A Revolution in Law’s Republic: Arendt and Michelman in Dialogue
Angelica M. Bernal
Assistant Professor
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
abernal@polsci.umass.edu
ABSTRACT
In the late 1980’s and 1990’s, the “republican revival” emerged as an influential movement in contemporary American constitutional thought. In this paper, I critically examine the republican approach to constitutionalism by bringing into conversation one of its most influential proponents—Frank Michelman—with another theorist not commonly associated with the republican revival: Hannah Arendt. In the first part of this paper, I examine Frank Michelman’s theory, in particular his conception of constitutional legitimacy and “jurisgenerative politics” with regards to questions of intergenerational commitment and social change, and review the critiques to his approach. In the second part of this essay, I reconstruct Arendt’s constitutional theory and contend that it offers a powerful corrective to some of the criticisms launched against republican constitutional theories such as Michelman’s, and indeed that it provides a more fruitful route for reconceptualizing constitutional theory in more inclusive ways.
I. Introduction
In How Democratic is the American Constitution? (2002) Robert Dahl begins with a question that strikes at the heart of the US constitutional tradition. He writes:
"Why should we feel bound today by a document produced more than two centuries ago by a group of fifty-five mortal men, actually signed by only thirty-nine, a fair number of whom were slaveowners, and adopted in only thirteen states by the votes of fewer than two thousand men, all of whom are long since dead and mainly forgotten?"1
The answer often given to this question of constitutional beginnings (or questionable beginnings) and its implications for contemporary constitutional legitimacy is a familiar one: that the Constitution offers us as individuals rights that protect the exercise of our political freedom, that it secures order and prosperity, and that it contains the possibility for change, in other words, that the meanings and values expressed in this text can be adapted in progressive ways to adjust to the changing face of American society. A reassuring, perhaps comfortable response. Yet for the countless number of groups who have since the Founding been a part of the political community, though not always recognized as equal members—African Americans, Native Americans, and women—to the countless more who in the contemporary political arena continue to be disenfranchised and excluded from the Constitution’s promised bounty of rights and freedoms, this question is more troubling and not so readily answered.2
Reviewing Founding historiography, one might indeed venture to say that this question of beginnings has been the Janus-face of American constitutional scholarship. Debates not only of textual legal interpretation but also of how we relate to and interpret the values and legacy of the Founding past can be framed as tense faces upon a spectrum. At one end, we find the face of the patriot, emblazoned by 19th century historiographers such George Bancroft in whose work the Founders became Hegelian heroes and demi-gods, the chosen agents of history acting upon a higher-will to create a nation and divine its course for time immemorial.3 At the other end, we locate the face of the skeptic sketched out by the Progressive Era historian Charles Beard, in whose work the Constitution appeared as the counterrevolutionary junta of the landed class, an undemocratic document staged through a process most characteristic of a coup d’état.4
Beginning in the late 1960’s, a third face emerged which caused ripple effects in this spectrum: the face of republicanism. Against then dominant Hartzian interpretations of America’s ideological rootedness in liberal political and economic thought, scholars such as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Quentin Skinner, and J.G.A. Pocock5 retrieved the civic republican strain present in the political thought of the American Revolutionaries and the Constitution’s Framers. The impact of these works has been enormous, redrawing intellectual battle-lines and approaches in a wide range of fields from history to political theory, and beginning in the 1980’s, in American constitutional thought. It is this last expansion into the self-proclaimed “republican revival” that is the focus of my analysis and this paper.
The “republican revival” emerged as one of the dominant new schools in American Constitutional scholarship thanks in large part to the work of Frank Michelman, who in his influential article Law’s Republic (1987) inaugurated the revival and provided with this piece one of the foremost statements on the republican approach to normative constitutional theorizing.6 At the core of this work is the claim that not only is republicanism just as much a part of America’s political and constitutional roots as liberalism, but that moreover it can offer us important “visionary resources” to guide contemporary constitutional practice. Among these “resources” he points to republicanism’s core ideals of political equality, participation, active citizenship, and deliberative democracy.
