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CONSTITUTIONALIZATION OF JOŽE PUČNIK’S POLITICAL 
THOUGHT
Matej AVBELJ
New University, European Faculty of Law, Delpinova ulica 18/b, 5000 Nova Gorica, Slovenia
e-mail: matej.avbelj@epf.nova-uni.si
ABSTRACT
This article sheds light on the academic side of dr. Jože Pučnik. While his civic, 
dissident and political activities in Slovenia have been well known, his academic 
work and the political philosophy he developed have been largely neglected. This is 
unfortunate, as already a cursory insight in Pučnik’s monography on Culture, Society 
and Technology, such as provided in this article, reveals the richness of his political 
thought. Pučnik as an intellectual, as a political thinker was not only aware of the 
main currents of western political philosophy after the WWII, but was also entirely on 
par with then political and legal thinkers. He had integrated their work into his own 
political philosophy, which he subsequently applied to the case study of Slovenia, a 
country that he felt most deeply about.
Keywords: Jože Pučnik, Slovenia, constitutionalism, enlightenment, pluralism, democracy
LA COSTITUZIONALITÀ DEL PENSIERO DI JOŽE PUČNIK
SINTESI
L’articolo fa luce sul lato accademico del dott. Jože Pučnik. Mentre le sue attività 
civiche, dissidenti e politiche sono ben conosciute in Slovenia, il suo lavoro accade-
mico e la filosofia politica che ne derivava rimangono ancora piuttosto ignoti. Un 
peccato, perché già una rapida visione della monografia di Pučnik Kultura, družba 
in tehnologija [Cultura, società e tecnologia], che è anche oggetto di questo articolo, 
lascia emergere la ricchezza del suo pensiero politico. Come intellettuale e pensatore 
politico Pučnik non solo aveva conoscenza delle principali correnti della filosofia 
politica occidentale e dei suoi sviluppi dopo la Seconda guerra mondiale, ma vi con-
tribuiva alla pari di altri suoi esponenti. Pučnik integrò i lavori dei maggiori teorici 
politici e di diritto nella sua filosofia politica, applicandola in pratica sull’esempio 
della Slovenia, il paese al quale era profondamente legato.
Parole chiave: Jože Pučnik, Slovenia, costituzionalità, illuminismo, pluralismo, 
democrazia
Received: 2020-12-23                            D I 10.1 233/AH.2021.9
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FROM DISSIDENT TO THE NESTOR OF THE REPUBLIC1
With the erection of the Iron Curtain Central Europe was torn apart from the 
rest of Europe. From the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea a communist totalitarian system 
was imposed on the peoples of Central European countries. Totalitarianism was 
maintained and preserved first with sheer and brutal violence and later through 
a total and systemic, formal and informal control of all spheres of public as well 
as private life. However, due to individuals’ eternal and universal yearning for 
freedom totalitarianism never succeeded to stifle all human dissent, its overw-
helming oppression notwithstanding. Even though a great majority was silenced, 
there were always individuals who stood up against totalitarian forces not only 
with their words, but more importantly: with their deeds. These individuals were 
called dissidents. In Central Europe the period stretching between the end of 
the WWII and the late 1980s was the age of dissidents. Many of them became 
famous well beyond their homelands. Vaclav Havel, Lech Walensa, Alexander 
Solzhenitsyn, Andrey Sakharov have thus served as a beacon of liberal democracy 
around the world. However, the list of Central (and Eastern) European dissidents 
is not exhausted by these names alone. There were many others whose individual 
struggle never really made into the international limelight, but were equally cou-
rageous, important and praiseworthy.
Among the internationally lesser known, perhaps even unknown Central Eu-
ropean dissidents, is Jože Pučnik. The communist authorities reprimanded him 
already in high school for publishing a critical essay of the then regime in the 
school journal (Pesek, 2013, 50). After a graduation at the University of Ljubljana 
Faculty of Arts he joined a group of young intellectuals who were publishing in 
the journals Revija 57 and Perspektive. For his critical articles, in particular, of 
economic measures of the then communist regime he was convicted twice. In 1958 
he was sentenced to nine years in prison and after his early release in 1963 to 
additional two years. Altogether he spent seven years in prison, mostly in solitary 
confinement, just for his academic writing (Pučnik, 2003, 78ff). After his release 
in 1964 he became a persona non grata in the then Socialist Republic of Slovenia. 
