Hypothesis and empirical challenges

This is a book made of intuitions. Any statement, let's say, on the oligarchies involved in the establishment of a constitutional framework and the violence undertaken to build the legal order (or the understanding of a constitutional decision as a basic decision on the allocation of power resulting from a grave conflict) would need endless empirical research.

If the episodes related to describe the factual, historical, and sociological conditions that lie behind the struggle of creating a constitution, or transforming it, are necessarily incomplete in dealing with both the U.S. and the German precedents, they might be more meagre in alluding to the scenarios in which constitutional transformations have been experienced during the last decades. Furthermore, every constitutional system should be subjected to the test on examining if the involvement of violence has been decisive in the configuration of its constitutional principles.

My initial position is that no constitutional system escapes from this dark side; that when examining the history of creation of public authority, it is easy to find deaths and all sorts of bloodbaths and, in the same way, constitutional supremacy is a device to ensure (and to remember) those deaths, coercions, and bloodbaths that occurred as events of genesis of the new political order.

My contribution would be only limited at least in determining the conceptual frame in which ulterior analysis might be developed.

Every constitutional democracy, thus, would need at least a book written wearing the glasses of the “genealogical” model in order to ascertain if my hypothesis is correct. Hence a profound quantitative analysis of that sort is still pending, which could be developed by political scientists with exhaustive statistics (which for the mainstream, also in social sciences, is the only way for passing off a research activity as “science”). However, the information currently available will suffice, in lieu of more patient scientific efforts in the future focused on the reconstruction of particular historical, sociological, and economic conditions of the founding moments; while respecting those already developed in the past, such as the noble and advanced works for their time written by Charles Beard (1964) concerning the case of the U.S. Constitution.

My aim will be achieved, if I place the question of violence and its relationship with the legitimacy of constitutionalism in liberal democracies, at the centre of debate.