Constitutional Theory

Across physics, biology, cognition, economics, language, and institutions, explanation has traditionally proceeded by identifying entities and describing their interactions. Yet this approach repeatedly encounters the same boundary: entities alone cannot explain why certain transformations preserve identity while others dissolve it; why some futures remain available while others become impossible; or why systems exhibit continuity despite continual change. This paper proposes Constitutional Theory, a general framework for understanding persistence, meaning, intelligence, coordination, and evolution in terms of admissible continuation. A constitution is defined not as a legal document, but as any structure that determines which continuations of a system remain lawful continuations of that system. Constitutional Theory treats admissibility as prior to agency, persistence as prior to identity, and continuation as prior to description. Within this framework, meaning becomes the alteration of future possibility; intelligence becomes the preservation of viable continuation; hierarchy becomes the compression of contradiction; markets become mechanisms for constitutional coordination; and physical persistence becomes a special case of constitutional binding. The theory does not compete with existing scientific descriptions. Rather, it proposes a deeper explanatory layer concerned not with what systems do, but with what they are permitted to become.