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37 J. Legal Educ. 167 (1987)
Idea of a Constitution, The

handle is hein.journals/jled37 and id is 179 raw text is: Idea of a Constitution The Idea of a Constitution Hanna Fenichel Pitkin The requirement to be extremely brief today is welcome to me, for on the idea of a constitution, if I know anything at all, I am surely a hedgehog (who knows one big thing) rather than a fox (who knows many things).' All I have to offer is the fact that our idea of what a constitution is, is inevitably tied to how we ordinarily-that is, naturally, spontaneously-use the word constitution and related words; and that the patterns of use of such important, abstract, and politically contested words always involve deep inconsistencies. So, to understand what a constitution is, one must look not for some crystalline core or essence of unambiguous meaning but precisely at the ambiguities, the specific oppositions that this specific concept helps us to hold in tension. In particular, it is worth attending to two uses of the word constitution which may at first seem wholly irrelevant to our obviously public and polit- ical concerns, irrelevant to the Constitution of the United States, whether considered as the document whose bicentennial we celebrate or as a tradition of interpretation and public practice. The first of these uses is constitution in the sense of composition or fundamental make-up, the constituent parts of something and how they are put together, its characteristic frame or nature. Concerning a person, ''constitution can mean either physical make-up (we say someone has a robust or a delicate constitution) or temperament, the frame of one's character. With respect to a community, this use of constitution suggests a characteristic way of life, the national character of a people, their ethos or fundamental nature as a people, a product of their particular history and social conditions. In this sense, our constitution is less something we have than something we are. This sense, is, I think, what Charles Mcllwain meant by the ancient idea of a constitution; no doubt he had in mind Aristotle's politeia, which refers not to fundamental law or the locus of sovereignty but to the distinctive shared way of life of a polis, its mode of social and political Hanna Fenichel Pitkin is Professor of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley. This paper was prepared for the Plenary Session program, The Idea of the Constitution, held at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in Los Angeles on January 5, 1987. The paper has been prepared from a transcription of oral remarks, without the qualifi- cations and citations one might expect in a formal paper. 1. Sir Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York, 1957). 01987 by the Association of American Law Schools. Cite as 37 J. Legal Educ. 167 (1987).

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