Tanzil Chowdhury: The British Constitution, Capitalism and Constitutional Change

In this episode, Associate Professor Tanzil Chowdhury (Queen Mary University of London) discusses his latest book project, examining the transformation of the British Constitution over the last century. Tanzil’s argument is that we cannot understand significant changes to the British constitution without understanding the broader historical developments in capitalist social relations and the significant social antagonisms that have occurred throughout the last 100 or so years. Capitalism is a totality of different social relations and processes oriented around the value form; different social relations (economic, but also political, legal, cultural, moral etc) which are all important to the reproduction of that social totality. Contrary to heteronomous theories of constitutional change (including some Marxist ones), this project seeks to understand constitutions (the different institutional combinations of state and social power, subject formations, forms of mediation and characterisations of legality) as having an internal relation with capitalist social relations. In that sense, constitutions cannot be abstracted from capitalist social relations and are in fact, as Tanzil argues, historically specific to capitalism. However, even though constitutions are internally related to capitalist social relations, that does not mean that capitalist societies are not fraught with all manner of tensions, contradictions and ruptures. This is not therefore a rigid economistic and deterministic theory of constitutional development, but one which takes seriously the historical distinctness of the legal form, constitutionalism, and the specific work they do (or not) in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Constitutionalism operates at different levels within the contradictory totality of capitalist social relations. Changes to the British constitution are the results of specific forms of struggle over the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Tanzil sets out some examples of this theoretical approach, periodises the last century of the British constitution, and connects it to distinct historical forms of capitalist constitutionalism. This seminar was chaired by Dr Martin Clark.