Even his peers started to avoid him and the secret service let him know, informally 
but definitely, that there is no job for him in Slovenia (Pučnik, 2003, 97). So he left 
for Germany where he wanted to continue postgraduate studies at the University of 
Hamburg, but was unable to do so since the University of Ljubljana refused to issue 
a copy of his diploma from the Faculty of Arts (Pesek, 2013, 208). Hence he started 
from scratch and while working in the local heavy industry he obtained his PhD in 
sociology at the University of Hamburg in 1971. In the following years he lectured 
at the University of Lüneburg, for some time distancing himself completely from 
public and political life in Slovenia (Pesek, 2013, 209–210).
1 This paper is the result of research carried out in the project Cultural Memory of Slovene Nation and State 
Building (ARRS, J6-9354), funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS).
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However, in the 1980s, as the communist regime in Yugoslavia started to demon-
strate first open cracks, Pučnik again became involved in the Slovenian public life. 
Most notably he published in the landmark 57th edition of the journal Nova Revija, 
in which Slovenian intellectuals developed the contributions to a Slovenian national 
program, laying down theoretical foundations for an independent, democratic state, 
based on the rule of law (Omerza, 2015, 198ff). While in 1987, when the journal 
was published, no one had realistically envisaged the creation of an independent 
and democratic Slovenian state, other than perhaps in the longer run, the events that 
followed surpassed everyone’s expectation (Jambrek, 2007). In 1989, Pučnik became 
a member of the newly established Social Democratic Alliance of Slovenia and just 
three weeks after the fall of the Berlin wall he assumed its presidency (Pesek, 2013, 
253). In 1990, he became a leader of the coalition of the Slovenian democratic alli-
ance (DEMOS), which won the first democratic election and effectively carried out 
the process of self-determination of the Slovenian people (Pesek, 2013, 253ff). After 
the people of Slovenia overwhelmingly supported the former Yugoslav’s republic 
independence at a referendum that had first been called for by Pučnik himself, he was 
an engine of the process that ultimately led to the formal and de facto independence 
of Slovenia. This earned him a symbolic title of the Nestor of Slovenian independent 
state (Pahor, 2018). However, despite his indisputably constitutive contribution not 
only to the independence but also democratization of the Slovenian state, Pučnik 
never enjoyed an unequivocal support by the electorate, the media, let alone of the 
political parties. In the run up for the presidency of the then still Socialist Republic 
of Slovenia he lost against the incumbent communist leader Milan Kučan and was 
often politically and even personally attacked by the media belonging to the post-
-communist left (Pesek, 2013, 270ff). This public treatment of Pučnik continued even 
after his death, when the National Assembly had initially declined to commemorate 
his passing away with a memorial session (Pesek, 2013, 18–20). 
CULTURE, SOCIETY AND TECHNOLOGY
While the contribution of Jože Pučnik to the political life in Slovenia has already 
been documented relatively well, his academic writing, in which he reflected deeply 
on the social predicaments for a sound, viable and lasting democracy that he dubbed 
civil society, as opposed to Leninism, has so far been left almost unexplored. This 
article therefore seizes the opportunity for, at least partly, closing this gap by inve-
stigating the political philosophy of Jože Pučnik as this derives from his landmark 
work on Culture, Society and Technology (Pučnik, 2008). Published in 1988 the book 
consists of three parts. In the first, most abstract, theoretical part Pučnik lays out 
his conceptual sociological apparatus for comprehending the modern social reality, 
concretely European societies post-WWII. In the second theoretical part he applies 
this apparatus to one subset of a socio-political life, namely democracy. Lastly, in the 
third part the book takes a concrete turn and contextualizes the theoretical findings 
from the preceding parts in the Leninist social conditions in the then Slovenia.
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In the first theoretical part, Pučnik is revealed as a social constructivist 
(Berger & Luckmann, 1971; Searle, 1995), deeply wedded to the idea of mo-
dernity and the program of Enlightenment on which modernity has been, in his 
view, based (Pučnik, 2008, 273). Accordingly, he construes modern societies 
as being embedded in and imbued with culture. Culture is a comprehensive 
system of technology that contains and constantly re-constitutes a society by 
way of unlimited and often unrelated, piecemeal and particularistic actions 
of individuals who are simultaneously a source and a product of this cultural 
technological process (Pučnik, 2008, 27–45). The latter is based and could, 
for the time being, only take place on the premise of argumentative rationality 
(Pučnik, 2008, 45), which is just another word for reason-giving. Reasons, 
which are themselves constructs, interpretative concepts of a particular 
culture, are the measure of legitimacy and validity of any social concept, 
deed and action (Pučnik, 2008, 68). The reasons, legitimacy and validity are 
thus necessarily contingent, dependent on the web of more or less persuasive 
interpretations and their institutionalization in practice, but this does not 
render neither the ultimate practical outcomes nor Pučnik’s thinking relativist 
(Pučnik, 2008, 212). As he explicitly argues, everything taken together is 
not simple randomness, playfulness, a game of constructs, it is a structural 
contingency: “The substance’s captivity in the web of its effects is not such by 
definition, it is genetic as a precondition of substance.”2 (Pučnik, 2008, 79). 
