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Unit 3: Constitutions and Constitutionalism

Friedrich’s Paradigm Notes

Some Restraints
Actual Governments
No Complete
Restraint Unconstitutional Constitutional Restraint
Government Government

Constitutionalism, in this way, desires a political order in which the powers of the government are
limited. It is another name for the concept of a limited, and for this reason, a ‘civilised’ government.
The real justification of the constitution finds place in having a “limited government” and of
requiring those who govern “to conform to laws and rules.” We are required to see how the
constitution of a state works in actual practice and whether usages and conventions operate to
strengthen or weaken the machinery of the constitutional arrangement. We may find that, apart
from those limitations that have their place in the provisions of the constitution, there are well-
established customs and norms that have their own effect for the same purpose. Keeping such
empirical facts in mind, one may say that there exists no government in the world that may not be
called constitutional, though he may also say that such a government hardly exists in a country
binder a totalitarian rule where the constitution is seen with ‘contempt’. For this reason, it is only
in a democratic country that constitutional government can be said to exist.
Development of Constitutionalism: An Historical Process of the Rise of
Constitutional State
The rise of a constitutional state is essentially an historical process whose chief material is contained
in the history of political institutions coupled with the history of western political ideas right from
ancient to modern times.
Rome and thereafter they witnessed their rise and growth in the middle and modern ages. Side by
side, reference should be made to the ideas of great political thinkers who either drew stimulus
from the development of political institutions, or who thought in terms of having a particular form
of polity under the ideal or obtainable conditions. The movement is still going on with a view to
seek the improvement of political institutions in the direction of having a legitimate constitutional
order. We may study the history of the development of constitutionalism under these heads:

The history of the development of constitutionalism is thus a history of the growth of
political institutions that had their first important manifestation in the soils of ancient
Greece.

Greek Constitutionalism: They had city-state system in which the benefits of citizenship were
open to the freemen only. Most of the city-states had a direct democratic system, though Sparta
was under the rule of military junta. The Greeks, however, had a peculiar notion about the state
and the role of the people (citizens) therein. As Strong says: “A Greek citizen was actually and in
person a soldier, a judge and a member of the governing assembly...The state to the Greek was his
whole scheme of association, a city where in all his needs, material and spiritual, were satisfied...”
The Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, however, studied the case of political institutions
from an ethical point of view with the result that the political constitutionalism became a handmaid
of normative and moral notions. The ideal state of Plato under the al powerful rule of a non-
corrupt and incorruptible philosopher-king looked like a ‘ utopia’, while the best practicable state
of Aristotle having ‘polity’ signified a type of middle-class rule “striking a balance between the
unrealisable, or at least transitory, best and the intolerable worst.” It is true that while Plato

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