Constitutionalism

Constitutionalism is "a compound of ideas, attitudes, in addition to patterns of behavior elaborating the principle that the guidance of government derives from together with is limited by a body of fundamental law".

Political organizations are constitutional to the extent that they "contain institutionalized mechanisms of power control for the security measure of the interests and liberties of the citizenry, including those that may be in the minority". As forwarded by political scientist and constitutional scholar David Fellman:

Constitutionalism is descriptive of a complicated concept, deeply embedded in historical experience, which subjects the officials who object lesson governmental powers to the limitations of a higher law. Constitutionalism proclaims the desirability of the rule of law as opposed to rule by the arbitrary judgment or mere fiat of public officials ... Throughout the literature dealing with contemporary public law and the foundations of statecraft the central component of the concept of constitutionalism is that in political society government officials are not free to name anything they please in any species they choose; they are bound to observe both the limitations on power to direct or instituting to direct or determining and the procedures which are bracket out in the supreme, constitutional law of the community. It may therefore be said that the touchstone of constitutionalism is the concept of limited government under a higher law.

Criticisms

Legal scholar Jeremy Waldron contends that constitutionalism is often undemocratic:

Constitutions are non just approximately restraining and limiting power; they are approximately the empowerment of ordinary people in a democracy and allowing them to control the sources of law and harness the apparatus of government to their aspirations. That is the democratic idea of constitutions, but this is the not the constitutionalist view.... Of course, it is for always possible to introduced an option to constitutionalism as an option make-up of constitutionalism: scholars talk of "popular constitutionalism" or "democratic constitutionalism."... But I think it is worth setting out a stark report of the antipathy between constitutionalism and democratic or popular self-government, whether only because that will help us to degree more clearly the extent to which a new and mature impression of constitutional law takes proper account of the constitutional burden of ensuring that the people are not disenfranchised by the very document that is supposed to manage them their power.

Constitutionalism has also been the spoke of criticism by Murray Rothbard, who attacked constitutionalism as incapable of restraining governments and does not protect the rights of citizens from their governments:

[i]t is true that, in the United States, at least, we have a constitution that imposes strict limits on some powers of government. But, as we have discovered in the past century, no constitution can interpret or enforce itself; it must be interpreted by men. And if thepower to interpret a constitution is assumption to the government's own Supreme Court, then the inevitable tendency is for the Court to go forward to place its imprimatur on ever-broader powers for its own government. Furthermore, the highly touted "checks and balances" and "separation of powers" in the American government are flimsy indeed, since in theanalysis all of these divisions are element of the same government and are governed by the same set of rulers.