This book - written by a specialist in Constitutional Law and a historian - examines the major pressures of modern Greek constitutional history. After the necessary introduction to the Greek Constitutions of the modern era, it focuses on the era of the "crisis of institutions" (1915-1974), defined by the two parallel divisions of the Greek 20th century, the National Division and the civil war, with their devastating effects on the institutional history of the country. The book does not only focus on the burdens imposed by the two divisions on the political scene, political culture, and legal system. It also deals with the incomplete and through supplementary application of the Constitution during these periods - that is, with the substantial, heavy, and even daily burden on the institutional course of the country under their influence. Thus, it examines the role of the Constitution in the outbreak of the National Division, the failure of the politics that led to the dictatorships of 1936 and 1967, the functioning of the institutions after the civil war, and the role of political forces and the Crown.

Similarly, the book also deals with the conditions for overcoming the "crisis of institutions" achieved during the Metapolitefsi of 1974-75. It assesses not only the institutional initiatives themselves but also the intellectual conditions for success at the institutional level, namely the worldview that supported that critical effort and the establishment of a consolidated democracy.

The book presents a fundamental position: Beyond the formal provisions of a Constitution, the way it is implemented is of decisive importance, which concerns the major issue of the quality of leadership, the level of economic, social, and educational development of the specific society. In Greek history of the 20th century, which was so turbulent from an institutional perspective, there were not lacking exceptional, truly enlightened constitutional texts. However, often lacking were common sense and self-restraint of political forces in their implementation.