Central to the return to republicanism that Michelman advocates is also the attempt to directly address the problem of exclusion and legitimacy through a constitutionalism founded on a practice of public justification that is dependent upon the continued inclusion of previously excluded social groups, that is, of bringing “the margin to the center.”7 In this, it is an approach that is a refreshing departure from the previously dominant paradigm: original intent. The beginning, the Founding moment, is problematized and still salvaged because the problem of exclusion is recognized.
This operation of returning to “republican beginnings” for the sake of its contemporary application, however, has been a source of some of the greatest criticism launched against the revival. For critics such as Derrick Bell and Preeta Bansal, reviving republicanism is something to be viewed by minorities with skepticism. They write:
"For centuries in this country…blacks have served as the group whose experiences and private needs have been suppressed in order to promote the “common good” of whites. Indeed, the “shared values” in which the anti-federalists laid faith included a historically constant and (for whites) a unifying belief in the inferior and subordinated position of black Americans."8
Thus, as a doctrine that extols “the common good”, presupposes “shared values”, and lauds the active citizen above all other human roles, republican constitutionalism today, they argue, cannot escape its less than rosy history of exclusion and moral solidarism.
The debates arising in the wake of the republican revival return us to the question of beginnings and its implications to constitutional legitimacy posed by Professor Dahl. Beginnings are problematic, contingent, and violent. They are also presumably integral to constructing the collective narrative fund from which political communities derive their identity and cohesion. Between the convulsive and violent fact of beginning and the Constitution’s function as a tool for stability, certainty, and cohesiveness, is a field of tension littered by questions: since not all groups were figuratively “part of the original contract”, what then makes the Constitution and the governmental framework it shields legitimate? What makes a “beginning” legitimate and how do the ways by which we explain this beginning impact contemporary constitutional legitimacy? What, in other words, ties the “Founder” to the “Citizen”—past, present, and future?
My analysis of Michelman’s republican revival will be guided by these foundational questions. My interest in examining the revival through this lens is prompted by a broader critique of normative constitutional thinking: theorists have generally tended to shy away from the problem of beginnings, following either the route of Constitution worship or atemporal, presentist conceptions of constitutional legitimacy. The republican revival, and Michelman’s approach in particular, is unique in following neither. Yet the synthesis it attempts remains questionable.
In order to fully articulate the tension inherent in his theory, this paper will examine Michelman’s approach by placing it in conversation with another theorist for whom the problem of beginnings is central yet has at this point not been connected with the republican revival: Hannah Arendt. Arendt for too long has been ignored as an important constitutional thinker. It is the hope of this paper to begin to rectify this problem. By bringing Arendt’s constitutionalism to the fore, I seek to not only provide a critical conversational partner to Michelman’s own constitutionalist approach but also, and more importantly, to offer what I shall argue is an important alternative vision.
The paper will thus proceed as follows: in the first part, I will examine the outlines of Michelman’s approach to constitutional law, investigating in particular his notion of constitutional legitimacy as “jurisgenerative politics;” in the second part, I shall attend to his critics; in the third part, I will examine Arendt’s constitutional theory with the aim of stirring once again the waters of the republican revival and providing a counterpoint for further stimulating contemporary political thought on these central questions of founding exclusions and the problem of democratic legitimation.
II. Michelman’s Republican Constitutionalism
Frank Michelman’s Law’s Republic (1986) begins in direct response to the controversial Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) case. To understand Michelman’s approach it is therefore necessary to briefly rehearse the facts of this case. In August of 1982, Michael Hardwick was charged with violating Georgia sodomy laws by consensually engaging in sexual relations with another adult male in the privacy of his home. He subsequently brought suit in federal court to challenge the constitutionality of the Georgia statute on the basis of the privacy rights established by Griswold, Eisendstat, Stanley, and Roe. In one of the most morally and politically charged cases since Roe, the United States Supreme Court ruled five to four against Hardwick and an extension of privacy rights to homosexuals.9
To most liberals, the Supreme Court’s ruling came as a shock. By declaring in its judgment that “none of the rights announced in those cases bears any resemblance to the claimed constitutional right of homosexuals to engage in acts of sodomy…(for) No connection between family, marriage, or procreation on the one hand and homosexual activity on the other has been demonstrated,”10 Bowers represented a regressive measure bent on curtailing the nascent and growing privacy rights wave ushered in by Griswold and Roe under an undisguised heterocentric rationale.
