Political and Legal Thought Colloquium -- The Art of Constitutionalism

Author: Autumn Wind
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: The author possesses a unique intellectual background, centered around Hayek's thought, tracing back to the Austrian School of Economics, extending to the Scottish Enlightenment and the common law tradition, and dedicated to exploring the classical liberal thought and institutional resources of China. The book attempts to integrate Eastern and Western thought and institutions, investigating a constitutionalist system with broad explanatory power. The book collects the author's recent essays on law and constitutional studies. Part of the essays, modeled on common law and Roman law during the Republican period, propose the concept of spontaneously discovering law and thereby argue for a regime analysis framework based on the division of sovereignty and legal authority. It also raises the question of how legal procedures can be discovered for the Chinese people in the contemporary context. The second part, using the French Revolution and EU constitutionalism as precedents, points out that constitutionalism is a purely political endeavor, not a holistic social or cultural undertaking. Therefore, attempting to establish free constitutionalism based on compelling the people to adhere to a specific religious belief will inevitably lead to the failure of constitutionalism. The third part attempts to reinterpret several classical Chinese concepts and institutions using the basic conceptual framework of free constitutionalism. The three parts of the arguments are full of original insights and hold significant reference value for the theoretical research of constitutional science in the Chinese context.