Constitutional Violence

The eighteenth-century is usually looked to as the theoretical source for modern concepts of constitutionality, those political and legal forms that limit conflict. And yet the eighteenth century was also a period of almost constant war, within Europe and in the new global spaces of colonial rule. Though it is well known that new concepts of international law emerged in this period, surprisingly few commentators have established what connections there are between the violence of war and the elaboration of new ideas about constitutional limit. I will show that war played a crucial role in the Enlightenment invention of a modern existential concept of the political, where the violence of constitution was understood to be foundational.