Abstract

The Greeks developed federal arrangements, but no thinker comparable to Plato or Aristotle articulated “federalism” systematically any more than later in the Roman Republic. Neither Madison's and Hamilton's political arguments in The Federalist nor Proudhon's philosophical arguments in The Principle of Federation provide an adequate theory of federalism. Schmitt's “Constitutional Theory of Federation,” the fourth and concluding part of his Verfassungslehre, is similarly deficient. But it does provide an historical overview of modern federations and in so doing an analysis of the main problems of federalism. The focus of his analysis is the role of federalism in the Weimar Constitution.