Constitutional imaginaries are internal symbolic constructs of self-constituted positive law and politics which make it possible to imagine and describe functionally differentiated modern society as one polity and distinguish between legal and political legitimacies and illegitimacies in this polity. Imaginaries, therefore, are not limited by the unity of topos-ethnos-nomos and evolve in national as well as supranational and transnational constitutions. In the context of European constitutionalism, general imaginaries of the common market, universal rights and democratic power are thus accompanied by specific imaginaries of European integration through legal pluralism, administrative rationality of calculemus, economic imperium of prosperity and democratically mobilised non-state community. These imaginaries invite constitutional theorists to rethink the juridical concept of constitution and employ sociological and social theoretical perspectives of constitutionalism within and beyond the state. In their specific ways, these imaginaries, which obviously can be detected at national levels but play a particularly important role at transnational levels of European integration, represent the paradox of modern society constituting its unity as difference, yet preserving its imaginary capacity to describe such differentiation as unity. Like any other society, European society thus represents its collective self to itself only through the specific imaginaries spontaneously constituted by its different systems.

In current debates on the constitutional imaginary, different dimensions are stressed in distinct contributions, ranging from philosophical and legal–theoretical, to sociological and socio–legal approaches. To situate Jiří Přibáň’s work in this larger scheme of reflection on the imaginary, this article identifies a number of core angles. Unlike Přibáň’s systems theoretical interpretation of imaginaries, Castoriadis’s philosophy of creative imagination puts emphasis on uniqueness, on historical creation ex nihilo, or the creation of worlds without a precedent in the existing world and without presuming any clear function. This also means that imaginaries relate to forms of meaning that cannot be reduced to binaries, codes, or structural languages (legitimacy – illegitimacy) that keep society together, but rather relate to meaning that can never be fully articulated or theoretically entirely grasped and explained. However, Přibáň does not ultimately fully reduce constitutional imaginaries to functional vehicles as becomes clear in his acknowledgement of the polysemy and polyvalence of functionally differentiated society. From this perspective, the contemporary populist challenge to constitutionalism appears to be based on a struggle between technocratic forces promoting a modern, legal–rational imaginary of constitutionalism, whereas populist forces endorse a constitutional imaginary that is grounded in traditionalism and authenticity. This counter-constitutional populist challenge is not merely about a rejection of liberal democratic orders but regards the questioning of the rational–scientific imagination as such.

In this contribution we ask how Přibáň’s theoretical choices shape the capacity of ‘European constitutional imaginaries’ to account for the ever more necessary work of recognition and redistribution within European society. While ‘European constitutional imaginaries’ reveal the intricate ideologies at play within European law and politics, as well as their power in motivating dominant currents of European political life, the project remains limited in that it accepts essential tenets of functional differentiation in society, obscuring the conditions of possibility for the formation of differentiated systems. Put differently, ‘European constitutional imaginaries’, both as forms of life and analytic concepts, have difficulty in conceiving the frontiers of imaginaries, their beginning and end, their formation and transformation—and in so doing, risk naturalizing their initial differentiation as a priori excluded from political contestation.

Jiří Přibáň’s work deals with constitutional imaginaries, starting from the concept of social imaginaries as entities describing functionally differentiated modern society as one polity. Přibáň’s conception perceives constitutional imaginaries in terms of social systems, representing a socio-legal paradox, since constitutional imaginaries express both the constitution of social unity and its pluralism of values. The aim of this contribution is to explore the link between Přibáň’s work and some aspects of Luhmann and Teubner’s contributions to the theory of social systems. By highlighting these features, the Author tries to argue that contemporary imaginaries can work as constitutional forces that drive contemporary legal pluralistic regimes, including the European one, to the societal unity by warranting a systemic difference.

All discussants of this book symposium on the monograph Constitutional Imaginaries address different aspects of constitutionalism beyond national and international limits and engage with the concepts of transnational law and global society to test and contest the book’s central argument according to which specific European constitutional imaginaries are internally constituted by different social systems and therefore paradoxically represent the unity of European society through their specific semantics. In this rejoinder, I focus on some overlapping themes, namely the process of social differentiation, its impact on both social and legal pluralism, and the paradox of legitimation in societal constitutionalism to respond to their comments and criticisms.