Theory As/Or Historiography? Constituent Power (of the Jurist) and the Law (of the State)

Abstract

Rather than to critique the substance of Joel Colón-Ríos’s indisputably important contribution to the scholarship on constituent power, the aim of this essay is to put in question the historiographical mode of theoretical engagement which prevails in the contemporary debates about this important concept, as well as to question its ostensible present-day significance—especially to the politically engaged projects such as Colón-Ríos’s—which, at the very least, deserves to be discussed more directly, explicitly, and systematically.