Comparative constitutionalism needs to become more open-textured (i.e., avoiding liberal-modernist teleological assumptions and reconceiving its unity as a unity of plural constitutional-ontological universes), self-reflexive (i.e., highly context-dependent for structures of justification for constitutional design, implementation, and adjudication, and allowing diverse constitutional systems to speak for themselves in comparative discourse), and pluriversal (i.e., rebalancing the relation between the universality of abstract norms, and the plural epistemic and ontological bases of their instantiation or determination in particular contexts).

But against the centrifugal dynamics of open-texture, self-reflexivity, and (civilisational) pluriversality must be weighed the need to maintain the conceptual integrity of constitutionalism as an analytical tool and a normative idea. For it to do its work within constitutional comparativism, it cannot be so relativistic as to do no more than provide an apology for power in whatever empirical context it finds itself in. How we answer this conundrum is the real research agenda for comparative constitutional studies in the present.

If both liberal individualism and unconstrained power are the extremisms to be avoided in a new normative account of constitutionalism on a global scale, we need to think about constitutional values, common to many global intellectual traditions, that once defined the concept of constitutional government – notably the values of civility, prudence, and order – which together articulate the parameters of constitutional government as being defined by ‘commonness’ and ‘goodness’.

Guest: Asanga Welikala (University of Edinburgh)

Date: 26 November 2024, 5.00pm

Venue: Bp., 1113 Tas vezér utca 3-7., Hunyadi János

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