Constitutionalism and the Political

Abstract

The act of labelling, typical of the contemporary discourse on constitutionalism, has given rise to a thick jungle of “adjectival constitutionalisms”, reaching beyond the classic liberal paradigm. The formulated concepts aim at specifying the changes taking place in public law and in its political surrounding. The discourse on the notion of constitutionalism is a piece of a greater puzzle – the problem of the political. The purpose of this paper is to compare the two titular notions: constitutionalism and the political. The first part of the paper addresses the problem of methodological inconsistencies in the modern-day analysis of the concept of constitutionalism. The second part raises the controversies around the essence of constitutionalism and their fundamental significance to the theoretical legitimisation of alternatives to the concept of legal and liberal onstitutionalism (the concepts of the essence of constitutionalism as limitation of power, statically understood self-establishment – a founding myth, and dynamically understood self-establishment). Part three discusses the notion of the political as a criterion of division of the said concepts of constitutionalism.