Towards a Tao of Comparative Constitutionalism for a Post-Liberal World

Asanga Welikala (University of Edinburgh)

Research Seminar

MCC Center for Constitutional Politics

Date: 26 November 2024, 5.00pm

Venue: Hunyadi János

The field of comparative constitutional studies is at an epistemological crossroads at the moment. As a field of scholarship and practice, it saw its greatest efflorescence in the period after the end of the Cold War. The monistic normative core that guided comparative constitutional studies in this period can be described as ‘liberal constitutional democracy’ and its fundamental aim has been teleological: for constitutions to achieve constitutionalism, they must be, or at least must aspire to become, liberal and democratic. That confident normative certainty is now in flux, perhaps even in crisis. The central question for comparative constitutional studies in the future seems not to be whether constitutionalism is liberal or not, but whether government is constitutional or not.

Comparative constitutionalism needs to become more open-textured (i.e., avoiding liberal-modernist teleological assumptions and reconceiving its unity as a unity of plural constitutional-ontological universes), self-reflexive (i.e., highly context-dependent for structures of justification for constitutional design, implementation, and adjudication, and allowing diverse constitutional systems to speak for themselves in comparative discourse), and pluriversal (i.e., rebalancing the relation between the universality of abstract norms, and the plural epistemic and ontological bases of their instantiation or determination in particular contexts).

But against the centrifugal dynamics of open-texture, self-reflexivity, and (civilisational) pluriversality must be weighed the need to maintain the conceptual integrity of constitutionalism as an analytical tool and a normative idea. For it to do its work within constitutional comparativism, it cannot be so relativistic as to do no more than provide an apology for power in whatever empirical context it finds itself in. How we answer this conundrum is the real research agenda for comparative constitutional studies in the present.

If both liberal individualism and unconstrained power are the extremisms to be avoided in a new normative account of constitutionalism on a global scale, we need to think about constitutional values, common to many global intellectual traditions, that once defined the concept of constitutional government – notably the values of civility, prudence, and order – which together articulate the parameters of constitutional government as being defined by ‘commonness’ and ‘goodness’.

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MCC students can earn credit for actively participating in the event, provided they complete the required reading and prepare three questions for the Q&A session of the research seminar.

Questions related to the required reading must be submitted to Kálmán Pócza at pocza.kalman@mcc.hu by 11:00 PM on November 24, 2024.

Required Reading: Please contact Kálmán Pócza to obtain the electronic version of the paper.

Submission Deadline: November 24, 2024, by 11:00 PM.