Constitution

A constitution is the body of law that defines and limits the powers of a government. On the Objectivist view its function is not to organise state power but to restrain it: a constitution is a charter of the citizens' protection against the government, and it is the mechanism by which a society subordinates the use of force to objectively defined rules.

“The Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights", The Virtue of Selfishness

Why a government needs one

Objectivism holds that government is a necessity, because retaliatory force left to individual discretion cannot be distinguished from aggression and ends in the stronger party prevailing. But an institution with a monopoly on force is also the most dangerous thing a society contains, and the question a constitution answers is how that instrument is kept pointed in one direction.

The answer is objective law. A citizen must be able to know, in advance and without consulting an official's mood, what is permitted and what is forbidden. That requires rules stated beforehand in knowable terms, applied by a defined procedure, with the powers of each office enumerated and everything not enumerated withheld. Where those conditions fail — where statutes are vague, retroactive, or enforced at discretion — the law has stopped protecting and started functioning as a weapon, since everyone is potentially in violation and prosecution becomes a matter of selection. See Justice and Rights.

A constitution is therefore not a statement of a nation's ideals or a list of things the government will provide. It is a set of prohibitions addressed to officials.

The American case

Rand regarded the United States as the first country founded on an explicit political principle rather than on custom or conquest, and she located its achievement in the Declaration's derivation of government from individual rights and in the Constitution's enumeration of powers.

Two features carried the weight. The first is that the document binds the government rather than the citizen: it tells Congress what it may not do, and the Bill of Rights is a list of further prohibitions rather than a grant of anything. The second is the structure of divided and checked authority, which does not depend on officials being virtuous.

Rand's criticism was of an omission. The founders separated church and state, and by doing so removed the most destructive power a government had held; they did not separate state and economics, and she argued that the power to direct a man's productive life is the same power in a different sphere. The gap is where she located the country's subsequent drift toward the mixed economy, and closing it — an explicit constitutional bar on the government initiating force in economic matters — is what she thought the document still needed. See Capitalism and Statism.

What a constitution cannot do

Objectivism does not treat a written document as self-enforcing.

A constitution is interpreted by men, and the interpretation follows the philosophy those men hold. Where the prevailing ethics is altruism and the prevailing politics is collectivism, the clauses will be read to permit whatever those premises require, and no phrasing is proof against a judiciary that has accepted them. Rand's conclusion was that political documents are downstream of philosophy, and that a country cannot be restored by amendment while the ideas that eroded it are unchallenged. See Philosophy and Politics.

The corollary is that a constitution is also not a substitute for the argument. Its clauses record conclusions reached elsewhere, and they hold only as long as the reasoning behind them is understood.

Common misunderstandings

That constitutional government means majority rule with extra steps. The point of a constitution is precisely that certain matters are placed beyond a vote. See Democracy and Elections.
That a bill of rights creates rights. On the Objectivist account rights are identified from man's nature and are not conferred by any document. An enumeration records them and directs the government to respect them. See Individual rights.
That a constitution limits private citizens. It addresses the government. A private person's obligations to other private persons come from the prohibition on initiating force, not from the constitution. See Initiation of force.
That "a living constitution" is a method of interpretation. Objectivism's objection is that a document whose meaning changes with prevailing opinion cannot perform the one function a constitution has, which is to be knowable in advance.
That the alternative to constitutional limits is anarchy. Objectivism rejects both. See Anarchism.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "Man's Rights" and "The Nature of Government", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Rand, Ayn. "What Is Capitalism?" and "The Nature of Government", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New American Library, 1966.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 10.

External links