Michelman offers a different response to Bowers. In Michelman’s reading, what is most alarming about this case is not merely the moralistic tinge of the Court’s decision, but “[r]ather, it is the decision’s embodiment of an excessively detached and passive judicial stance toward constitutional law”.11 This jurisprudence of detachment is evident in the Court’s final deference to the Georgia legislature and the twenty-five other state legislatures that criminalized homosexual sodomy. Thus, rather than “impos[e] the Justices’ own choice of values on the States and Federal Government,”12 the Court deferred to the presumed judgment of “we, the people” acting through their state legislatures as the preferred neutral ground on this issue of morality.
For Michelman, this defense of judicial restraint under the mantle of democracy is objectionable on several counts. Firstly, through this stance the adjudicative act becomes an unreflexive, uncritical one. As he explains,
"The devastating effect in Bowers of a judicial posture of deference to external authority appears in the majority’s assumption, plain if not quite explicit in its opinion, that public values meriting enforcement as law are to be uncritically equated with either the formally enacted preferences of a recent legislative or past constitutional majority, or with the received teachings of a historically dominant, supposedly civic, orthodoxy."13
This unquestioning attitude by the Court, particularly in rejecting Hardwick’s counterargument that there was an inadequate rational basis to support the establishment of the Georgia sodomy laws, leads to an exclusionary practice that is not only non-responsive to the claims for political freedom of one individual but also demeans the community as a whole by preventing the possibility for self-transformation. Thus secondly, this stance is objectionable because it presumes a static conception of citizenship and membership in the political community. In Michelman’s words, it “debases the community by slighting its self-transformative capacity…through lapse of commitment to extension of membership to persons, who, at many historical moments could not count themselves to traditions whose meanings did at those times involve the exclusion or subordination of just those persons.”14 Finally, according to Michelman, the retrenchment of rights evidenced in Bowers is objectionable in that it produces an authoritarian conception of legitimacy since what is determined to be legitimate is what is dictated by a prior authority that is itself uncritically subsumed.
As we can see from these objections, Michelman’s critique is broader than the adjudicative context of Bowers. Rather, this context serves as an opportunity to rethink what we mean by constitutionalism and its relation to democracy, in particular how we reconcile the ideals of law-rule and self-rule inherent in American constitutionalism. The balancing act attempted by the Bowers court does injustice to both these ideals. On the one hand, it suggests a passive and apolitical understanding (perhaps purposively) of the former; the Court is seen as “the servant, not the author, of a prescriptive text…an organ of law, and therefore not of politics.”15 On the other hand, it presumes an equally passive and uncritical understanding of the later. “Democracy thus conveniently answers to the need for authority…the social determination of disputed questions of value is imaginable only as a battle of preferences or as the exertion of an arbitrary, dominant will.”16 In other words, it fails to sufficiently answer by what right can others control Michael Hardwick’s liberty claims and by what right can the Court rule that these others have spoken for “we, the people”. To this end, Michelman proposes a republican-inspired constitutionalism as a better account of the relation between constitutionalism and democracy, law and politics.
Michelman’s republican constitutionalism is founded on two interrelated claims about the nature of American constitutionalism in particular and the law in general: first, that the principles of self-rule and law-rule can be reconciled by the possibility of a jurisgenerative politics17; and second, that the law is not merely a system of rules but a world of narrative and meaning, a fund of public normative references that organizes the political world, informs the individual and collective identity of its participants, and sustains their continued commitment to that community. I shall expand on each point below.
Michelman’s central concept of jurisgenerative politics is adopted from the work of Robert Cover. As Cover describes it, “the jurisgenerative principle (is) the legal DNA.”18 Michelman takes this conception one step further and asserts that it is a particularly republican legal DNA embedded in the twin premises of American constitutionalism: self-rule (a government by the people for the people) and law-rule (a government of the people by the laws). The first is inscribed in the principle of popular sovereignty and mediated by the system of representation and the second by the idea of the rule of law as that which provides for stability, certainty, and protection to individuals against arbitrary power.
