ABSTRACT
When Jeremy Bentham returned to constitutional theory in the early 1820s, as part of his great project of drafting the Constitutional Code, he had already developed many of his characteristic ideas in earlier writings on parliamentary reform and public finance. To argue that monarchy was, in effect, a tyrannical regime, even where the powers of the monarch were limited and shared by representative institutions, Bentham must deal with obvious objections derived especially from the considerable experience of constitutional monarchy in Britain. Bentham analysed constitutional government in terms of two kinds of power: operative and constitutive. Operative power is the power of government in all of its forms: legislative, executive, and judicial. Constitutive power is 'the power of determining at each point of time in the hands of what individual functionary or individual functionaries the correspondent operative power shall at that time be lodged'.
