What the (Expletive) is a “Constitution”?! Ordinary Cadres Confront the 1954 PRC Draft Constitution (original) (raw)
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It is a quarter century since I began to think about the Weimar Constitution and its interpreters. In Fall 1990, I arrived in Germany to undertake my research, armed with the latest in "critical theory": a mixture of Marxism, deconstruction, and Critical Legal Studies. My aim was to take the constitution apart, to offer a skeptical judgment on the importance of constitutional democracy. And what better system to use for this project than the Weimar Republic, where brilliant thinkers on both left and right had questioned the value of constitutionalism. Many of these thinkers proclaimed that constitutionalism impeded "real" democracy; that it undermined the state, the higher power previously embodied in a monarch that held a disparate society together; and that constitutionalism's focus on rights and limited powers halted the forward march of the nation or humanity. Rights and rules, the critics proclaimed, got in the way of substance, whether that substance was the people or the state or the movement or justice. These criticisms were to form the basis of my dissertation.