Abstract

The article focuses on the concept of the material constitution in the work of Otto Brunner and on his contribution to a European constitutional history centered neither on the evolution of legal institutions nor on the history of the modern state, but on the set of legal, political and social conditions that have sustained the durability of effective unities of action over time. The essay reconstructs the close critical confrontation in the 1930s with Carl Schmitt’s Verfassungslehre, preliminary to the construction of a history of the people organised around the element of domination, an alternative to the conceptual framework of sociology. After 1945, Brunner deepened the paths of a new constitutional and social history, continuing to engage with the problem of the nexus between constitution, history and domination in the long-lasting European tradition, whose distance from the present and unexpected vitality he simultaneously addresses