DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12720 ORIGINAL ARTICLE On old revolutions and new constitutions: Constituent power in the Chilean constituent process Franco Schiappacasse University of Chile, Santiago, Chile Correspondence Franco Schiappacasse, Suecia 810, Santiago, Chile. Email: francoschiappacasseb@gmail.com 1 INTRODUCTION In October 2019, the foundations on which Chile rested were shaken to the core. After a slight increase in subway fares, demonstrations against the measure began to escalate. By 10/18, around 20 subway stations in the capital were burnt to the ground, and pharmacies, banks, supermarkets, and shopping malls were raided all over the country (Sehn- bruch & Donoso, 2020, pp. 52–54). The upheaval following them was the most massive in the country’s history (Garcés, 2019, pp. 483–491). The poster boy of Latin American stability rebelled. The response from the political class outlined a way to channel the unrest: a route to a new constitution. The demand to replace the Constitution of 1980 imposed by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet had been present for years (Heiss, 2021, p. 71). The constituent process, still underway, has numerous characteristics that make it worth studying. This essay will focus on one: The constituent power’s role in the country’s constitutional problem. It is a propitious moment to reformulate how the country has understood constituent power. Moments of constitu- tional creation are also moments of conceptual creation. In processes during which the law becomes more malleable, the principles on which it is built show more clearly their contentious and contestable nature. Constituent power is one of those principles. In the following sections, it will be argued that an erroneous con- ception of constituent power reveals a seemingly irreconcilable conflict. That is the one between the need for an unleashed constituent power capable of erasing the normative vestiges of the current Constitution and that of a pro- cess contained and outlined by the existing legal order, shaped to prevent the mistakes made by neighboring countries in recent years. A modern understanding of the purpose of constituent power can overcome this apparent contradiction. Instead of resorting to the concept to enact revolutions and proclaim new constitutions, it should be used to explain the dialectical and open character of democratic institutions. Nonetheless, it will be argued that even modern theories have problems in satisfactorily explaining the particularities of the Chilean process, and that although a “relational” approach has descriptive advantages, it still has normative limitations. The following sections will set out the problem in the following way: Section 2, “Constituent Power in Chile,” deals with the theoretical and political problem of the constituent process: reconciling the demand for a “sovereign” constituent power to achieve a legitimate constitution and the need to constrain that power to avoid repeating the mistakes of South American constitutionalism. Subsection 2.1 details Constellations. 2023;1–15. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cons