Introduction

This essay concerns the research I have done, since 2010, in the research group on Constitutionalism and Democracy at Federal University of Parana Law School on the idea (and possibility) of a radical Constitution.

In its first part I discuss, on the one hand, the notion of Constitution as promise and, on the other hand, as the realization of such promise and the bulk of difficulties, precisely, paradoxes, tensions that such approach entails. I take Robert Post’s (2000, 187) premise that democratic constitutionalism implies a collective intervention by the people (a shared voice), which assumes the ineradicable tension between collec­tive self-governance and the rule of law in order to establish the ongoing structure of democratic states. In the second part, I discuss the link between constituent power, sovereignty and the Constitution and, in the third part, the relation between constitutionalism and democracy. The discussion on the foundations of such rela­tions is central to this essay as far as it sets the place from where I speak which is either political philosophy or constitutional law. If they were simple relations, of easy connections between categories, it would be irrelevant to face them for the proposal of a radical Constitution.

Contemporary constitutional theory has been generous in arguments, whose dis­agreements -either in favor of political action or constituted order, of potentiality or actuality, of democracy or constitutionalism, of rights or majorities- have instigated new theoretical positions and new practices. In this essay, I am more focused on theoretical issues concerning the possibility of a radical Constitution. However, I am firmly convinced that another important challenge is the internalization of this idea into social and legal practices in order to deepen the commitment to democracy and constitutionalism. Then, I finally propose the notion of a radical constitution as a possible mediation for political action based on the arguments brought in the first, second and third parts.

This essay is also an effort to deal with constitutional time, which integrates past, present and future as far as it redeems the promises made in the name of constitu­tionalism and democracy in the now: As Balkin and Siegel say, Constitution is always a work in progress (2009,02).

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