The idea of constitutionalism is the idea that all public power is subject to the law, that all public power is delegated by the law, that the exercise of public power is accountable before the law. The revolutionary transformation of international society includes the insertion of the idea of constitutionalism into its theoretical structure, into the pure and practical theories of international society.

The idea of constitutionalism is a golden thread running through the better history of the human race, a perennial and universal possibility in humanity's social self-constituting, a meta-cultural and meta-temporal theoretical potentiality. It is an idea which has had intimate and essential connections with the perennial and universal phenomenon of religion, allowing us to see religion as a spiritual constitutionalism. It is an idea which has had intimate and essential connections with the idea of social self-constituting, with the intrinsic hegemony of that which, in a society, transcends the self-constituting of individual society-members. It is an idea which has had an intimate and necessary connection with the most abstract conception of law as a metaphysical and meta-personal and meta-social phenomenon.

As the fabric of international society becomes ever more dense and complex, as the cross-frontier socialising of human beings develops in dynamic intensity, the idea of constitutionalism is emerging as a necessary and natural control on the ever-increasing accumulation of communal governmental power, which is gradually reproducing at the global-level phenomena of public power, which are closely analogous to those which have developed over recent centuries at the national level and to which national systems have had to respond with ever more sophisticated systems of social and legal control.