Constitutional Reason Of State

THE PRESENT STUDY proposes to explore the history of the problem of ‘reason of state’ in a constitutional political order. The writers treated belong among the ‘great’ in modern political thought and therefore it is not and cannot be a question of dealing with the integral thought of the writers here examined. All we can hope to do is to seek out those aspects which bear more immediately upon this particular problem. Ratio status,—the very term shows that we are moving within the context of the great tradition of Western rationalism, where everything has its particular ratio or inner rationale which it behoves the mind to grasp and to understand. For the idea of such rationes is prominent in the Middle Ages,—an aspect of the matter which receives scant attention in Friedrich Meinecke’s magistral treatment of the subject Die Idee der Staatsräson in der Neueren Geschichte published in 1925 and by now become something of a classic. Perhaps partly because of his lack of sympathy for this rational basis of the idea which he was discussing, he also paid scant attention to that aspect of it which we are particularly concerned with here: reason of state in its application to the government of law, the constitutional order, in short ‘constitutional reason of state’ or more precisely ‘reason of the constitutional state.’

This is a collection of essays from leading constitutional lawyers and theorists, examining the philosophical foundations of constitutional law and the issues that arise from the fundamental philosophical issues raised by the idea of a constitution.

A collection of brand new and revised essays from eminent scholar of public law, Martin Loughlin, that systematizes his work on political jurisprudence - a school of thought that contends the key to understanding the nature of legal order lies in how political authority is constituted.

An original work on the important idea of reason of state and British and imperial history and constitutional theory.

There is a great difficulty in the way of a writer who attempts to sketch a living Constitution-a Constitution that is in actual work and power. The difficulty is that the object is in constant change. An historical writer does not feel this difficulty: he deals only with the past; he can say definitely, the Constitution worked in such and such a manner in the year at which he begins, and in a manner in such and such respects different in the year at which he ends; he begins with a definite point of time and ends with one also. But a contemporary writer who tries to paint what is before him is puzzled and a perplexed: what he sees is changing daily. He must paint it as it stood at some one time, or else he will be putting side by side in his representations things which never were contemporaneous in reality.