While these two principles might appear contradictory—and indeed are problematic—their reconciliation is the system’s irresistible jurisgenerative impulse. As Michelman depicts it, it is the process by which the law gains a “sense of validity as ‘our’ law.”19 The process by which the law’s authority is legitimated, however, can take various normative venues. Why then is the republican route better?
Michelman makes the case for the republican approach by contrasting it with a competing account: pluralist-inspired constitutionalism. He groups the theories of Richard Epstein, Buchanan and Tullock, John Ely, and John Rawls in this camp. According to Michelman, “such accounts have at their core a line of argumentation designed to show something like the following: Given the various, partly complementary but partly conflicting, pre-political aims and interests of the individuals concerned, and given also the inevitably competitive and strategic motivational realities of social (including political and economic) interaction, it is rational for everyone concerned to prefer the constitution in question to the next best practically attainable alternative.”20
According to Michelman, two fault-lines are present in this approach. First, it presumes rationally motivated self-contractors as the heuristic agents for an account of the law’s validation. Second, it is transcendental in character in that this argument rationalizes the law according to a conception of the right removed from actual, political history. “Taking its scientific and philosophical premises as given, the argument’s gist then is that each person, whether she knows it or not, ought to accept the law in question as comformable to some assertedly objective notion of reason, nature, fairness, utility, or other criterion of rightness.”21 For Michelman, transcendental justifications of the law are not enough. “Whatever kind of authority a law may possess by force of transcendental justifiability, it is not the authority of self-government.”22
Against pluralist conceptions of higher law, republican constitutionalism is political, historically sensitive, and immanently grounded. Normatively, it takes as its point of departure the concepts of communicative rationality and discursive validation of norms developed in the work of Jurgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib.23 Its central contention is that “justificatory argument must at least begin to explain how that law might have been actually regarded by the people subject to it, in all their actual social and experiential situations, as deserving acceptance by them.”24 Discursive validation, the give-and-take of reasoned argumentation by situated agents each coming towards agreement on the validity of the law from their own perspectives as free and equal participants, thus provides the procedural means by which the law may attain a sense of self-givenness.
The republican quality of Michelman’s approach should be apparent. It is inspired by the ideals of political equality, active citizenship, and deliberative democracy. Yet it is important to note that this approach is not strictly procedural. The discursive process is itself dependent on the context in which it takes place. Participants are involved, as he states, in not just “one debate, but in a more encompassing common life, bearing the imprint of a common past, within and from which the arguments and claims arise and draw their meaning.”25
Michelman describes this common world as a fund of normative references. He depicts these as a set of narratives through which the political community and its individuals imagine themselves as “a people”. Jurisgenerative political debate takes place as a contested “re-collection” of this fund.26 That is, this fund is not merely passively “collected” by subsequent generations but rather actively reshaped by them so that they may continually re-create and re-imagine themselves as a people.
This process of re-collection is itself dependent upon the active inclusion of previously excluded narratives and voices. In Michelman’s words, it “depends on ‘our’ constant reach for inclusion of the other, of the hitherto excluded—which in practice means bringing into legal-doctrinal practice the hitherto absent voices of emergent self-conscious social groups.”27 It is ultimately through this process which I would like to term re-collection as inclusive translation that the alienated authority of the Founding past is reconstituted and translated into the contemporary authority of present and future generations of citizens.
From this analysis, the component features of Michelman’s republican constitutionalism may be summarizes as follows: first, the problem of beginnings is dealt with through a process of self-critical, transformative, and revisable dialogic validation of the law; second, this process presumes an existing normative fund of references, that is, a starting point of narratives that participants draw upon for collective identification across the intergenerational horizon; finally, this fund is itself readjusted, amended, and reshaped by a constant outreach to previously excluded social groups. Through this process of jurisgenerative politics the Constitution’s legitimacy is thus presumably attained and intergenerational commitment sustained.
