Constitutional Identity and the Right to Attachment

Abstract

What form should our relationship with the state take? Is the state like a team, where membership is grounded primarily in reasoned consent, or is it more like a family, where membership is grounded primarily in emotional attachment? The lecture examines the differences between these two, and argues that we have good reasons for wanting our relationship with the state to be underpinned by attachment. But whilst wanting to experience attachment is rational, it is not a disposition we can chose or can be reasoned into adopting. In consequence, states must rely on emotional strategies to ground attachment. The lecture ends by reflecting on the right to attachment, the limits that our reasons for wanting to experience attachment place on the emotional strategies states deploy.

About the Speaker

Nick Barber is Professor of Constitutional Law and Theory at Oxford University. He has written two books on constitutional theory. The Constitutional State, published in 2011, examined the construction and form of the state, and The Principles of Constitutionalism, published in 2018, which looked at the principles that structure the constitutional order. His most recent book, The United Kingdom Constitution: An Introduction was published in the Clarendon Law Series in 2021, and provides an account of that constitution which draws on the structures established in his earlier work. He is presently working on a new book, to be called The State and its People, looking at the relationship between individuals and the state.