A Meta-Category “People” and Limits of Cognition in the Science of Constitutional Law

Abstract

Based on approaches existing in domestic science to the interpretation of the term “a people”, the author concludes that in constitutional law the term under consideration is used in at least two different meanings: 1.as a source of power; and 2. as a subject of constitutional rights. The author highlights the irreducibility of this duality and substantiates the thesis that the concept of the people as a source of power is one of the limiting concepts of constitutional law and, therefore, cannot be defined within its framework. Awareness of this problem leads some Russian lawyers to denying the principle of popular sovereignty, and other scholars try to equate the concept of “a people as a source of power” with the concept of electoral corps. Arguing both these approaches, the author highlights that according to Gödel’s theorem on incompleteness, constitutional law as a system of formally defined norms cannot be complete and uncontroversial at the same time. Attempts to construct a “pure” constitutional-legal theory free of any extra-legal elements where definitions of all concepts the theory operates would be derived from the theory itself lead to intractable contradictions. If the system of constitutional law is built as non-contradictory, it is inevitably incomplete, in particular it uses concepts that cannot be defined within its framework. The author investigates such concepts and categories belonging to a higher level of abstraction as meta-categories, or marginal concepts, of the science of constitutional law. The category “the people as a source of power” is one of them. Concerning the dilemma of completeness and consistency of constitutional law as a system of formally defined norms, the author prioritizes consistency.