4 comments

  • peterbecich a day ago

    Neat, how about adding historical constitutions as well, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constitutions_of_Franc... or the U.S.S.R.?

    • joaoli131 a day ago

      Adding a temporal dimension is a great idea. It would offer a fascinating perspective on the data by allowing us to track the 'semantic drift' of legal frameworks over time.

      Brazil is actually a perfect use case for this: the country has had 7 different constitutions since its imperial era (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Constitution_of...). Plotting its transitions through a monarchy, dictatorial periods, and modern democracy—alongside historical texts like the French Republics or the U.S.S.R.—would let us visualize exactly how a nation's priorities shift within the latent space across different political eras.

      Thank you for the suggestion! I will seriously consider advancing the project in this direction.

  • cineticdaffodil a day ago

    Constitutionalism is a leftover of the liberal worldview. Just write a perfectly formulated watertight document, read it to the people and voila perfect state of affairs. Same with laws. Just flash a citizen and he is ready for action.

    But it turned out the surface layer is a very leaky abstraction. Culture makes and breaks societies and even worse by result, rationally designed synthetic culture works as well as socialism. And finally if a society drops beneath a treshold of riches, it regresses into tribal warfare universally.

    The constitution can do nothing to prevent this, but try to survive into the next sunny season unaltered. How can i filter constitutions for absence of idealizattions and utopism?

    • cineticdaffodil 6 hours ago

      The classic extreme here is the french code civic vs the english lack of a constitution, more a build up of precedence into a constituting body of law case by case. Its idealization, universalism, utopism and ignorace of the cultural ooerating system vs prgmatism in its purest form.