In this way meaning is only objective and stable subject to the structurally 
contingent interpretation of arguments on which it is based and which is in 
that context and moment recommended by that very structural contingency 
(Pučnik, 2008, 80). All objectivity that, therefore, exists out there is at best 
contingent objectivity (Pučnik, 2008, 80). Since it is relational, within the 
meaning of being related to a particular contextual structural contingency, it, 
in Pučnik’s words, frees us from necessity (determinism); but since it simul-
taneously provides us with a rational, argumentative basis for our action it 
relieves us of randomness (Pučnik, 2008, 80), indeed of arbitrariness.
This leads Pučnik to an important result in political philosophy. We as 
human beings in a modern society are only left with technology of argumenta-
tive rationality, of reason-giving, which is neither miraculous nor permanent 
(Pučnik, 2008, 129). As a result, as he openly confesses, we do not know what 
the truth is. 
The phenomenon of truth cannot be denied, if we take into account concrete 
actions [in which the truth is certainly reflected], but on the basis of these 
concrete manifestations of truth the truth as such cannot be identified [or 
comprehended in its totality]. (Pučnik, 2008, 184) 
2 All the quotations from Pučnik‘s book on Culture, Society and Technology have been translated by the 
author of the present article.
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No living human being can thus have a monopoly over truth, because no li-
ving human being has ever had a privileged, let alone direct or objective access 
to the truth. All that we are left with is a search for meaning, for making sense 
of the social and natural reality, in which we are cast. 
The search for meaning, for making sense, has become an alternative 
to the truth. In so doing, it has taken up the role of truth, ever since 
the latter has become irrevocably fragmented and as such can no longer 
assume that traditional role in legitimating the validity of arguments 
as an emphasized and at every occasion accepted validity of substance. 
(Pučnik, 2008, 193)
To many this would be an utterly dispiriting conclusion, but not for Pučnik. 
He takes this fact of existence of truth, which is ultimately inaccessible for 
us humans, as a paramount argument against fundamentalism of any kind, be 
it secular or religious (Pučnik, 2008, 129). This is why he opts so strongly in 
favour of the so-called program of Enlightenment. The latter has managed to 
undo the world in which 
a theocracy was a leading ideational power: it claimed not only the right 
to rule as the entitlement of the secular power, but also the monopolized 
right to decide questions of meaning or truth, as well as the questions of 
conscience as a determinant of good and bad. That was a total monopoly 
over peoples’ lives in a society, a monopoly over practical, concrete actions 
as well as spiritual and emotional life. Following this principle of regulating 
a society, people are subject to the predetermined ideational ordering of 
the world, which was construed and enforced by all means by an elite who 
claimed for itself that it was a direct reflection of an objective, immutable 
and hence necessary truth. On the basis of this claim it imposed its own 
monopoly over this truth, and with the help of secular authorities it also 
claimed the right and duty of a leading role, eg. of guiding and re-socializing 
its own people as well as other peoples. This typical and extremely effective 
identification of a theocratic elite with the reason itself, with truth and ju-
stice, thus legitimated the use of any, including the most horrible means of 
re-socialization: from benign persuasion to torture and burning on stakes. 
(Pučnik, 2008, 275–276)
The Enlightenment introduced a definite break in the very conception of 
the human world. In taking a Copernican turn, as argued by Pučnik (Pučnik, 
2008, 276), an individual, a concrete human being has become the measure 
of legitimacy of all things (Pučnik, 2008, 292). “Human being has reason 
and cognition which enables him to decide his fate for and out of himself.” 
(Pučnik, 2008, 292). 
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The program of Enlightenment is a program of civility. […] Its task is to deve-
lop and implement such institutions, which permit an individual to fulfil his life 
and himself, and in so doing to legitimate the validity of institutions, but also to 
change the image of institutions, which enable him, as a concrete and emotionally 
reasoned person, to live with other individuals. (Pučnik, 2008, 292–293)
The greatest threat to the program of Enlightenment and the paramount role 
of individual in it, according to Pučnik, is the supremacy of the society over 
a person, of primacy of the collective over an individual (Pučnik, 2008, 294). 
