Reconciling Constitutionalism with Power: Towards a Constitutional Nomos of Political Ordering

Abstract

Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s and Carl Schmitt’s theories on the relationship between nomos and boundary, this paper revisits how constitutionalism and political power are reconciled as a constitutional ordering. It first analyzes constitutionalism in the light of political modernity. Indicating that political power grounded by a constitution is omnipotent, complementing and completing constitutionalism, this paper contends that an omnipotent constitutional ordering is anything but an unleashed Leviathan. It is argued that constitutional omnipotence is framed and thus constrained by a constitutional nomos, the matrix of which is a dual delimitation of boundaries, generational and jurisdictional.