A Sociology of Constitutions: Constitutions and State Legitimacy in Historical- Sociological Perspective by Chris Thornhill

Author:Chris Thornhill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government, Constitutional Law, Political Science, Law, Social Sciences, Constitutions
ISBN: 9780521116213
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-08-21T18:30:00+00:00

Cambridge Books Online

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/

A Sociology of Constitutions

Constitutions and State Legitimacy in Historical-Sociological Perspect

ive

Chris Thornhill

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511895067

Online ISBN: 9780511895067

Hardback ISBN: 9780521116213

Paperback ISBN: 9781107610569

Chapter

4 - Constitutions from empire to fascism pp. 252-326

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511895067.005

Cambridge University Press

4

Constitutions from empire to fascism

Constitutions after 1848

As discussed, the revolutionary constitutions of the later eighteenth

century did much to consolidate the power of central states, and in

supplying the idea that the nation of rights holders was the origin of

legitimate state power they greatly simplified the social abstraction and

circulation of political power. The constitutions of 1848, then, consoli-

dated the state as a broad-based body of institutions, and they at once

heightened the power of states and distributed power in more even

fashion through society by enunciating the principle that all members

of a national society had a common and equal relation to political power.

In both periods, the forming of constitutions continued a process of

political distillation that had shaped most European states throughout

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the patterns of liberal-

national constitutional formation that culminated in the middle of the

nineteenth century extended the centralistic and inclusionary impetus of

earlier constitution writing. Indeed, as discussed, the liberal-national

constitutional movement resulted directly from the primary state-

building tendencies of the age of ‘absolutism’. Naturally, this does not

imply that the constitutional models that emerged in the age of revolu-

tion did not profoundly alter the inner organization of states, and that

their emphasis on popular sovereignty and rights-based self-legislation

did not produce a condition of more equal legal and political inclusivity

in society in which a popular legislature played an increased role in

governance. However, the revolutionary constitutions of the period

1789–1848 formed a structural continuum with the administrative inno-

vations typical of ‘absolutism’. It was in these constitutions that the

attempt of ‘absolutistic’ states to abstract an inclusionary and general-

izable form for political power was finally accomplished. National-liberal

constitutionalism eventually consolidated itself as a dominant mode of

governance in Europe precisely because its core principle of popular

252

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c o n s t i t u t i o n s a f t e r 1 8 4 8

253

sovereignty, correlated with the concept of citizenship as rights holding,

was successful in concentrating political power as a generally abstracted

resource, and it was more effective than personal/monarchical rule in

weakening society’s local and patrimonial structures. The early form of

constitutional democracy, thus, emerged as a political system that, more

than any previous political model, adequately reflected the growing

autonomy of political power and enabled societies to use power as a

positive iterable phenomenon. As discussed, the tendency towards accel-

erated nation building in the constitutional movements of the middle

part of the nineteenth century immediately reflected both the growing

abstraction of political power and the increasing construction of soci-

eties around uniform processes of political inclusion, in which the

separation of political power (state) and the rest of society (nation) was

organized through generally articulated rights.

In the same way that absolutist states governed in spite of particularist

opposition, however, states founded in national-liberal constitutionalism

were also opposed by social groups who possessed entrenched regional

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