EMERGENCY AND MODERNITY: CONTEXTUALIZING THE CONTEMPORARY DEBATE

Abstract

All states are subject to emergency circumstances that may suggest special responses challenging the normal rule of law. The debate between Oren Gross and David Dyzenhaus asks how emergency powers can be best designed and employed to prevent their abuse and ‘normalization’ — the phenomenon by which the use of exceptional powers leaves persistent traces of their use in a state’s normal institutions of government. This dissertation argues that containing normalization on the terms proposed by Dyzenhaus and Gross is unlikely to succeed because ideas about what emergency entails have expanded in the modern age, contributing to this normalization, and that these phenomena have been fuelled by intellectual features of modernity itself that the debate leaves largely unconsidered.