Preface and Acknowledgements

This book seeks to defend both the normative attractiveness of a political constitution and its empirical plausibility. If the initial criticisms of my earlier defence of Political Constitutionalism in 2007 centred on its coherence as a normative ideal, the more recent critiques have focused increasingly on its ability to withstand certain real-world contemporary challenges. Taken on their own, the normative criticisms have not altered much over the intervening eighteen or so years. By contrast, the real-world challenges have changed dramatically—both in kind and urgency. Back in 2007 and the immediate years that followed, these challenges mainly stemmed from what was heralded as the unfolding triumph of legal constitutionalism, both domestically and internationally. With regard to the UK, for example, this development was traced to the constitutional reforms of the first Labour administration of Tony Blair—most particularly the Human Rights Act and the creation of the Supreme Court, on the one hand, and the growing impact of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights, and of international law more generally, on the other. However, more recently the apparent global expansion of legal constitutionalism has met with—and, on some accounts, even provoked—a populist backlash, a shift associated in the UK with the ultimately successful campaign to leave the European Union.