The Problem of Federalism

A Study in the History of Political Theory - Volume One

Sobei Mogi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367222413
• eBook ISBN: 9781000706444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Politische Literaturkritik

First published in 1931. The Problem of Federalism provides a comprehensive and critical survey of the historical development and practical application of the idea of federalism as a form of state organisation. The author explores federal ideas from the eighteenth- up until the early twentieth-century. This extensive study will be useful to students of politics and philosophy.

PART I

THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FEDERAL IDEAS

CHAPTER I

DEVELOPMENT OF FEDERAL IDEAS BEFORE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

§ 1

The idea of federalism in the modern sense can hardly have reached any political thinkers till the time when the American constitution was drawn up.

The constitution of 1787 in the United States of America was influenced chiefly by political expediency, rather than by any political legacy of federal doctrine from Europe. The federal idea, which federal authority infused into the individual life of the members of the states as the standard of the nation without their governmental agency, was first shown to us by the formulated policy of the American federalists. In order to realise a true federalism, we must look at the idea in its germ as well as in its development, and must trace federal principles from their birth.

The first glimpse of the federal principle was about the third century B.C. (281–146), in Greece.¹ There is, however, no sufficiently clear description of federalism in Greek political thought even though the first confederacy in history was the Achaean League. There were problems of practical politics; how, for instance, to unite several city states at particular times for special purposes. The association of the Amphictyonic Council was merely a voluntary association of city states for specific purposes under the oath of the Temple of Delphos. However freely deputies were appointed by the citizens, and whatever authority was vested in the council, its aims were limited to the common welfare and the declaration or cessation of war.

The power of the elaborate city state, which was based upon absolute sovereignty, was so strong that powerful members, instead of being kept in due subordination, could tyrannise over the weak.

¹ Before the Grecian Age there were crude types of federations. The government of the Israelites was a federation held together by no political authority, but by the unity of race and faith, and founded, not on physical force, but on a voluntary covenant. The principle of self-government was carried out not only in each tribe, but in every group of at least one hundred and twenty families; and there was neither privilege of rank nor inequality before the law.

The Achaean League, in the strict sense of confederation, was a perfect union on paper and in theory, but the members of the League held independent political power in various forms of government and no direct contact between the populace and the Senate was permitted.

The Abbé de Mably remarked of Greece that “the popular government, which was so tempestuous elsewhere, caused no disorders in the members of the Achaean Republic, because it was there tempered by the general authority and law of confederacy.”

It was only when the Romans were summoned to aid Achaia against Macedonian aggression that internal dissensions broke out. These dissensions, fostered by the Romans, soon led to the destruction of “the last hope of Greece” and the bondage of the members of the Achaean League.

The relations between the members of the League, whether it had general laws or not, depended upon the authority of the constituent cities and the degree of strength and practically unequal basis of the union.

The culture of the city states was high, and was so brilliant that each independent state could hardly enter into a union on equal terms without sacrificing its pride, prestige and its own peculiar political issues. Naturally political democracy was confined to meetings in the market-place of the free citizens, who used their slaves as machines for production and served the public in no other capacity than as mere consumers. To them the Achaean League was only a piece of political mechanism to prevent external invasion and diplomatic impropriety.

Aristotle, in his Politics, touches on a hundred institutions in his remarkable survey, but though there had been instances of union before the time of Aristotle, he never discusses the form of federal government, which had been of the loose kind, and the “federal revival” began many years after his death, when the Achaean League was constituted on a new basis.

At the time of Aristotle there was a variety of city states scattered around the Athenian democracy. He criticised, analysed and compared the numerous political institutions from his ethical standpoint and furnished and contributed the Politics to the growth of political philosophy on the basis of “political justice.”

From his definition of the state he denounced an alliance of any sort, because “a state exists for the sake of a good life,” but not “for the sake of alliance or maintenance of injustice,” and an alliance is a mere society if intercourse with one another is of the same kind after as before the union.¹ And he said further that “there are no magistracies common to the contracting parties who will enforce their engagements, different states have each their own magistracies; nor does one state take care that the citizens of the other are such as they ought to be, nor see that those who come under the terms of the treaty do no wrong or wickedness at all but that only they do no injustice to one another,”² and he added that “the community becomes a mere alliance which differs only in place from alliances of which the members live apart, and law is only a convention,”—“a surety to one another of justice,” as the sophist Lycophron says, and “has no real power to make the citizen good and just.”³

On this argument the state exists for the sake of a good life on the basis of relative equality and freedom and justice.