The republican constitutionalist approach developed by Michelman in this article has been highly influential and highly controversial. While his approach has come under attack from various theoretical fronts, in the section that follows I want to examine the critique developed by critical race theorists Derrick Bell and Preetha Bansal as a means of opening up the features of Michelman’s theory further to the problem of beginnings and exclusion, as well as the impact of these twin problems on contemporary constitutional legitimacy and the possibility for social change.
III. Michelman and the Problem of Exclusion
In their article “The Republican Revival and Racial Politics”, Derrick Bell and Preeta Bansal begin their critique with a cautionary parable set in 1930’s Harlem:
"During a quiet moment on a too-crowded block, an old, black man sat on his stoop observing familiar activities of the community he served as respected sage…He listened now to the earnest young street worker, an exile from the upper class, extolling the marvels of the Marxist millennium…When the young proselytizer finished, the black man said he had only one question. “Ask me anything, Pop,” the young radical urged. “I have the answers to all your people’s problems.” “Well,” asked the old man, “when you revolutionaries take power and change all the world over—will you still be white?”28
This may seem like a peculiar parable by which to introduce their critique but the kernel of the old man’s response in this parable remains the same with regards to black Americans’ response to the radical promises of Michelman’s republican revival: skepticism. This skepticism is primarily directed at the core claim of Michelman’s argument: that a resurrected republicanism can best inform contemporary constitutional theory and practice.
For Bell and Bansal, the main problem is a historical one: can and should a political theory historically associated with a solidaristic moral doctrine based on the development of a “common good” and predicated upon a set of “shared values” be applicable in today’s context? Or to put it more succinctly, can a theoretical tradition break with its “tainted past”? The Framers, as they remind us echoing Robert Dahl, expounded ideals of political equality and liberty, that all “men are created equal,” yet proceeded to qualify and restrict these ideals to befit their economic, social, and racial prejudices.
Historical contentions aside, a second, and as I will suggest, more forceful element of their critique aims at the core features of Michelman’s republican-inspired dialogic constitutionalism. This notion of dialogic constitutionalism, they write, “assumes at base that a social consensus will emerge from ‘reasoned’ deliberation by individuals who think ‘rationally’ and who are capable of abstracting from their private experiences.”29 The fault line with this process, they suggest, is the insensitivity to the contexts of power and domination that results from a belief in a “common good”. The problem here is who defines this common good: the dominant class. The “common good” consequently serves as a smoke screen by which to disguise particularistic interests, suppress injustices, and subjugate the interests of the marginalized. Moreover, “reasoned” deliberation accompanies this smoke screen to likewise suppress the claims of justice based on the “private” experiences of the subordinated group.
Finally, a third critique related to the above concern pertains directly to what I have termed Michelman’s conception of re-collection as inclusive translation. For Michelman, the jurisgenerative process is dependent upon this capacity of “bringing the margin to the center” as a means of fully re-collecting the normative fund of narratives and translating them into a present context that existing and subsequent generations can call “their own”. For Bell and Bansal, the key question for this process is: how are those voices to be included? In their view, Michelman gives no clear answer. At best, he seems to suggest that this capacity depends upon the judiciary’s ability to recognize and integrate these voices. This dependence upon the judiciary for them ultimately undercuts Michelman’s radical promises for an inclusionary constitutionalism, capable of attending to the needs of excluded groups and keep up with “the constantly political and revisionary activities of ‘we, the people’.”30 The whims of the judiciary are not enough. As they state, “the oppressed will not triumph over these barriers through faith alone.”31
On this latter count I agree with Bell and Bansal’s assessment. Michelman’s view, while attempting to redirect constitutional theory in more inclusionary ways, in the final analysis appears less than radical in its redirection in that it places too much faith and power in the judiciary’s capacity as an inclusionary tool. Indeed, Michelman admits to this much and sheepishly attempts to justify it. He writes, “judges perhaps enjoy a situational advantage over the people at large in listening for voices from the margins.” This statement, however, seems all the more surprising given that his article was prompted by a critique of the Supreme Court’s failure to fully give voice to Hardwick’s claims.
