Constitutions, politics and the new state
A pervasive interpretation of the revolution that overthrew the absolute monarchy in 1932 is made by Riggs, who noted that "The revolution confirmed but did not create a more basic transformation in the structure of the Thai government, which had already taken place 43 Given that significant changes in the state had already occurred in the 1890s, Riggs considered the events of 1932 as merely the "substitution of one oligarchic elite by another Certainly the governments that immediately followed the revolution of 1932 were marked by compromise and struggle between competing fractions of the elite centred in the military, bureaucracy and the palace. These struggles have led to an interpretation of post-1932 politics as a politics of faction constitutionalism which David Wilson famously described as "the drafting of a new constitution to match and protect each major shift in factional dominance 45 At one level this is a fair description given the frequency of coups d'état and constitutional revision in Thailand However, recognizing the instrumental uses to which constitutions were put does not mean that democracy' was irrelevant to the post-revolutionary order. The idea of constitutionalism also downplays the significant changes ushered in by the revolution On overthrowing the absolute monarchy in June 1932, the revolutionary People's Party built on earlier discourses of national citizenship to formulate a new conception of an individual's relationship to the state. The revolution's intellectual leader Pridi Phanomyong, a French-educated lawyer, was well versed in Western constitutional and utopian radical thought, and this