ABSTRACT
Modern constitutional-democratic regimes have crystallized with the onset of modernity. As such they share some of the tensions and contradictions inherent in the cultural programme of modernity as it developed with the Great Revolutions and the Enlightenment (which in their turn had, of course, their roots in earlier periods of European history). It was above all the combination of the strong interweaving of this-worldly and otherworldly conceptions of salvation and the continuous struggle about access both to the sacred and to the political centre that created in Europe the potentialities for the crystallization of the new modern social order. These potentialities were greatly enhanced by the specific type of structural pluralism that developed in Europe-the multiplicity of social and political formations, of centres of power and continuous flexibility of political and communal boundaries.
