Ten chapters, most of them published here for the first time, make up the bulk of this book. In addition, the editors commissioned an epilogue from Cass Sunstein, to bring out more clearly implicit agreements and disagreements among the contributors, and to engage in a discussion with them. The present introduction has a more limited purpose. It attempts to map some of the main problems raised by the contributors and to bring out their relation to one another. I shall emphasize three issues. First, I shall argue that the tension between constitutionalism and democracy is only, as it were, the two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional issue. The third dimension which provides depth to that tension is the goal of efficient decisionmaking, unencumbered, if necessary, both by popular participation and by constitutional constraints. Next, I attempt to survey some of the proposed answers to what is perhaps the central question in the volume: why would a society want to limit its own sovereign power? Why would a democratic society tolerate what might appear to be a dictatorship of the past over the present? Finally, I shall explore some of the multiple links, discussed in the chapters below, between democracy, constitutionalism and private property. Is constitutionalism only a tool deployed in the self-interest of the property-holding class? Or are constitutional guarantees for property in the interest of everybody?

A three-cornered dilemma

Democracy I shall understand as simple majority rule, based on the principle “One person one vote.”