part vii • legal history and legal science • dag michalsen tively prescribed a political vision, and the social and cultural transformations brought about by the state created by the constitution. A constitution should govern the state and structure its legal character. At last, the modern constitutional concept presupposed that the act of writing down the constitution involved the performative idea that the act itself brought about new sociopolitical realities. The extraordinary numbers of constitutions drafted and adopted in the decades around 1800 speak of this confidence in the effect of legal acts. Legal confidence – the many worlds of political utopias – was not only visible in constitutional practice, but equally visible in the practice of civil law codifications like the French Code civil of 1804, which expressed a legislative optimism typical of this period. There are many interesting connections between constitutional communications and the production of temporalities in society. When a constitution is adopted and put into practice, several derivative texts are produced. The state organs created by a constitution must continuously interpret that constitution whenever they apply a constitutional norm. Thus, the constitution is the cornerstone of what in time will be innumerable legal documents that reflect aspects of it. Legal documents are not the only texts produced in response to a constitution, however. Because a constitution is very much a political and ideological document too, political and ideological texts that concern constitutional life are a significant category of derivative texts. In addition, any constitution important in a nation’s life will become the object of many kinds of reflections. Therefore, countless texts will be produced that in some way address, discuss, and mirror the constitution. The action of social processes then ensures that these derivative texts become interwoven with the constitution. Put differently, constitutional practices transcend law and become broader social practices, embedded in cultural ideology and social structure, and attain a new temporal dimension as is testified in the many older constitutions still in effect. This might be viewed nationally, but now the international scene predominates. It is a well-known fact that the histories of constitutions are part of the global trends in geopolitics, world economics, and much more. 326
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