The relationships of domination that are established within urban institutions certainly guarantee that they will not collapse with the first distributional failure.

However, when sovereignty takes on the character of uncritical imposition, as is the case today, when the institutions cease to favor relations of legal reciprocity and instead rely solely on the vertical hierarchical relationship between rulers and subjects, then nothing can rule out the activation of the economic antinomy of law, the intensification of the social conflicts that lie within it, and ultimately the dynamic resurgence of constituent authority.

In such conditions, the rhetorical invocation of the social contract or of popular sovereignty by the rulers is not sufficient to suspend the fundamental movement of institutional reconstruction, the work of constituent authority.

(. . .) [Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]