Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

In current times, established or taken-for-granted notions of the political, most evidently so regarding representative democracy, the rule of law, and constitutionalism, are being put to an existential test. The longue durée of modern democracy – as deeply tied up with the nation-state, distinctive understandings of liberal and representative politics, and legal-constitutional arrangements - seems to have arrived at a turning point. This turning point calls for a profound analysis, which is able to identify fields of tensions and important shifts in meaning with regard to constitutional democracy as a political regime. It is suggested and elaborated in this chapter that such an in-depth analysis ought to be based on a historical perspective grounded in the idea of social imaginaries, and more specifically, political imaginaries. It will be argued that the modern constitutional imaginary is grounded in contradictory representations of what constitutes society. Whereas the ‘formatting’ of society by means of an emphasis on the orderly function, as exemplified by liberal constitutionalism, has been historically predominant, its insistence on the autonomous, hierarchical, and technocratic nature of the legal-constitutional is in some ways in strong tension with the political imaginary of autonomy. The latter informs a range of competing constitutional imaginaries, including populist but equally radical-democratic ones. The populist imaginary has resurged strongly in democratic politics in recent times, and an analysis of its main components allows for a deeper understanding of the tensions and paradoxes afflicting liberal, constitutional democracy as an idea as well as practice of government. The chapter will, in a first step, elaborate the notion of political imaginaries. Second, it will explore in an in-depth manner the idea of constitutional imaginaries, in particular by elaborating the dual nature of such imaginaries, related to both the ideas of order and stability and to the ideas of autonomy and self-government. In a third step, the chapter will discuss contemporary shifts in (the hold of) political and constitutional imaginaries, engaging in particular with what could be identified as a ‘populist imaginary’ of constitutionalism.