Abstract

This article argues that the opposition between political and legal constitutionalism can be traced to a cleavage in what philosophers have called the ‘social imaginary’: the shared understandings that underpin social life. Since social imaginary understandings are by their nature nebulous and ill-defined, political and legal constitutionalism should not be thought of as competing theories or heuristic models, but—more abstractly—contrasting ways of imagining the political world. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, I argue that my claim is supported by the way in which legal constitutionalism embedded itself as the governing idea in the United States and in France, and also by the failure of the ‘new Commonwealth model of constitutionalism’ to yield a genuinely distinctive alternative to political and legal constitutionalism.

中文翻译：

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政治立宪主义和法律立宪主义-假想的反对者？

摘要

本文认为，政治和法律立宪主义之间的对立可以追溯到哲学家所谓的“社会假想”中的分裂：支撑社会生活的共同理解。由于社会想象的理解本质上是模糊的且定义不清的，因此不应将政治和法律宪政主义视为竞争性理论或启发式模型，而应将其抽象化为对政治世界的想象方式。借鉴历史和当代的例子，我认为我的主张得到了法律宪政主义在美国和法国作为治国理念的内在体现，以及“新的英联邦宪政主义模式”的失败。产生了真正独特的政治和法律立宪主义替代品。