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4A Reconstructive Approach to Law II:The Principles of the Constitutional StateThe reconstruction of law functions as an explication of meaning.With the system of rights, we have assured ourselves of the presuppositionsthat members of a modern legal community must take astheir starting point if they are to consider their legal order legitimatebut cannot base this legitimacy on religious or metaphysicalarguments. However, the legitimacy of rights and the legitimationof lawmaking processes are not the only question. There is also thequestion of the legitimacy of a political order and the legitimation. of the exercise of political power. The basic rights reconstructed inour thought experiment are constitutive for every association offree and equal consociates under law; these rights reflect thehorizontal association of citizens in statu nascendi, as it were. But theself-referential act that legally institutionalizes civic autonomy isstill incomplete in essential respects; it cannot stabilize itself. Themoment of a reciprocal conferral of rights remains a metaphoricalevent. It can perhaps be recalled and ritualized, but it cannotbecome permanent unless state power is established and put towork. If the interpenetration of private and public autonomybrought about in the system of rights is to be rendered permanent,then the process ofjuridification must not limit itself to the libertyof private persons and the communicative freedom of citizens. Itmust extend immediately to that political power already presupposedwith the medium oflaw, a power to which the making as well as theenforcing of law owe their binding character. The co-originalconstitution and conceptual interpenetration of law and political