'I voted against the constitution because it was a constitution!' said the great French political philosopher, Pierre Joseph Proudhon during the French Revolution of 1848 when he was asked why he had been among the tiny minority of the National Assembly voting against proposals for a constitution. His attitude was not based merely on his libertarian view that society should be allowed to develop its institutions empirically and organically, rather than by formal fiat. He also pointed out that in a constitution which divided powers, the tendency would always be for the executive, the most rigid, centralist and power-oriented branch of government, to take control. His point was well taken, and history has given it justification in the centuries since the American states adopted their own pioneer constitution. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the president of France elected under the constitution that Proudhon rejected, made himself first a dictator and then an emperor. And with only brief intervals, the president of the United States has represented all that is reactionary and overbearing in American life and in the American attitude towards the world in general. I need hardly expand on the offences against basic human rights that have taken place under the apparently benign constitutions of the Soviet Union in the past, or the People's Republic of China in the present.