“Unlocking Humanity: The Surprising Secret Behind What Makes Us Truly Human”
Similarly, it’s sometimes claimed that the Constitution of San Marion is the oldest still functioning constitution because it was enacted in 1600… Except this, also, doesn’t quite tell the whole story, as it is also, similar to the UK, uncodified, with simply some of the documents comprising their constitution still active from then- in this case 6 works helping to define their present uncodified system.
For most of the nations of the world, however, when we say their “Constitution” we are referring to a single, codified document that defines the fundamental principles and laws for which all other laws in the nation are measured against, and which outlines the general structure of the government and how it operates, as well as usually defines the basic rights of the citizens within that nation.
Moving on to codified constitutions, the honor of oldest that is still functioning today is often given to the United States’ Constitution, which was also the constitution that really popularized the idea of a codified constitution in the first place, along with many other staples of constitutions now quite normal worldwide.
But, as alluded to, this isn’t quite accurate either. There was one that came before that is still running smoothly to this day- the Massachusetts state constitution, written in late 1779 almost wholly by one man, John Adams, who was, at the time, attempting to take facets of all the best ideas man had ever had on government, and very carefully trying to apply them to a system that would function in the real world. Not a perfect system, because the world and humans are imperfect, but that would attempt to balance everything to create something extremely functional and to the benefit of the society and individuals in it that operated under it. In authoring the Massachusetts Constitution and one other work we’ll get to, he not only helped define the U.S. Constitution, with these two the oldest codified constitutions still functioning, but so many others after that were based on it.
