Introduction: Leftist Constitutionalism and the Rechtsstaat: The Ongoing Relevance of a Historical Controversy

The introduction argues the continuing relevance to modern constitutionalism, of the difficulty of accommodating a leftist political programme of social change with the ‘rights revolution’ and the rule of law. In fact, we don’t have a leftist alternative in today’s constitutional theory because the Twentieth century’s left is still under fire for imposing unconstitutional governments (Unrechtsstaat). Their priority was to ‘accelerate’ history; thus, constitutionalism was perceived as a hindrance to a transformation of society by means of unlimited party and state power. The present study reconstructs the difficult relationship of the German left with the Rechtsstaat principle in a long-term perspective, from the 1848 Revolution to the birth of the East and West German states in 1949. It focuses on the attempts of the leftists unpersuaded of the anarchist’s and Bolshevik’s anti-formalist solutions to elaborate an alternative to liberal constitutionalism, either via a social Rechtsstaat or a Rechtsstaat-free constitutionalism.