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2 results

  • 2 - Constitution Making through Law

  • from Part I - Conceptual, Normative, and Empirical Issues
  • Edited by Gabriel L. Negretto, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
  • Book:
    Redrafting Constitutions in Democratic Regimes
    Published online:
    29 August 2020
    Print publication:
    17 September 2020, pp 33-52

  • Summary

    Does the absence of a legal rupture, the failure to put into practice the idea of a legally unrestrained popular sovereign, necessarily mean that an exercise of constituent power has not taken place? Can constituent power be exercised through law? These are questions that indirectly challenge one of the features normally attributed to constituent power: its unmediated and uncontrollable nature. This chapter will compare two traditions of constitutional thought (that of Sieyès and Rousseau) that provided different answers to those questions and explore the ways in which the idea that constituent power can be exercised through legally recognised procedures has figured in later constitutional theory and practice.

Constituent Power
  • A History
  • Lucia Rubinelli
  • Published online:
    28 April 2020
    Print publication:
    21 May 2020
  • From the French Revolution onwards, constituent power has been a key concept for thinking about the principle of popular power, and how it should be realised through the state and its institutions. Tracing the history of constituent power across five key moments - the French Revolution, nineteenth-century French politics, the Weimar Republic, post-WWII constitutionalism, and political philosophy in the 1960s - Lucia Rubinelli reconstructs and examines the history of the principle. She argues that, at any given time, constituent power offered an alternative understanding of the power of the people to those offered by ideas of sovereignty. Constituent Power: A History also examines how, in turn, these competing understandings of popular power resulted in different institutional structures and reflects on why contemporary political thought is so prone to conflating constituent power with sovereignty.