The Material Constitution
This stream reconstructs the idea of the ‘material constitution’ as a development, at the level of constitutional theory, of two schools of thought: on one hand, law and the political economy, on the other, the theory of normative orders. Its aim is to contribute to a nuanced and accurate understanding of State and supranational constitutions in the service of a critical approach.
Much of what has been written in the last two decades on constitutionalism and constitutional law is based on a stark polarisation between a legal and a political conception of the constitution. Both approaches, exclusively focussed on the legitimacy of judicial review, share a common deficit: they do not thematise society as the main object of constitutional law. This project aims to place the link between he societal production of value and the constitutional order at the core of constitutional study by adapting insights from two continental traditions. For the reconstruction of the material study of the constitution precious insights are offered by the first wave of legal institutionalism. Part of this project is to introduce that debate in the Anglophone world, where it has been partially neglected up to now. However, the institutionalist approach is enriched by a material study focussed on the concrete constitutional organisation of societies, which introduces a visible political corrective. (A particular political version of the critique of political economy, rooted mostly but not exclusively on Italian Workerism, will be retrieved to highlight the political aspects of the material constitution.)
Overall, the reconstruction of the material constitution aims to provide a methodological take on contemporary constitutionalism and positions itself as an alternative to other sociological conceptions as those available within systems theory or the reductive economism supported by previous critical and comparative theory. Such an approach ought to speak not only to legal philosophers but also to comparative constitutional lawyers and socio-legal scholars. Moreover, by providing tools for mapping the concrete constitutional organisation of society, the material constitution serves as a prolegomenon for thematising spaces for political action.