ABSTRACT
My comments about the Gulf War have four framing assumptions. The first assumption is that whatever deliberative processes we are expected to exercise are especially important at a moment of emergency. The argument is often made that in wartime or in the moment of a crisis the population's participation has to fall away because of the speed required for what is about to occur. But in social contract theory, as well as in specific constitutions such as our own U.S. Constitution and many others, it turns out that precisely the opposite is the case: the requirements for overt and explicit acts of deliberation and consent increase rather than decrease at times of war and do so not only in terms of the explicitness of the act of consent, but also in the breadth of distribution of the consensual act.
