As with all agreements, consensus and contracts, a Constitution is a hunt for a balance – and a dynamic one at that – between the expressing on one hand of lofty national aspirations and ambitions, and on the other of compromises meant to be more binding than they usually turn out to be.
It is an act of self-definition and self-control, where rights and duties are laid out in broad generic terms. Thus, one can see it either as a search for common ideals, or as an arena of contestation where the fortunes of different interest groups shift over time. Which parts are carved in stone and which parts are of wet clay? That seems to be the unanswerable question.
Edmund Burke, the famous conservative and vivid scholar of the French Revolution, wrote in 1790 in Reflections on the Revolution in France that “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.”