But the individual human being might be a threat also to himself and other 
individuals. As implicitly recognized by Pučnik, in a fundamentally secular 
turn by the Enlightenment, which Pučnik embraces wholeheartedly (Pučnik, 
2008, 270), “with the demise of the transcendental order on which our world 
was based, the objects too lost their ‘sacredness’, they were relieved of the 
taboos as [god’s] creation. In this way they in principle became dispensable like 
any matter, almost like a randomly available raw material. That, unfortunately, 
included a human being too […].” (Pučnik, 2008, 277).
The program of Enlightenment is thus synonymous with the program of ci-
vility that ought to underline concrete institutional systems of democracy. This 
civility, as openly admitted by Pučnik, is not a cure for all illnesses and remains, 
as everything socially constructed by human beings, structurally questionable 
(Pučnik, 2008, 303). “But at the same time it is all that we can currently yearn 
for, since it is the only realistic option.” (Pučnik, 2008, 303). The civility itself 
is built on the dogmatic, monistic construct of supremacy of an individual, which 
is of course, again, contingent and socially constructed. All this, however, we are 
warned by Pučnik, should not lead us into resignation, rather it should strengthen 
our courage in awareness of our own structural limitation that forces us into 
modesty (Pučnik, 2008, 314). “The courage is to definitely accept our own im-
perfections and act out of them.” (Pučnik, 2008, 314). Any self-assurance must be 
thus combined with a degree of healthy scepticism, critical self-examination that, 
as a result, in most general terms speaks against any kind of revolution, even if it 
is geared towards the final realization of the program of Enlightenment. The latter 
should only come about not as a revolution, but as an evolution (Pučnik, 2008, 
314). This sets up, for Pučnik, a requirement of listening to and hearing each 
other, in a constant awareness of one’s own limitations, in acceptance that can be 
through concrete societal and political actions overcome over and over again, but 
never to the point of finality or perfection (Pučnik, 2008, 313).
CONSTITUTIONALIZATION OF PUČNIK’S 
POLITICAL THOUGHT
The students of contemporary political philosophy and of modern constituti-
onalism would, having read Pučnik’s book on Culture, Society and Technology, 
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immediately recognize how deeply related, deliberately or not, his political 
philosophy was to that of his contemporaries, including giants of political 
and constitutional thought. Pučnik’s embrace of technology of argumentative 
rationality is coterminous with discursive, deliberative democracy as it has 
been developed by Jürgen Habermas (Habermas, 1996). Pučnik’s politically 
philosophical approach also echoes with Dworkin’s interpretative conception 
of law, following which the meaning of law is never fully settled, rather it 
depends on the best-fit interpretations, which in legal practice, conceived of 
as a chain novel, strives for and is constantly underlined by the search for 
a right answer (Dworkin, 1986). Furthermore, Pučnik’s total embrace of the 
Enlightenment puts him in the camp of modern constitutionalist thinking, which 
has long insisted that a constitution is by the people, for the people and of the 
people (Sartori, 1962). 
People form a community, conceived of as a polity of free and equals 
(Kumm, 2016),  which according to Pučnik 
cannot be legitimized top down, from a transcendental principle whose 
interpreter and executor is any given elite, but from a human being who is 
an exclusive source of community’s legitimacy. (Pučnik, 2008, 292)
The centrality and supremacy of human being as a measure of legitimacy 
and validity of all social institutions and their (in)actions is derived from a 
monistic foundation of human dignity (Avbelj, 2018, 35). Every individual 
by way of her very humanity is entitled to equal human dignity. The latter 
is a source of the rights to freedom and equality, to an equal freedom, which 
entitles everyone to self-realisation or self-fulfilment as she sees fit within the 
context of an equal right of others. 
This bedrock of modern constitutionalism, which resonated heavily also in 
Pučnik’s political thought, found its explicit confirmation also in the jurispru-
dence of the Slovenian Constitutional Court. In the landmark Tito Street case 
the Court rectified the human dignity deficit in the Slovenian Constitution 
(Avbelj & Letnar Černič, 2020, 25) by reading the right to equal human dignity 
into Article 1 of the Constitution according to which Slovenia is a democratic 
republic. The Court claimed that 
Human dignity is the fundamental value which permeates the entire legal 
order and therefore it also has an objective significance in the functioning 
of authority not only in individual proceedings but also when adopting 
regulations. (Ur. l. RS, 2010)
This led the Court to clarify the nature of Slovenian democracy. Contrary to 
the classical  monistic, majoritarian democracy, the essence of a constitutional 
democracy in Slovenia is not in formally following the rule of the majority, but to 
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ensure a substantive protection of individuals, because it is them and their dignity 
who are at the centre of the existence and functioning of the Slovenian state (Ur. 
