constitūtiō

Constitution comes from Latin constitūtiō, a noun from the verb constituere, meaning 'to set up, to establish, to settle, to appoint.' The verb is built from con- (together) and statuere (to set, to place, to establish), which shares its root with status, statute, and the verb 'to stand.' A constitūtiō was, in Roman usage, any authoritative establishment or settlement of a matter — a general principle or regulation, particularly one issued by an emperor. Roman imperial constitutions (constitutiones principum) were the emperor's formal pronouncements on legal questions, binding across the empire. The word named the act of setting something up so that it would stand — the constitūtiō was stable by nature, a fixing of what had been fluid.

The Latin word passed into medieval usage with multiple meanings: a church constitution was a decree issued by a pope or council; a university constitution was the foundational document of its organization; a city constitution was the set of rules governing its governance. In each case, the word named the foundational instrument — the document that set up the institution and defined its operating principles. The English word 'constitution' appeared in the fourteenth century carrying all of these senses, plus a bodily sense (a person's physical constitution — the fundamental arrangement of their body's properties) that reflects the same underlying idea: the settled, fixed arrangement of component parts.

The constitutional meaning that dominates modern usage — a fundamental written document establishing and limiting the powers of government — developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the political theory of natural rights and popular sovereignty. The English Civil War (1642–1651) and the Glorious Revolution (1688) prompted intense debate about the constitution of the English state. The American Revolution made the abstract debate concrete: the Constitution of 1787 was the first national constitution in the modern sense — a written document ratified by the people (or their representatives), establishing the structure of government, allocating powers, and specifying limits. The constitūtiō had come full circle: from the emperor's decree establishing a legal principle to the people's document establishing the terms on which their government would operate.

What the Constitution did that Roman constitutiones did not was impose limits on the power of those who governed, not just on those who were governed. Roman imperial constitutions were the emperor's law, binding on subjects. The American Constitution is the people's law, binding on government. This inversion — the fundamental document as constraint on authority rather than expression of it — is the conceptual revolution that the word now carries. To have a constitution, in the modern sense, is to have a fundamental law that the government itself cannot violate without losing its legitimacy. The con- of constituere ('together') has been reread: the constitution is something set up together, by the people, to govern their governors.