Constitution and the State

Abstract

Burckhardt wrote of the ‘great modern fallacy that a constitution can be made’.²² It would be equally true to speak of the greater modern fallacy that a constitution can be endlessly and in every particular reformed. The customs, allegiances and traditions to which I have referred form the life of a civil society: they do not yet amount to the constitution of a state. And yet clearly they owe their continuance to a presiding power, and that power (which is the power of the state) must contain in itself the authority of something ‘given’ if it is to protect and enshrine loyalties and obligations that arise from no individual choice.