The Changing Politics of Federalism in the United States

Abstract

Governmental design is an ancient question. For the Greeks, the question was whether citizens were best ruled by the one, the few or the many. For Hobbes, power needed to be centralized in the hands of a single sovereign so as to protect citizens from a “war of all against all.” For the writers of The Federalist Papers — Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay — power was best divided between central and lower tiers of government in order to check each from threatening the liberties of individuals. For US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, lower tiers of government should have the autonomy to become “laboratories of democracy.”