In an important 2007 paper, “Federalism and the old and new liberalisms,” Jacob T. Levy uses a chapter, “On Municipal Power, Local Authorities, and a New Kind of Federalism,” from Benjamin Constant’s Principles of Politics Applicable to All Representative Governments, to frame his interpretation of American federalism. Levy’s paper — a retelling of the story of American federalism from the perspective of liberalism — is important because it is directed at “all liberals who understood federalism as a means, and freedom as the end.” (Emphasis added.)
In an early footnote Levy quite rightly cites Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), part II, book 9, chaps. 1–3, as a relatively slim (it’s only a few pages) background for the American political experiments in federalism which Levy presents.1 While Montesquieu undoubtedly loomed large in the American founding, in the American context, Levy argues elsewhere, “we lack heirs of Montesquieu for them to bother arguing against. Accordingly, federalism is almost entirely absent from the work of John Rawls and from the generation of liberal theory he inspired.”2
As Levy puts it, in practice, American federalism “evolved as the unintended result of a series of compromises and power struggles, both among the states and between the states and the center.” While I share Levy’s interpretation of the American experiment with federalism, this paper is rooted in two reservations about his approach. First, I doubt whether for Levy’s intended American target audience Constant has much status. So it may be worth looking at an alternative framing for the same end. Second, while Montesquieu is undoubtedly significant to the story of the American founding, there were rather important English language contributions to the eighteenth century discussion about federalism. I view the present paper as a preliminary contribution to an American reframing of Levy’s argument.
I tell the story in reverse chronology. In section 1, I briefly introduce Adam Smith’s plan for a (federal) parliamentary union of the British Atlantic empire. He proposed it at the end of the Wealth of Nations. In addition to sketching some of the key issues in his proposal, I also explore the nineteenth century reception of Smith to tackle a widespread and enduring misperception of Smith that treats his economics as a depoliticized project. In the second and main section, I focus on William Penn’s proposal for a federal European parliament to tell a fresh story about English language discussions on federalism, including – in addition to Penn and Smith – David Hume and Benjamin Franklin.
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