Including a cognitive perspective into a vision of 'transformative constitutionalism'

Abstract

Both the legal concepts of the public interest and of civil rights should be reflected upon with a view to understanding their permeability to the effects of the self-transformation of society on the collective dimension of cooperation among societal actors and of their cooperation with the state (and vice versa). The epistemic forms and figures that characterize the basis of the production of societal knowledge betweenactors deserve more attention from a constitutional perspective. The idea of a ‘neighbourhood’ that contains webs of interrelationships might help construct new collective procedural rights that would imply - under conditions of the rise of computer technologies to hitherto unknown power - a collective right to the establishment of an experimental design that would test the possibilities for a hybrid combination between older economic structures and new ideas. This would include a focus on the new technologies that tend to be accompanied by more disruption than less developed regions might be able to bear and a conception of social rights as procedural rights of participation in the deliberation of what one might call a working plan for the development of a neighbourhood. Such a plan could be of help in the context of judicial control because it would provide the inevitable framework for the evaluation of highly complex economic questions. I would add a further argument. A critical reading of systems theory might include the idea that social rights could be paradoxical rights in their demand for self-limitation of the expansion of liberal experimentalism.