ratified in a series of popular assemblies. Revolutionary France then embarked on the most extensive experiment with constitutional referendums, and though they fell into abeyance after the Revolution, interest in constitutional referendums revived in the late nineteenth century and again after the Second World War, until they are the norm in almost all European countries and in all but one of the states of the USA.

Once the distinction between acts of sovereignty and acts of government was in place it would be possible to assign the role of constitutional legislator to non-democratic institutions as well – indeed, the two earliest theorists of the distinction, Hobbes and Bodin, assigned it to monarchs; but the distinction was always more relevant to democracy than to any other system of fundamental legislation,for the obvious reason that a monarch or an aristocratic board was not impeded in exercising acts of government as well as acts of sovereignty, and both Bodin and Hobbes seem, surprisingly, to have understood this.

Britain historically had kept out of this story, retaining its medieval representative institution and treating what elsewhere would be constitutional laws, passed in a special way, as merely ordinary statutes. (Incidentally, it is often said that Britain has an unwritten constitution and the US a written one. This is not really true: there are many constitutional conventions in the US, as there would have to be, and there are written laws which are patently constitutional in the UK, such as the Act of Settlement, the Act of Union, and the Accession to the