ABSTRACT
The problem of sovereignty became a bore in the hands of the Benthamites and the British Hegelians, and in the 1930s one’s heart warmed to Sir Ivor Jennings when he wrote the whole thing off as a ‘politico-theological dogma’. One cannot press very hard on the dry forms of constitutional law without touching the naked nerve of personal allegiance and individual decision. In a sense, the American constitution is, as Bryce said, a document that ‘may be read through aloud in twenty-three minutes’, and the document is law, not description. A constitution purports to be a rational structure: indeed the whole notion of government under law belongs to the same realm of ideas as right reason, natural law, and the equality of men in so far as they realize their nature as men. Constitutions purport to be as rational as bureaucracies, but like them they live by myth-making and ritual.
