ABSTRACT
Broadly, empiricism supposes human nature to be a tabula rasa, an unwritten ‘blank slate’ that is imprinted with the knowledge gathered about the world experienced by the senses. Rather than relying on abstract deduction, empiricism relies on induction in order to constitute who ‘we’ are: we can only know what we experience and we only experience what is there, rather than what we think or deduce is there. Empiricism is pragmatic and practical, relying on ‘common sense’ to discern self-evident truths about the world.1 British diasporic constitutional texts are characterised by empiricist discourse, which deploys bodily metaphors and anthropomorphic language based on the senses – including such verbs as ‘seeing’, ‘feeling’, ‘thinking’ and ‘holding’ – to naturalise specific instances of graphic writing.2 Such writings are underwritten by an ‘unwritten’ human nature. Examining how writing configures and naturalises the ‘body politic’ in the work of influential empiricist philosophers John Locke and David Hume, as well as that of other significant political theorists and philosophers, we can begin thinking about how constitutional texts might work in the context of a British legal and political diaspora.