To agree with this critique is not to say that Michelman’s whole approach should be dismissed so readily. While classical republicanism’s belief in a “common good” and “shared values” has, and in this Bell and Bansal are correct, served as mechanisms by which to suppress the claims of subjugated groups, the political values which Michelman seeks to extract from it—deliberation, active citizenship, and political equality—can and have indeed served to aid in the emancipatory struggle of social groups. It is by upholding such ideals and fighting for their redefinition towards more inclusionary ways that groups such as women and blacks have expanded that foundational dictum of “all men are created equal.”
Footnotes
1 See Robert Dahl. How Democratic is the American Constitution? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 2.
2 In his speech during the commemoration of the Constitution’s Bicentennial, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was among one of the few dissenting voices suggesting a more critical review of the Constitution’s original legitimacy. See “Bicentennial Speech”, Annual Seminar of the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Law Association, Maui, Hawaii, May 6, 1987. www.thurgoodmarshall.com
3 See George Bancroft. History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America. (New York: D. Appleton, 1885). Though this image is characteristic of the nineteenth century historical school of thought, its one that as Bruce Ackerman notes, has gained renewed appeal in recent years, “to the point where Justice Clarence Thomas could embrace the words and wisdom of the Framers with an enthusiasm unprecedented in modern constitutional law.” For a discussion of the “glorification/demonization” cycle in constitutional interpretation see Bruce Ackerman, We, The People. Vol. II: Transformations. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 32-33. For an excellent overview of the movements in Founding Historiography see Peter Onuf. “Reflections on the Founding: Constitutional Historiography in Bicentennial Perspective.” The William and Mary Quarterly. Third Series, Vol. 46, Issue 2 (April 1989): 341-375.
4 See Charles Beard. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1913).
5 See Bernard Bailyn. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. (New York: Belknap Press, 1967); Gordon Wood. The Creation of the American Republic, 1777-1787. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Quentin Skinner. Liberty before Liberalism. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and J.G.A. Pocock. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
6 See Frank Michelman. “Law’s Republic.” Yale Law Journal. Vol. 97, no. 8 (1988): 1493-1537 For an extensive discussion of the “republican revival” see Scott D. Gerber. “The Republican Revival in American Constitutional Theory.” Political Research Quarterly Vol. 47, no. 4 (December 1994): 985-997.
7 This is phrase is borrowed by Michelman from bell hooks. See bell hooks. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (Boston: South End Press, 1984).
8 See Derrick Bell and Preetha Bansal. “The Republican Revival and Racial Politics.” Yale Law Journal. Vol. 97: 1609-1621.
9 Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com. The Bowers case was overturned in 2003 by Lawrence v. Texas (2003).
10 Ibid.
11 Michelman, Law’s Republic, p. 1496.
12 Bowers v. Hardwick (1986).
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid, 1497.
16 Ibid, 1499.
17 This term is adopted from Robert Cover. See “Nomos and Narrative.” In Narrative, Violence, and the Law: the essays of Robert Cover. Edited by Martha Minow, Michael Ryan and Austin Sarat. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
18 Ibid, p. 146.
19 Michelman, Laws Republic, p. 1502.
20 Ibid, p. 1510. Italics added by author.
21 Ibid, p. 1511. Italics added by author.
22 Ibid.
23 See Jurgen Habermas. Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I & II. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985); Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Seyla Benhabib. Critique, Norm, and Utopia. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
24 Michelman, Law’s Republic, p. 1511.
25 Ibid, p. 1513.
26 Michelman adopts this term from Drucilla Cornell’s work. See Drucilla Cornell. “Institutionalization of Meaning, Recollective Imagination, and the Potential for Transformative Legal Interpretation.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 136: 1135-1172.
27 Michelman, Law’s Republic, p. 1529.
28 Derrick Bell and Preeta Bansal. “The Republican Revival and Racial Politics.” Yale Law Journal: Symposium on the Republican Revival. Vol. 97 (1997): 1609-1621.
29 Ibid, 1610.
30 Ibid, p. 1616.
31 Ibid, p. 1620.