Particularly following the Renaissance and Enlightenment, written constitutions began to be celebrated by limited government political theorists as rational devices designed to bind rulers, limit coercion, and protect liberty through clearly-enumerated rules.

Yet a persistent strain of skepticism—articulated most sharply by thinkers such as Murray Rothbard and Ralph Raico—has questioned whether constitutions can ever perform this task in practice. Far from constraining power, they recognize, constitutions tend to be reinterpreted, circumvented, or absorbed into expanding state structures once they conflict with the incentives of those who govern.

Rather than restating this argument in the abstract, we will examine three historical case studies—Republican Rome, medieval Florence, and 20th-century England—to demonstrate how constitutional arrangements repeatedly failed to limit government power. These cases span vastly different political, social, and institutional contexts, yet they reveal common mechanisms by which constitutional restraints eroded: the normalization of emergency powers, the displacement of formal limits by informal authority, and the rise of bureaucratic administration that enables what Tocqueville famously called “soft despotism.”

The Roman Republic is often invoked as a paradigmatic example of constitutional government without a written constitution. Its complex system of magistracies, popular assemblies, and senatorial authority was governed by mos maiorum—customary norms that defined the boundaries of legitimate political behavior. For centuries, these norms successfully constrained officeholders, limited terms, and distributed authority in ways that prevented the consolidation of permanent power.

Yet the Roman case illustrates with particular clarity the fragility of constitutional restraint once political incentives change. Rome’s constitutional system depended not on enforceable legal mechanisms but on elite self-restraint and a........

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