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Reviews of Books
Why Federalism?
| Collective Action under the Articles of Confederation. By Keith L. Dougherty. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 211. $49.95.)Dreams of a More Perfect Union. By Rogan Kersh. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 358. $39.95.)The Federal Principle in American Politics, 1790–1833. By Andrew C. Lenner. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001. Pp. xiv, 223. $80.00 cloth; $26.95 paper.)States' Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776–1876. By Forrest McDonald. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Pp. viii, 296. $29.95 cloth; $16.95 paper.)
Reviewed by Donald S. Lutz
, University of Houston
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American federalism was developed as one answer to a problem that lies at the heart of our political culture: How does one induce collective action while preserving liberty? One can solve this problem in a number of ways, but federalism seems in retrospect to be an inevitable part of the American solution. For one thing, compared to most earlier regimes, the American emphasis on liberty precluded asking the easier part of the question: How does one induce collective action? Faced with the more difficult problem that their British heritage handed them, a liberty-loving heritage that was amplified by the diverse reasons for emigration, Americans developed and borrowed a variety of solutions. The bottom-up organization of colonial government, the implicit federal structure linking the colonies to Britain, and the brute existence of thirteen separate polities at the time of Independence all seemed to dictate that what we now know as federalism would be part of the solution. However, a history that retrospectively has an apparent logic could have gone in other directions. One can easily imagine three unitary republics centered around Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The Virginia Plan adopted early in the Constitutional Convention visualized a unitary state. One can more easily imagine thirteen independent nations that failed to unite at all. Even if we grant a high probability for some kind of federal system, federalism did not have to take the form it did. Together, the four books under review here examine the unfolding federalism of the early Republic, and each attempts to contribute to our understanding of why a specifically American version of federalism was generated as part of the answer to the problem of inducing collective action while preserving liberty. |
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Keith Dougherty's book asks why the states cooperated at all. Using analytic techniques borrowed from economics that are together known to political scientists as "positive theory," he points out that, under the institutional structure of the Articles of Confederation, the states had no apparent reason for cooperation once the War of Independence was over. The real question, he says, is not why the states failed to comply 100 percent with national levies and requisitions; rather, it is why the states provided 53 percent of the men levied for the Continental army from 1777 to 1783 and 40 percent of the money requisitioned for the federal treasury from 1782 to 1789. (Reliable data on compliance with levies and requisitions are available only for the time periods he cites.) Viewing each state as a "rational actor," one might conclude that the inability of Congress to raise taxes directly or to force state compliance fairly pleads for each state to act as a free rider—that is, to wait for the other states to provide men and money—and thus to reap the shared benefits without contributing to the common pool. |
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