The Federal Is the Political: A Conceptual History of Federalism in Theory and Practice traces the history of federal thought from ancient Greece to the European Union.
After re-examining federal practices in ancient Greece, political scientist Thomas O. Hueglin follows two main traditions: an older European tradition beginning with the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century, and a more recent tradition that starts with the invention of the American federal state in the eighteenth century. A methodological chapter considers the problems and limits of interpreting texts across time, and through close textual analysis, this book identifies the emergence of key concepts such as co-determination, subsidiarity, and shared sovereignty, and shows how federal ideas shaped early claims to popular sovereignty. Hueglin compares almost identical forms of confederal council governance in the Holy Roman Empire and in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to suggest that federalism was a universal concept in pre-statist societies. He also devotes a chapter to non-territorial ideas of socio-economic and cultural-linguistic federalism.
Across this journey through the conceptual history of federalism, this book supports the claim that “the federal is the political”: social life rests on the tension between autonomy and interdependence, and federalism is a central way of balancing the two.
