Abstract There is something utopian about constituent power, whether this is the unrealisable idea of “the people” or the world-building nature of constitutional change. However, in contemporary constitutional scholarship “utopia” is more often used as a pejorative critique of reform projects that are seen as idealistic ambitious calls for constitutional change, which might fail for being “too utopian”, “too idealistic”, “too unrealistic”. In an attempt to move beyond this critique, this article draws on alternative approaches to utopianism to uncover the temporal assumptions underpinning contemporary approaches to constituent power and highlights the different approaches that can be exposed if theories of utopian-thinking are foregrounded. Both utopia and constituent power are closely aligned with visions of alternative futures, and constitutional scholars agree that there is an intersection between utopian thinking and the subjectivities, temporalities and operationalisation of constituent power. Moving away from utilising utopia as a pejorative label and engaging instead with what it can expose about temporalities, offers alternative approaches to the study of constituent power.
Ruth Houghton (Mon,) studied this question.