Reflecții despre fragilitatea raportului între autoritatea statului și libertate, ca valoare fundamentală a democrației constituționale
Reflections on the fragility of the relationship between State authority and freedom, as fundamental value of the constitutional democracy

Summary/Abstract: How firm the authority of the state should be and how wide the margin of freedom of the citizens of a state should be are questions without a convenient answer for either the state, or for the citizen. This is a truth that can be insisted upon for a long time, but without satisfactory results. The citizen has always demanded from the public power a sphere of his freedom as wide as possible and the public power has been and is, in principle, ready to retain an extra authority over the citizen. The author aims in this study to show that both the authority of the state and the vocation of freedom of the citizen must slide between reasonable and legitimate limits, so that the state can exercise its role and social functions established through constitutional norm and put in the service of the common good of the society and that the citizen can enjoy, without any illegitimate restraints or restrictions, a freedom (recognized and guaranteed by the state), which allows him to develop his personality and dignity as a human being, in the general interpersonal relations and in its relations with the state, in a determined social-historical, economic, political, cultural, religious context, etc. The author also shows that the relationship between authority and freedom is in its essence a fragile one, in which the state may have, in certain political circumstances or of other nature, leviathan temptations, with oppressive effects on the constitutional freedoms, a position from which it reproduces tools of force in ever new forms and it restricts the exercise of the citizens’ rights. The author draws attention to a serious social danger that threatens the foundations of a democratic government: the excess of authority and its repeated, illegitimate and unjustified use can be premises of the establishment of an authoritarian regime, in front of which the citizen is powerless. The excess of authority and the unlawful violation of public liberties call into question the democratic character of the state. In its turn and also in certain given political or social circumstances, the associated citizen or citizens may be tempted to resort to extreme forms of manifestation, claiming a higher degree of individual or collective freedom, to the detriment of the original authority of public power.

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