This wide-ranging and insightful book challenges our understanding of the nature and uses of political constitutions. We are used to thinking of modern constitutions as something that arise out of popular struggles for freedom—individual, social, national—and self-governance. Examples from the dawn of the modern age that come immediately to mind are the United States (US) constitution that was framed after the war of independence against the British imperial rule. And the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the constitution that was subsequently adopted in the aftermath of the overthrow of the monarchy in 1789 in a violent mass uprising. Constitutions are thought to have ended arbitrary and oppressive rule and established the rule of law. And constitutional democracies promise, additionally, the participation of the people in their own governance. Over the next two and a half centuries, constitutions are believed to have led progressively to greater human rights, inclusiveness, stability, peace and prosperity. In the popular mind at least, they have come to be seen as the ultimate good, the gold standard by which all politics is judged.