Contribution to the online symposium on Poul F. Kjær (ed), The Law of Political Economy: Transformations in the Function of Law (CUP 2020), published at Verfassungsblog on 4 September 2020.
The volume seeks to re-connect law and political economy, both understood in very broad terms. My contribution provides an additional perspective on this theme, and discusses the place of political economy (or rather its conspicuous absence) in the constitutional imaginary of Europe, which has dominated much of the last three decades. It originated, in the words of Antoine Vauchez, ‘in the hills of Fiesole between Badia Fiesolana and the Villa Schifanoia’ (now of course Villa Salviati). Joseph Weiler’s The Transformation of Europe is the foundational piece of this imaginary. I have recently analysed Transformation and discussed it at the place of its birth. This contribution builds on that analysis.
I firstly explain what I mean by constitutional imaginary and present Transformation as such. I stress its neglect for questions of political economy, something that has marked much of the European constitutional scholarship at least until the Eurocrisis (and probably even beyond that). In the final part I will argue, using constitutional imaginary as a heuristic tool, that European economic constitutionalism, which was emerging from the hills of Fiesole at the time when Transformation’s imaginary dominated the field, is not able to fully grasp some questions of constitutional political economy. We need to move beyond Fiesole.