Whereas until recently economic problems seemed to dominate the public mind, the debate on the best way of organizing the state has now also come to the fore. Recent momentous developments in Europe have focused attention on such fundamental options as democracy versus autocracy, politics versus ideology, unitary versus federal organization, pluralism versus intolerance, centralism versus regionalism, national sovereignty versus European unity, the bureaucratic welfare state versus individual freedom and a market economy, and a Bill of Rights versus parliamentary omnipotence: in 1990–1 alone I counted six books or pamphlets on ‘Britain's constitutional future’ and a ‘Bill of Rights for Britain’. Third World countries are also interested, as they realize that economic progress is hard to achieve in a backward political regime. Leading economic historians such as Douglass North, one of the 1993 Nobel Prize winners for economics, have shown that the free market alone does not ensure prosperity, but that a stable political and legal organization is also necessary; the role played by a liberal constitution in the industrial take-offin Europe some two hundred years ago was indeed conspicuous.

Today's constitutional debate would be shallow without a knowledge of the historical antecedents. It would be preposterous to imagine that we were the first to discern the fundamental options, and foolish not to try and learn from the experiences of the past.