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This paper identifies two types of constitutionalism, understood as knowledge of the law established by the constitutional rights of the Constitution of Colombia and which it calls the (initial) moral reading and the (current) turn towards efficacy. Its main argument says that instead of complementary types of knowledge, an adequate understanding shows them as the exclusive alternatives that arise from our need to choose (between two readings on the way in which such norms operate within the judicial courts as devices of claim Social). For his defense it resorts to a strategy in which both types of constitutionalism are linked to the republicanism of Machiavelli (the fight for effective power) and that of Montesquieu (the fight against despotic power). This, first, to sustain that a moral reading in a comprehensive sense and in which the type of reconciling reason that Alexy works with operates would allow his harmonic understanding; second, that under political conditions such as those of the department of Córdoba (which Espinosa and García call institutional apartheid) it becomes inevitable to choose between undertaking the fight against the power deficit or against despotic power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]