In Homer's Odyssey, Ulysses commands his sailors to bind him to the mast before passing the Sirens. He knows his future self will be overcome by their song—will beg to be released, will promise anything. So he binds himself while rational, anticipating his own weakness.

Constitutional theorists have long drawn on this image to explain the fundamental paradox of democratic self-limitation. Why would a sovereign people, possessing unlimited authority, choose to constrain their own future choices? The Ulysses metaphor suggests an answer: we bind ourselves because we anticipate our future failures of judgment, our susceptibility to passion, our vulnerability to demagoguery.

Yet the metaphor conceals as much as it reveals. Ulysses bound himself—the same agent who would later strain against the ropes. Constitutional precommitment involves something far stranger: one generation binding another, one majority constraining its successors, a collective entity whose membership changes continuously attempting to bind what it will become. The philosophical foundations of this enterprise prove far more unstable than the elegant Homeric image suggests. Understanding these foundations—and their fractures—illuminates both the necessity and the fragility of constitutional democracy.

The rational choice account of constitutional precommitment begins from a recognition of human imperfection. We are not consistently rational agents pursuing stable preferences through time. We suffer weakness of will. We discount the future hyperbolically. We succumb to passion, to prejudice, to the manipulations of skilled demagogues.

Constitutional framers, on this view, occupy privileged moments of relative clarity. Emerging from revolution or crisis, deliberating behind something like a veil of uncertainty about their future positions, they can perceive long-term interests obscured during ordinary politics. They establish fundamental rules precisely because they doubt their own future judgment.

Consider the entrenchment of rights against legislative override. A present majority, recognizing that majorities sometimes persecute minorities, ties its own hands. It creates constitutional barriers against future discrimination not because it expects to be discriminated against, but because it acknowledges that future majorities—including itself in different moods—may prove intolerant.

The economic analogy illuminates: constitutions function like commitment devices in behavioral economics. The person who freezes credit cards in ice blocks, who sets up automatic savings withdrawals, who tells friends about diet goals—these actors recognize their future selves as potential adversaries. Constitutional constraints operate similarly at the collective level.

This framework generates powerful justifications for counter-majoritarian institutions. If democratic majorities can predictably err—can violate rights, can discount future interests, can be captured by momentary passions—then institutions constraining majorities serve democratic values better than unconstrained majoritarianism. The mast that binds Ulysses does not limit his freedom; it preserves his deeper purposes against temporary irrationality.

Takeaway

Constitutions may function not as external constraints imposed upon democracy but as democracy's own recognition of its characteristic failures—self-imposed disciplines that preserve long-term commitments against short-term temptations.

The Ulysses metaphor breaks down upon serious examination. Ulysses bound himself—the same continuous agent who would later desire release. Constitutional precommitment involves radically discontinuous agents: the 1787 framers binding the 2024 polity, the dead constraining the living, one generation imposing its judgments upon wholly different persons.

Jeremy Waldron has pressed this objection with particular force. The American Constitution was ratified by propertied white men, many of whom owned slaves. By what authority do their constitutional choices constrain contemporary citizens who share neither their circumstances, their prejudices, nor their understanding of rights? The intergenerational problem is not merely practical but conceptual: can one agent in principle precommit another distinct agent?

The collective action problem compounds these difficulties. Even within a single generation, constitutional majorities are not unified agents with continuous identities. They are aggregations of diverse individuals with conflicting interests, temporary coalitions rather than persons. When we speak of the people binding themselves, we employ a legal fiction that obscures profound questions about collective agency and authorization.

Defenders of precommitment offer several responses. Some emphasize tacit consent: each generation implicitly ratifies the constitution by not exercising revolutionary authority to replace it. Others invoke the ongoing benefits of constitutional settlement—the coordination advantages, the stability, the framework for politics itself. Still others argue that amendment procedures provide adequate mechanisms for intergenerational revision.

Yet none of these responses fully dissolves the paradox. Tacit consent theories notoriously struggle to explain binding force. Beneficial consequences cannot justify unlimited constraint. Amendment procedures may be so onerous as to constitute de facto permanent entrenchment. The conceptual foundations of intergenerational precommitment remain philosophically contested in ways that Ulysses's individual self-binding never was.

Takeaway

Constitutional precommitment cannot simply be modeled on individual self-binding because 'we the people' is not a continuous agent—the philosophical puzzle is not how the people constrain themselves, but whether the concept of collective self-binding is coherent at all.

Even granting the legitimacy of constitutional precommitment, a fundamental engineering problem remains. How do you design institutions capable of constraining the very majorities they are meant to serve? The guards must be strong enough to resist the guarded—yet not so independent as to become unaccountable tyrants themselves.

Judicial review represents the dominant solution in constitutional democracies. Courts staffed by unelected judges with secure tenure interpret constitutional meaning and invalidate legislation deemed inconsistent with fundamental law. The counter-majoritarian difficulty—Alexander Bickel's famous phrase—becomes a virtue from the precommitment perspective: courts should resist majorities because that is their constitutional function.

Yet judicial review generates its own pathologies. Judges bring ideological commitments. Constitutional interpretation involves irreducible discretion. The counter-majoritarian institution may enforce not the people's past commitments but the judges' present preferences. The mast may bind not to the sailors' chosen course but wherever the rope-holders wish to steer.

Alternative institutional designs address these concerns differently. Strong-form judicial review (American style) gives courts final interpretive authority. Weak-form review (Commonwealth style) allows legislative override of judicial determinations. Constitutional courts distinct from ordinary judiciary (German style) concentrate constitutional interpretation in specialized bodies. Each design represents different judgments about the relative dangers of majority overreach versus judicial overreach.

The deepest insight may be that constitutional precommitment cannot rely on any single institution. Effective self-binding requires what we might call constitutional culture: widespread internalization of constitutional norms, political actors who accept constraint even when they could evade it, citizens who punish constitutional violations at the ballot box. Parchment barriers, Madison knew, prove insufficient without supporting political practices.

Takeaway

Constitutional enforcement ultimately depends less on institutional design than on political culture—the willingness of those holding power to accept constraint not because they must, but because constitutional fidelity has become constitutive of legitimate governance.

The Ulysses metaphor endures because it captures something genuine about constitutional democracy: the recognition that self-governance requires self-limitation, that freedom depends upon structure, that present wisdom must somehow survive future weakness.

Yet the metaphor's limits prove equally instructive. Constitutional precommitment is not individual self-binding but something stranger—an intergenerational project of uncertain legitimacy, maintained by institutions of contested authority, dependent finally on political culture rather than legal mechanics.

Perhaps constitutions succeed not because they solve the precommitment problem but because they institutionalize it—creating ongoing practices of constitutional interpretation, amendment, and contestation that keep fundamental questions perpetually open while providing sufficient stability for democratic governance to proceed. The ropes that bind are forever being tested, questioned, and retied.