The State between the exhaustion of meaning and constitutional modernity

conceptual aging, movement, and autonomy

Abstract

This paper investigates the transformation of the idea of the State within constitutional modernity through the analytical lens of conceptual history, with particular emphasis on processes of semantic aging and conceptual reoccupation. It advances the hypothesis that, although the State remains a central structure for the organization of power, it can no longer sustain, in a self-referential manner, the grounds of its own legitimacy, being instead subjected to a dynamic of displacement that reinscribes it within normative and narrative structures that exceed it. In this context, the Constitution is understood not merely as a normative framework or legal text, but as a narrative structure of meaning-production, responsible for shaping the horizons of intelligibility of the political and stabilizing expectations of legitimacy. The analysis demonstrates that conceptual historicity does not unfold as a linear evolution, but rather as a field of tension between permanence and transformation, in which fundamental concepts persist through ongoing processes of resignification. From this perspective, the paper examines two central dimensions of the relativization of sovereignty—intergenerationality and internationalization—showing how both challenge the possibility of self-ascription of the meanings of the State and reconfigure the dynamics of democratic legitimacy. It concludes that the autonomy of the State can no longer be conceived as self-sufficiency, but as a capacity for narrative reinscription within the constitutional grammar, aimed at preserving the openness of the contestation over the meanings of power in a context marked by the pluralization of authorities.