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Abstract

The present article commences analyzing the origins and influences of the religious discourse on the configuration of the modern constitutional discourse and the contributions of the jus-positivism in the consolidation of this sacred-civil language. The second issue is the definition of the U.S. Constitution as a mixed and not as a democratic constitution, with regard to the influences of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Polybius to the Drafters of the first modern constitutional text; stability and equilibrium took preference over democracy in a wide sense. I also analyze how the Drafter’s decision has conditioned the modern constitutional system up to the present.

Keywords  Modern and ancient constitutionalism - The role of God - Torah - U.S. American constitution drafters - Civic religion - Legal postivism - Mixed constitution instead democracy

I consider in this paper that the American constitutionalism started in 1789 as a sort of big bang of the American constitutionalist experiment. Other authors might suggest that the American constitutional tradition might be more critically tied to the events and moral-religious-legal conflations leading to the execution of Charles I in 1649, in this sense see David L Holmes (2006) and Donald Lutz (1988).

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