l. RS, 2010). Paying heed to what Pučnik has dubbed as a Copernican turn of the 
Enlightenment, the Court openly declared:
In a constitutional democracy the individual is a subject and not an object of 
the functioning of the authorities, while his or her (self)realization as a human 
being is the fundamental purpose of the democratic order. (Ur. l. RS, 2010)
The state with its apparatus is thus established to serve an individual, to 
facilitate her self-fulfilment, rather than vice versa (Ur. l. RS, 2010). As there 
are many (a plurality of) individuals, there are – as a result of the respect for 
their equal human dignity – many (a plurality) of actual and potential ways 
of self-fulfilment, many conceptions of a good life. As humans, we therefore 
necessarily live in a world, which is pluralist and therefore diverse.  The respect 
for human dignity mandates that this is good and, consequently, in a pluralist 
civil society, which underpins a veritable democracy, this plurality should be 
preserved and fostered.  Pučnik was more than aware of this fact as he explicitly 
cautioned against “any program and any idea, including those pertaining to the 
civil society, that make calls for turning plurality into singularity.” (Pučnik, 
2008, 332). The essence of democracy, based on a civil society as opposed to 
Leninism, for Pučnik then was to permit the existence “of an infrastructure whi-
ch will be more sensitive to and more inclusive towards plurality, in particular 
of the plurality in peoples’ lives.” (Pučnik, 2008, 328). 
The Slovenian Constitutional Court has thus construed Slovenia as a 
constitutional democracy: a democratic political community in which in 
order to protect each individual’s equal right to self-realization all activities 
of public authorities must be subject to the rule of law. A constitutional 
democracy is, of course, as powerfully demonstrated by Habermas and other 
legal philosophers (Tully, 2017), a laborious and demanding system of go-
vernment which rests on “a paradoxical union of contradictory principles.” 
(Habermas, 2001, 766). It requires that a democratic majority, no matter how 
numerous and qualified, constitutionally imposes on itself the rule of law 
and hence limits its scope of powers in order to protect the rights of indivi-
duals, whose exercise is then a source of pluralism that provides democracy 
with the prerequisite civility.   
One of the central constitutional mechanisms, which in quotidian practices 
of a democratic state guarantees the existence and flourishing of plurality, is 
the system of separation of powers. The principle of separation of powers is 
for Pučnik the most important construct of civility, brought about by the Enli-
ghtenment, which entails the system of institutional checks and balances as a 
logical part and parcel of the self-legitimation process in a democratic society 
(Pučnik, 2008, 281). It has found its way also in the Constitution of the Republic 
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of Slovenia. By contrast to its communist predecessor, which maintained the 
system of undivided powers, the contemporary Slovenian organization of state 
is based on the principle of checks and balances. The latter, as it has been time 
and again stressed by the Constitutional Court, is not established to protect the 
independence of different branches of power for their own sake, but to protect 
the individuals against the arbitrariness of public authorities. The Court thus 
held very early on that 
The aims of the constitutional principle of separation of powers are in par-
ticular:
• to protect and ensure personal freedom of each individual person,
• to prevent concentration of power and monopoly over it;
• to establish control over authorities, thus preventing their arbitrary acts, 
misuse of power and lawlessness,
• to organize as appropriate the tasks and powers of the government,
• to establish mutual control of the holders of power, as well as
• to maintain an equilibrium and evenly distributed power between indi-
vidual branches of government and its agents. (Ur. l. RS, 1994, par. 18)
All these requirements stemming from the principle of separation of powers 
are again derived from the centrality of an individual for whom the state and 
public order, following the ideal construct of a social contract, has been created. 
In Court’s words: 
The essence of the constitutional provision dealing with the separation of 
powers is not in the manner of organizing the relationships between in-
dividual branches of government or government organizations, but in its 
fundamental function of protection of individual’s freedom and dignity in 
relation to the government. (Ur. l. RS, 1994, par. 20)
Individuals in a constitutional democracy, also as established in Slovenia, are 
not objects, rather they are subjects of political authority. For this matter they 
are recognized their fundamental human rights, which are nowadays explicitly 
protected in section II and III of the Slovenian Constitution. This was not yet 
the case at the time when Pučnik was writing his book and therefore he could 
not have made the case for this to change any stronger:
We have to be aware of our fundamental human rights and of our dignity as 
a person. We do not want to be like an inventory that the priests of an Idea 
can toss to and fro, as mandated by their inconceivable cult, their scientific 
technology […] Their technology is not ours, if it does not respect us as 
persons. (Pučnik, 2008, 363)
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It is therefore important to note that literally all human rights, which Pučnik 
had so vigorously intellectually and politically defended in his work, have found 
their way in the Constitution. The latter thus protects all the constitutive rights of 
a constitutional democracy, in the absence of which Slovenia could neither exist 
as a democracy nor as a state based on the rule of law. These are the freedom 
of conscience (Constitution, Art. 41), the freedom of speech (Constitution, Art. 
