Summary: There exist several ways of constructing general relativity from ’first principles’: Einstein’s original derivation, Lovelock’s results concerning the exceptional nature of the Einstein tensor from a mathematical perspective, and Hojman-Kuchař-Teitelboim’s derivation of the Hamiltonian form of the theory from the symmetries of space-time, to name a few. Here I propose a different set of first principles to obtain general relativity in the canonical Hamiltonian framework without presupposing space-time in any way. I first require consistent propagation of scalar spatially covariant constraints (in the Dirac picture of constrained systems). I find that up to a certain order in derivatives (four spatial and two temporal), there are large families of such consistently propagated constraints. Then I look for pairs of such constraints that can gauge-fix each other and form a theory with two dynamical degrees of freedom per space point. This demand singles out the ADM Hamiltonian either in (i) CMC gauge, with arbitrary (finite, non-zero) speed of light, and an extra term linear in York time, or (ii) a gauge where the Hubble parameter is conformally harmonic.