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Constitution

Overview

A constitution, or supreme law, is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed.

When these principles are written down into a single document or set of legal documents, those documents may be said to embody a written constitution; if they are encompassed in a single comprehensive document, it is said to embody a codified constitution. The constitution of the United Kingdom is a notable example of an uncodified constitution; it is instead written in numerous fundamental acts of a legislature, court cases, and treaties.

Constitutions concern different levels of organizations, from sovereign countries to companies and unincorporated associations. A treaty that establishes an international organization is also its constitution, in that it would define how that organization is constituted. Within states, a constitution defines the principles upon which the state is based, the procedure in which laws are made, and by whom. Some constitutions, especially codified constitutions, also act as limiters of state power, by establishing lines which a state's rulers cannot cross, such as fundamental rights. Changes to constitutions frequently require consensus or supermajority.

The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution of any country in the world, with 146,385 words in its English-language version, while the Constitution of Monaco is the shortest written constitution with 3,814 words. The constitution of San Marino might be the world's oldest active written constitution, since some of its core documents have been in operation since 1600, while the Constitution of the United States is the oldest active codified constitution. The historical life expectancy of a written constitution since 1789 is approximately 19 years.

There are also varieties of constitutions, for example liberal constitutions, absolutist constitutions, Islamic constitutions and communist state constitutions.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Constitution is discussed.

This, however, took place at a later date; at the time of which we are speaking the people, having secured the control of the state, established the constitution which exists at the present day. Pythodorus was Archon at the time, but the democracy seems to have assumed the supreme power with perfect justice, since it had effected its own return by its own exertions.
Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution
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The monarchical constitution is therefore the constitution of developed reason: all other constitutions belong to lower grades of the development and realisation of reason.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
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The _content_ of the Constitution is in every respect a product of history; it is determined by conditions which, in the last analysis, depend upon the general culture of a nation and upon its relations with other peoples. These conditions, however, are so complex that, though every form of Constitution and all its modifications may be regarded as absolutely involved in the causal nexus of historical life, the…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
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Here the bourgeois republicans were concerned in securing their own position. Articles 45-70 of the Constitution are so framed that the National Assembly can constitutionally remove the President, but the President can set aside the National Assembly only unconstitutionally, he can set it aside only by setting aside the Constitution itself. Accordingly, by these provisions, the National Assembly challenges its own…
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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The unwritten maxims of the Constitution--in other words, the positive political morality of the country; and this positive political morality is what we must look to if we would know in whom the really supreme power in the Constitution resides.
John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government
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Constitution

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Constitution

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