39), the freedom of association (Constitution, Art. 42), the freedom of education 
(Constitution, Art. 57), the right to private property and the right to conduct one’s 
business freely as well as the right to judicial protection in a fair trial.
In his work, Pučnik stressed all of these rights. The freedom of conscience 
derives from the autonomy of person, of each individual’s right to seek the truth, 
which prevents any given priestly caste, even if belonging to the civil society, to 
monopolize the knowing of truth and the interpretation of the good for the people 
(Pučnik, 2008, 344). “There will always be also different opinions, which have 
the right to be established and implemented in a political system.” (Pučnik, 2008, 
344). To make this happen the freedom of speech and the freedom of association 
ought to be protected. Pučnik saw these two freedoms as important already in 
general terms, but he stressed their importance in particular when applied to the 
political system by opining that it is only on their basis that a political system can 
reflect social plurality and is hence also itself pluralistic. Since any kind of power, 
including a democratic power, is susceptible to an abuse and indeed can be abused 
(Pučnik, 2008, 346), Pučnik saw the only remedy for and an exclusive alternative 
to an abuse of power in the establishment of political pluralism (Pučnik, 2008, 
348). However, the latter could have only come into being under the conditions 
of established freedom of speech, by guaranteeing an as free as possible public 
political debate (Pučnik, 2008, 349). 
The freedom of education is equally quintessential for the functioning of de-
mocracy. As presently stipulated in the Slovenian Constitution, this right belongs 
to individuals, foremost to parents who have the right and duty to provide educa-
tion for their children (Constitution, Art. 54 and 57). The protection of this right 
must be again conducted in a pluralist setting, rather than in a uniform enviro-
nment monopolized by a single political or ideological source. This was precisely 
the occasion in the communist Slovenia. Pučnik thus noted that the totalitarian 
character of the state had succeeded to penetrate in every single corner of social 
life, “from the remotest cabin in the countryside to the doormen and cleaners in 
the companies.” (Pučnik, 2008, 380). It filtered pupils and teachers, students and 
professors, members of trade unions for their moral political appropriateness, 
turning all these building blocks of a democratic state into the instruments of a 
ruling party (Pučnik, 2008, 376, 381).
The same happened to the right to private property and the freedom to conduct 
business. The two were literally extinct, their nature transformed into social 
property which was de facto controlled by the communist regime and their pro-
tégés. The end result was economic collapse of the communist system. Pučnik 
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predicted this early on, already in the 1960s, for which he was incarcerated for 
many years. He always argued in favour of private property and freedom to 
conduct business, insisting that it is not for the state to make economic choices 
on behalf of the individuals, property owners, companies and their workers. 
The role of the state in economy should be limited. It should concentrate solely 
on the protection of a fair competition in the market (Pučnik, 2008, 369) and 
on providing for the legal and economic protection of workers (Pučnik, 2008, 
375). The civility of a civil society should have thus been translated also in the 
civility of an economic system:
Civility of an economic system consists of its total independence in a constant de-
velopment of new, innovative structures of economic governance, implementation 
of new infrastructures of an economic system in order to enhance its efficiency; 
however, other systems, like legal, political, moral etc., should be entrusted with 
a task of creating as favourable conditions as possible for flourishing of the 
economy and simultaneously ensuring a constantly improving legal and political 
protection of employees. (Pučnik, 2008, 375)
What Pučnik argued for in the late 1980s, is now indeed guaranteed in the 
Slovenian Constitution. Article 33 in conjunction with Article 67 protects the 
right to private property not in absolute terms, but being mindful also of its social 
dimension. Article 74 shields against the unfair competition and protects the 
freedom to conduct one’s business. This is also not unfettered, as it may not be 
conducted in violation of public interest that, of course, includes the protection 
of workers’ rights (Constitution, Arts. 66, 75, 76, 77) as well the environmental 
protection (Constitution, Art. 72). Pučnik’s theoretical demands are hence today 
fully fulfilled in the text of the Constitution, but probably a little bit less in 
practice. Ever since the independence, the successive Slovenian governments 
have preserved a large share of state ownership in the economy, intervening in 
the actual business decisions, which have been more than often economically 
suboptimal, permeated by political interests. In exact opposition to this, Pučnik 
argued that the role of the state is not to take concrete business decisions, but 
only to provide for a sound business environment for the flourishing of private 
economic initiative (Pučnik, 2008, 369).
