The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (58 page)

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

The set of rules that define the distribution of governmental power; the study of those rules. F. W. Maitland wrote that the phrase constitutional law, while in common usage, was not a technical phrase of English law. The term is not to be found defined in a statute book and it has not been the subject of exact judicial definition in any case decided by the courts. No special pre-eminence is given to constitutional law largely due to the absence of a written
constitution
for the United Kingdom. John Austin , whose opinion on sovereignty in English law has been influential, identified constitutional law as extremely simple ‘for it merely determines the person who shall bear the sovereignty’. In modern usage this view is too narrow. Returning, therefore, to the rules that relate to the distribution of governmental power, a wide range of matters may fit this description. The law relating to Parliament, the executive, including cabinet government, and the judiciary are relevant to this definition of constitutional law today.
In the absence of a written constitution in the United Kingdom, constitutional law is not primarily the concern of the courts. Parliament and its privileges, and the scope and extent of
prerogative
powers, all fit for convenience into the general description of constitutional law. As Maitland observed, constitutional law has ‘no special sanctity’. Thus demarcation lines between what is and what is not constitutional law are extremely difficult. Definition appears to be a matter of convenience. Constitutional law is sufficiently broad and flexible to refer to the structure and the broad rules, whether or not enforceable by the courts, that describe how power is exercised by government.
Rigid classification of English law is inappropriate to its understanding compared to other European countries where law is codified. A. V. Dicey likened defining constitutional law as looking for a clue through the ‘mazes of a perplexed topic’. Three guiding principles were apparent. First, the legislative sovereignty of Parliament, second, the ‘universal rule or supremacy throughout the constitution of ordinary law’, and thirdly, the dependence in the last resort on unwritten conventions as part of the law of the constitution. The latter may be regarded as a ‘more doubtful and speculative ground’ to advance a definition. The inclusion of conventions refers to the unwritten but no less important ‘morality of the constitution’. For example, the doctrine of ministerial responsibility for the decisions of a government department provides that ministers may be held accountable to Parliament. However, today ministerial resignation appears more a matter of political expediency rather than constitutional propriety.
Constitutional law might have been codified if Bentham's Constitutional Code had been adopted in the nineteenth century. More recently, proposals for a written constitution have been advanced with publication of a draft constitution for the United Kingdom.
JM 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

First articulated by President Truman in 1947, containment involved maintaining the US military presence around the world, as well as supporting ‘friendly’ regimes economically and militarily. It was the foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War, aimed at preventing Soviet expansion. See also
Truman Doctrine
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

The circumstances surrounding an event, usually the writing or publication of a book. Amongst such circumstances, contemporary political and intellectual debates are often seen as especially important. Knowledge of the context of intellectual production may help to explain what an author was trying to achieve, and the meaning of what was produced, but this is a disputed matter in the study of the history of ideas. ‘Contextualism’ is associated in the United Kingdom with political philosophers in Cambridge, while the rival approach of confining oneself to the analysis of the arguments of the text is associated with political philosophers in Oxford. Intelligent discussion of political theory requires both.
AR 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

The phrase, although not unfamiliar in other contexts, is especially associated with
Mao Zedong
. In 1958 Mao, in an intra-party document, criticized Stalin and the Soviet party for having allowed the Soviet Union to drift into a state in which the institutions hastily created to bring the resources of society under communist control had been accepted as having permanent and universal validity. This was the consequence of a centralized command structure which suppressed political activity, and it was given ideological expression in Stalin's assertion that there were no contradictions in socialist society. Mao argued that the nationalization of industry and commerce, and the collectivization of agriculture represented only the first step to socialism; the assumption of ownership and control achieved no more than the opportunity to transform the relations of production; hence his apparently perverse accusation that those of his fellow leaders who were content to operate the state sector by management methods inherited from capitalism were ‘following the capitalist road’. The same applied to the Soviet-inspired use of state tractor stations to control the management of agriculture.
At the theoretical level, Mao insisted that dialectical materialism applied as much to socialist society as to the capitalist phase. Contradictions continued to exist, and were indeed the driving force—the only driving force—of progress towards a truly and effectively socialist system. He expressed this idea in his speech ‘How to Handle Contradictions Among the People’. The rectification movement of 1957, in which Mao widened the Hundred Flowers policy of permitting debate in scientific and academic affairs to include political criticism; the
Great Leap Forward
, which sought to encourage full popular participation in the development process; and the
Cultural Revolution
, which was intended to open a dialogue on the basic issues of socialism—all are illustrations of Mao's belief that revolution must be continuous, and that if it is not going forward it is going backwards.
The idea of continuous revolution implied that the function of the Communist Party was not to staff an authoritarian bureaucracy, but to enable and guarantee a process of development which gave a Marxist form to popular aspirations and to supervise a continuous process of change.
Mao's continuous revolution should be distinguished from Trotsky's ‘permanent revolution’, which was concerned with the situation before, not after, the achievement of socialist power, advocating that social democrats should not, following the bourgeois revolution, relax in the drive to achieve the social revolution.
JG