To take ‘redress’ as the tilting that forces appearance – of ‘a reality which can only be imagined’ – is the insight that underpins the analysis of constitutionalism that this book offers. My argument will be that such redress has become highly improbable under conditions of a significant shift from a political to a market conception of constitutionalism. Redress aims to capture, and where unavailable to force, law’s countervailing gesture. Since it is increasingly forged in a context that resists that gesture it calls for strategic thinking. The key phenomenological question is ‘under what conditions might something emerge as a problem?’ This is where political rationality, the possibility to think the given otherwise, meets a critical phenomenology, the forcing to appear. Redress is not to be understood as the compensatory gesture that would commit to the already defeated site of a skewed equilibrium. Instead, as per Weil, redress asks of us to ‘do what we can’ to imagine alternatives and equip them with a ‘gravitational pull’ such that the weight of necessity does not submerge them. That at least is the aspiration that links the phenomenological account of the first part of the book with the strategic account of the final part. It is with the help of phenomenology that we explore the shaping of the constitutional imaginary of the age; with systems theory, oriented to the ‘appearance of difference’, that we explore what is selected and what suppressed as its expression in constitutional reason; and with critical theory in the tradition of ‘immanent critique’ that we explore strategic deployments. While a phenomenology that navigates its way between Marxism and systems theory is going to be selective in its debts, there is scope, I argue, to extract significant dividends from the way in which appearance is thematised in both, allowing the traditions of phenomenology and Marxism to converge in a restatement of praxis philosophy: as a restatement, in the words of the phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, of a vision that transforms the seen.