Last, but certainly not least, in order to ensure the existence of the rule of law 
the right to a fair trial in front of independent and impartial courts should be in 
place. This is precisely what follows today from Articles 22, 23, 24 and 25 of the 
Slovenian Constitution in combination with Art. 6.1. of the European Convention 
on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. However, during communist times, 
this was certainly not the case. As Pučnik stressed, the system of justice too 
was subordinated and in service of Jugoslav unitarism and Leninist centralism of 
the communist party (Pučnik, 2008, 360). This had pernicious consequences for 
the system of justice in its formal institutional as well as informal, sociological 
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dimension. Pučnik, however, was much more concerned with the latter than with 
the former. He pointed to a major shortcoming of the then socialist legal system, 
which was reflected in the fact that its rules and institutions were not internalized 
by the people, as they felt alien and oppressive (Pučnik, 2008, 362). The lack 
of civility of a political and legal system in Pučnik’s eyes impacted on the very 
structure of our political and legal culture (Pučnik, 2008, 363). Neither the state 
nor its legal system were considered as belonging to the people, while simultane-
ously the incivility of the state and the law were tolerated and made possible by 
this very same people: “We cursed and complained, but nevertheless allowed for 
it.” (Pučnik, 2008, 363).
The remedy identified by Pučnik was political pluralism. The civility of a 
legal system was seen dependent on the internalization of its rules and institu-
tions by the addressees and institutional actors (Pučnik, 2008, 364). However, 
“this could only take place in the context of a civil political system, which 
presupposes political pluralism: organized, public and transparent.” (Pučnik, 
2008, 365). Pučnik here voiced, only with different words, what H. L. A. Hart 
dubbed as the rule of recognition (Hart, 1994). The norms of a legal system have 
to be recognized, by way of their internalization, as the essential criterion for 
one’s own behaviour. And while Hart imposed the duty of internalization only 
on the officials, the institutional actors, and permitted the common people to 
pass by mere obedience to the legal rules (Hart, 1994), Pučnik writing with a 
reference to a totalitarian state and having experienced its sheer arbitrariness, 
was much more demanding. He insisted that the norms of a legal system, con-
stitutive of the actual rule of law, not only have to be internalized by everyone, 
but they have to be fought for by each and every individual. If one was to satisfy 
himself simply with obedience to the law, in the absence of internalization of 
its rules and institutions, “everything would be reduced down to a coordinative 
system of punishment and sanctions, devoid of any moral quality.” (Pučnik, 
2008, 284–285).
This led Pučnik to argue forcefully in favour of active citizenship. He was 
led by a strong conviction that 
modern cultures and their societies possess no guarantee, that would auto-
matically protect them from falling into the well-known forms of barbariani-
sm, experienced in less and more recent history […]. The only means, which 
can protect us against [the slid into barbarianism] is us ourselves, to the 
extent we are able and willing to employ the technology of civility proposed 
by the program of Enlightenment. (Pučnik, 2008, 330)
However, as Pučnik added, the program of Enlightenment is not self-execu-
ting. “The technology of civility entails a constant need for a creative establis-
hment of civil substance and form in a concrete society.” (Pučnik, 2008, 322). 
The individuals, as founding pillars of a civil society, have to act, here and now! 
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(Pučnik, 2008, 331), but their actions too must be imbued with a sense of civi-
lity. The requirement of ensuring civility in public social life, in particular in 
political affairs, demands investing into a dialogue. Staying faithful to political 
pluralism, which is about the recognition and acceptance of diversity, precludes 
treating those who do not share our opinion as our enemies. Pučnik, revealing 
the depth and breadth of his democratic ethos, insisted with full force:
In fact, we are opponents, because in many important questions we adhere to 
different opinions, but this should not turn us into enemies who hate each other. 
By way of fate we are forced to search and find a minimum common denominator, 
while beyond it we should treat and try to resolve other questions with courage 
in a European, humane and civil manner. (Pučnik, 2008, 356)
CONCLUSION
This has article has shed light on the academic side of Jože Pučnik. While 
his civic, dissident and political activities in Slovenia have been well known, 
his academic work and the political philosophy he developed have been largely 
neglected. This is unfortunate, as already a cursory insight in Pučnik’s mono-
graphy on Culture, Society and Technology, such as provided in this article, 
reveals the richness of his political thought. Pučnik as an intellectual, as a 
political thinker was not only aware of the main currents of western political 
philosophy after the WWII, but was also entirely on par with then political and 
legal thinkers. He had integrated their work into his own political philosophy, 
which he subsequently applied to the case study of a country that he felt most 
deeply about. This was Slovenia. The latter and its people benefited from the 
fact that Pučnik was no mere theorist, an intellectual safely scrutinizing the 
social world from his ivory tower. He was a man of action. Someone who strove 
to turn his well thought-through ideas into practice. Someone who followed, 
quite literally, the principle that as things are going wrong, they ought to be 
improved, and corrected, again and again (Pesek, 2013).  
