The article thematizes the relevance of Paul Kahn’s conception of political sacrifice for contemporary constitutional studies. Kahn’s approach to political sacrifice is compared with another extremely influential theory of sacrifice, René Girard’s theory of sacrifice. The main aim is to show why Kahn’s view of sacrifice in constitutional orders escapes the logic of victimization that affects Girard’s seminal work, and it provides a better understanding of a political conception of modern constitutional orders. In the final section, the article shows that although Kahn’s version of political sacrifice is seen as the embodiment of the principle of sovereignty, it can be expanded beyond it.

This intervention expands Stefan Eich’s analysis of the parallel between language and money in The Currency of Politics by emphasising the increasing importance of linguistic communication within processes of production. This expansion has had an impact on monetary policy and on the communicative strategies of central banks. The suggestion is to integrate Eich’s call for the politicisation of monetary design with an appraisal of post-fordiist productive processes and the importance of money creation for the valorisation of those processes. If this reading of the expansion of the logic of economic value to linguistic communication is correct, then any call for a monetary design of money that works like public speech ought to be carry forward cautiously, in light of the colonisation of the latter (speech) by market forces

Michael Wilkinson’s Authoritarian Liberalism puts forward a challenging and controversial claim: the history of European integration and the trajectory of the constitutional orders of the founding Member States have always been driven by authoritarian liberalism. This comment focuses on a certain slack, in Wilkinson’s analysis, between the material constitution of European states and authoritarian liberalism as a form of government. More specifically, the comment highlights the need to retrieve a more conflictual relation between, on one hand, the material constitution of the welfare state and its industrial involvement, and on the other hand, the constitutional forms adopted by authoritarian liberalism.

The article addresses the question of how to study global constitutional law by suggesting a material methodology. Drawing from previous studies of the notion of the material constitution, both from materialist and institutionalist types (Marx, Mortati, Poulantzas), the article proposes to look at the development of global constitutional law, in its many instantiations, in terms of its relation with the state. Accounts of the autonomy of global constitutional law are requalified in terms of relative autonomy. More specifically, global constitutional law is conceived as a legal construction functional to the transformation of the contemporary state. From the perspective of the material study of constitutional law, the state is still deemed to be the main unit of analysis, but, at the same time, state-centred accounts based on an exceptionalist understanding of sovereignty are rejected as reductive and, at times, inaccurate.

The revival of the political constitution has come about in parallel with two developments, one in constitutional practice and the other in political theory. With regard to the former, the political constitution has been seen as something of a bulwark against the rise of legal (or judicial, or common law) constitutionalism. The seeming hegemony of this latter model of constitutionalism among contemporary lawyers and political scientists has produced from (so-called) political constitutionalists a reaction against the delegation of important decisions to non-political institutions and an obsessively court-centered scholarship. Perceiving this shift in focus from political to legal institutions to be the very antithesis of the traditional Commonwealth (more particularly, of the United Kingdom's parliamentary) model of constitutionalism, and, more broadly, to be an affront to democratic sensibilities, the notion of the political constitution was retrieved and defended in a seminal article in the 1979 edition of the Modern Law Review, written (though first delivered in his Chorley Lecture the previous year) by the late John Griffith. More recently, in the work of Adam Tomkins, Richard Bellamy, and Grégoire Webber and Graham Gee, a normative interpretation has been lent to Griffith's thesis so as to provide a full-fledged constitutional theory capable of standing as an alternative to the liberal-legal paradigm—a turn, one might say, from the political constitution to political constitutionalism.

This paper posits a (very British!) call to arms, and does so in five steps. In part A, we address the need for constitutional fictions by which the many surrender political power to the few, in the name of stability, order and security. In part B, however, we will show that conflict is both a necessary and a core principle of political constitutionalism—that it is the latent possibility of conflict, the (re)awkening of the many where the few abuse that power, that acts as the final check on government. In part C, we trace the steps by which recent re-interpretations of the work of J.A.G. Griffith, with a focus on the work of Tomkins and Bellamy, have reduced politics to its parliamentary form, thereby closing—rather than “enlarging”—the “areas for argument and discussion”—a narrow view of the constitution to which, admittedly, Griffith himself might have subscribed. In part D, we will assess the limits of such a narrow reading of the political and argue that a more dynamic and reflexive approach is needed if we are to remain in—or recover to—rude constitutional health. Finally, in part E, we will use the political and constitutional background to the devolution of legislative and executive power to Scotland in order to demonstrate the power of political conflict, in extraordinary moments, to expose, break down and create new constitutional fictions.