Why Classical-Liberal Constitutionalism Has Failed

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the party of laissez-faire and free markets—known today as “classical liberals”—often pushed a political program that included the adoption of written constitutions. The old liberals—such as the American revolutionaries and French bourgeois reformers—thought that written constitutions would offer a substantial barrier to abuses of state power.

The constitutional program of the classical liberals is not to be confused with its underlying ideology—wh...