This relative justice and relative freedom should be based upon the virtue of good government and adapted to the varying functions of good citizens. The great mind of Aristotle could not acknowledge federalism as a good governmental organisation, since its principles were animated by compromise.

Polybius described the Achaean League, and although he recognised the unitary laws, weights and measures, coinage, supreme administration, councils and judges, which made a union much closer than a mere treaty or alliance—in fact created a union which, if enclosed within town walls, would be a single state, even then he did not realise that a new state distinct from the individual states had been created, i.e. the relation of the member states to the collective state.⁴

And Strabo, a Greek geographer and historian, also described only cursorily and superficially the Achaean and Lykian Leagues, which he called systema; after him we hear nothing for centuries about the union of states.⁵

Although neither from “enlightened” monarchy, which Plato emphasised, nor from the “mediating middle class,” to which Aristotle adhered, did the actual experience in the Grecian states tend to uphold the Achaean League; nevertheless a bridge was built by which thought passed from the narrow unit of the city to the wide cosmopolitanism on which Stoicism was based.

¹ Aristotle: Politics, trans. by Benjamen Jowett, 1923, pp. 118–119.

² Ibid., p. 118.

³ Ibid., p. 118.

⁴ Polybius: Historiœ, ed. Bekker, II, p. 37. S. Brie: Der Bundestaat, 1874,p. 10. G. J. Ebers: Die Lehre vom Staatenbunde, 1910, p. 4.

⁵ Strabo: Geography, VIII, 6, Sees. 18, 25; IX, 3, Sec. 7; XIV, 3, Sec. 3.

Modern federalism has gained little from the legacy of Greek politics except a vague experience of confederation, and it is experience which is the real root of political philosophy.

The Roman Empire dominated Europe under the auspices of the Roman Emperors, and developed the brilliant unitary sovereign empire until the growth of barbarian power put an end to its shadowy supremacy.

The Roman Empire derived its political philosophy from Stoic cosmopolitanism and its moral virtue from the Christian Fathers. Its political frame was formulated partly by the fundamental ideas of Athenian democracy. Nevertheless, on the one hand the Roman law had infallible supremacy in the secular sphere, while on the other hand Christianity was a general guardian of virtue in the spiritual sphere. Several cities or towns independently made unions for the purpose of political relations, in order to preserve their independence, but still throughout the Empire there was a single sovereign law, which subjugated all the members.

Though the people of Rome had been in favour of ruling men by kindness rather than by fear, and conquered foreign nations by faith and friendship rather than by hard bondage, yet, as Grotius said, “it is true that it often happens that he who is superior in the league be much more powerful than the rest, and he by degrees usurps a sovereignty over them especially if the league be perpetual.”

In these periods, the legists in order to distinguish between empires and kingdoms which were composed within the state, applied to this latter the term universitas. But the hard fact was that there were within the Empire kingdoms and cities which had actual independence—i.e. the rule of the Emperor was little more than nominal. All the jurists clung to the idea that the universitates were only groups which constituted each a single legal unit, but not a “state.”

Only a few pre-eminent thinkers, such as Engelbert von Volkersdorf and Dante, ascribed to the Emperor the realisation of general prosperity or the fostering of the higher interests of the state, and to the individual states the realisation of the prosperity of the individual nations and care for this particular interest, and thus approximated to the idea of the federal state.¹

¹ Engelberti abbatis Admontensis Liber de Ortu, Progressu et Fine imperii Romani (in the Maxima biblotheca veterum patrum, tomus XXV, Lugduni, 1577), Cap. 15 argum. tertium and cap. 17. Dante: De Monarchia, ed. Alessandro, Torri, 1844, Lib. I, cap. 16.

Bartolus, a Roman jurist, laid down that the essential tendency of the state was sovereignty, and divided all unions into two forms:—(a) Universitates, subject to no superior; (b) Universitates, recognising a superior. The former was restricted to the state conception and the latter represented the union, but he made no distinction between civitas, regnum and imperium, the differences between which were, from the standpoint of the human organisation, merely qu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Author’s Note
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Part I The History of American Federal Ideas
• Part II The History of British Federal Ideas
• Part III The History of German Federal Ideas
• Index