Constitutional Theory and its Limits – Reflections on Comparative Political Theologies

Abstract

This article first argues that the thinking behind different theories of collective self-constitution – normative political and reflexive – is commonly restricted by the particularly occidental metaphysics of medieval natural theology which rendered transcendence immanent and domesticated and absolutized God’s unlimited power. The article then shows how this “defective immanence” of constitutional thinking functions ideologically through retroactively colonizing other forms of “theo-politics” in non-occidental monotheistic socio-political organizations.