As Peter Jambrek (2021) writes in his encyclopedia entry on Jože Pučnik: 
“As a matter of fact, most of his active political time Pučnik was not successful, 
despite his determinate personal efforts, he did not move much of the externally 
tangible things.” What is more, his country and people, whose independence 
he de facto decisively helped to ensure have neither truly understood nor ever 
really appreciated his contribution and the excessive personal price he had to 
pay for it. However, irrespectively of all this, and in awareness that since time 
immemorial no one has ever been a prophet in his own country, this article has 
demonstrated that all the main ideas, that Pučnik deeply believed in, and all 
the key values, that Pučnik espoused and practiced in his life, have found their 
way in the Slovenian Constitution. Pučnik’s political philosophy, his political 
thought has thus been constitutionalized. It is in contemporary Slovenia at least 
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formally valid and protected on a piece of paper called the Constitution. This 
is, of course, neither to say that Slovenian Constitution has been modelled 
after Pučnik’s political philosophy, nor that he had any direct impact on its text 
whatsoever. But it is to say with certainty that by way of adoption of the Con-
stitution, with the entrenchment of a modern liberal political order in Slovenia, 
Pučnik’s life-long struggle for the right cause has been formally validated and 
hence fulfilled.  
Last but not least, the mission of implementing the program of Enlightenment and 
its pursuit of civility in all corners of social life is, of course, still far from being ac-
complished in Slovenia. The normative struggle, in which Pučnik invested so much, 
is, hence, far from over. It is in fact, at least as far as Slovenia is considered, still at an 
early stage. The formal structure of a civil society has been put in place in 1991, but 
it still awaits its proper effectuation by way of internalization by the people. Even in 
democratic countries with long and well established political and legal culture, this 
process of actual democratization, of ensuring the rule of law in practice, is a never 
ending, laborious process of trial and error, following a shared commitment that a 
given polity can in a common pursuit of a common good help bring about, by acting 
together a brighter, better and more democratic and more just future as its past had 
been. In short, the mission of democracy and rule of law can never, even in the best of 
places with the most virtuous people, be fully accomplished. It is even more difficult, 
however, to secure democracy and the rule of law in post-totalitarian countries, with 
wrecked and weak institutions and democratically pathologized citizenry. Pučnik was 
more than aware of that as he predicted that the process of establishing civility would 
take a long time (Pučnik, 2008, 381). He even went so far as openly proclaiming in 
the final pages of his book, published in 1987, that “the actual situation is almost 
hopeless, basically devoid of any hope.” (Pučnik, 2008, 433). And yet, since preci-
sely that was terribly wrong, it had to be remedied. And, indeed it was remedied, so 
much so that only four years later, after a centuries long struggle for an independence, 
Slovenians, that people that might have come from nowhere, ended up creating their 
independent and sovereign state. Pučnik’s contribution was decisive, actual, symbo-
lic, political and academic. In all of its guises does remain a point of inspiration for 
the future generations, including to us – constitutional lawyers. 
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KONSTITUCIONALIZACIJA POLITIČNE MISLI JOŽETA PUČNIKA
Matej AVBELJ
Nova univerza, Evropska pravna fakulteta, Delpinova ulica 18/b, 5000 Nova Gorica, Slovenija
e-mail: matej.avbelj@epf.nova-uni.si
POVZETEK
Ta članek odstira manj znano akademsko plat dr. Jožeta Pučnika. Medtem ko so 
njegove državljanske, disidentske in politične aktivnosti v Sloveniji relativno dobro 
poznane, pa njegovo akademsko delo ter politična filozofija, ki jo je v njem razvijal, 
ostajata precej neznana. To je obžalovanja vredno, saj že kratek analiza Pučnikove 
monografije Kultura, družba in tehnologija, ki je posvečen tudi ta članek, razkrije 
bogastvo njegove politične misli. Pučnik kot intelektualec, kot politični mislec ni 
zgolj poznal glavnih tokov zahodne politične filozofije, kot se je ta razvijala po 
drugi svetovni vojni, temveč je bil tudi njen enakopraven tvorec. Dela vodilnih 
političnih in pravnih mislecev svoje dobe je vgradil v svojo politično filozofijo, ki 
jo je kasneje uporabil v praksi na primeru Slovenije, države, katere nestor je bil.
Ključne besede: Jože Pučnik, Slovenija, ustavnost, razsvetljenstvo, pluralizem, 
demokracija
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