Thinking About Constitutionalism at the Start of the Twenty-First Century

At the beginning of a new century, constitutional democracyseems ascendant almost to the point of a universal inevitability.What follows is in part a cautionary tale and in part an assessmentof where we now stand in one of history's most hopeful long-termtrends. An examination of the diffusion of constitutional democracy,and of general trends in cross-national constitutional developmentssince World War II, leads to a consideration of the manner andextent to which modern constitutionalism embodies a recapitulationof human cultural and political evolution. The culture-power-justicenexus that characterizes modem constitutionalism was first dissectedby Montesquieu, and an examination of his approach to constitutionalismprovides a useful window into why we developed the politicaltechnology of constitutional democracy and why the future ofthis technology is not a foregone conclusion.