Liberal constitutionalism is a recent invention, but its historical roots lie deep in Renaissance and Early Modern thought. An examination of the problems and the arguments that gave rise to the concept of liberal constitutionalism goes a long way toward clarifying the special role that authority over language plays in establishing the legitimacy of a constitutional regime.

At the beginning of the modern era, the question of political legitimation became the search for the true source of sovereignty. The search for sovereignty arose from the desire for a basis for human political authority unmoored from assertions of theological orthodoxy. In the fifth century c.e., Augustine had proposed that the survival of a state depended on its being governed in accordance with Christian teachings, rather than on the republican virtues that had been emphasized by writers such as Aristotle and Polybius. As a consequence, Augustine concluded that a government owed a duty to its people to provide Christian governance by virtue of its duty to promote the state's existence. In the fifteenth century, Florentine republican writers, among whom Machiavelli was the leading figure, argued that Augustine had it wrong. Confronted by the record of a millennium of religious conflict, and inspired by the recent rediscovery of ancient texts of classical republicanism, Machiavelli proposed that the key to creating and preserving the state was either a restoration of republican virtue or else the tyrannical but effective rule of a Prince bereft of either republican or Christian virtue.