capitalism

Federalists Versus Anti-Federalists 171
will have two major advantages: The new European
Constitution does not effectively limit the central authority,
and European tradition suggests sovereignty must be unitary.
In the United States, the tragic attacks of September 11,
2001, made homeland security and war making, two responsibilities
of the national government, the central concern of
American politics. More generally, some scholars argue that
Washington should take a larger role in redistributive policies
like health care and welfare spending. Others continue
to seek institutional changes that might protect liberty by
reviving a federalism of mutual constraint between the
national government and the states. The success or failure of
that search may go some distance toward deciding the fate
of liberty in the new century.
See also Constitution, U.S.; Decentralism; Federalists Versus Anti-
Federalists; Judiciary; Limited Government; Subsidiarity
Further Readings
JSa
Conlan, Timothy J. From New Federalism to Devolution:
Twenty-Five Years of Intergovernmental Reform. Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998.
Derthick, Martha. Keeping the Compound Republic: Essays on
American Federalism. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution
Press, 2001.
Dinan, John J. “The Rehnquist Court’s Federalism Decisions in
Perspective.” Journal of Law & Politics 15 (Spring 1999):
127–194.
Levy, Jacob. The Multiculturalism of Fear. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000.
Moravcsik, Andrew. The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and
State Power from Messina to Maastricht. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1998.
Niskanen, William A. On the Constitution of a Compound Republic
(Cato’s Letter no.14). Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2001.
Peterson, Paul E. The Price of Federalism. Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press, 1995.
Pollack, Mark. “Theorizing the European Union: International
Organization, Domestic Polity, or Experiment in New
Governance?” Annual Review of Political Science 8 (June 2005):
357–398.
Samples, John, ed. James Madison and the Future of Limited
Government. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2002.
Whittington, Keith. “Dismantling the Modern State? The Changing
Structural Foundations of Federalism.” Hastings Constitutional
Law Quarterly 25 no. 4 (Summer 1998): 483–527.
FEDERALISTS VERSUS
ANTI-FEDERALISTS
The Federalists and Anti-Federalists conducted a spirited
debate over ratification of the U.S. Constitution beginning
in late 1787 and continuing through the following year.
This momentous struggle about the nature of the American
union and its future central government had its genesis in
the American Revolution, which had ended 6 years earlier.
The Revolution succeeded by virtue of a temporary
coalition of competing viewpoints and conflicting interests.
At one end of the coalition stood the American radicals—
men such as Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine,
Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson. The radicals
objected to excessive government power in general and
not simply to British rule in particular. Spearheading the
Revolution’s opening stages, the radicals were responsible
for all the truly revolutionary alterations in the domestic
status quo. At the other end of the Revolutionary coalition
were American nationalists—men such as Benjamin
Franklin, George Washington, Robert Morris, Alexander
Hamilton, and James Madison. Representing a powerful
array of mercantile, creditor, and landed interests, the
nationalists went along with independence, but resisted the
Revolution’s libertarian thrust. They preferred an American
central government that would reproduce the hierarchical
and mercantilist features of the 18th-century British state,
only without the British.
The Revolution had started out as a struggle against
taxation. What passed among the newly independent
American states for a central government did not have
direct access even to this most basic and usual of political
powers. The Articles of Confederation, a written constitution
adopted in 1781, failed to give Congress any authority
either to collect taxes or to regulate trade. The war, however,
helped spawn various pressure groups that clamored
for stronger government. Eastern land speculators agitated
for a standing army that could protect their vast claims, and
in this effort they were joined by many of the Continental
Army’s former officers.
One of the nationalists’ most potent political weapons
was the Revolutionary War debt, which provided an enduring
rationale for national taxation and another special interest,
those to whom the debt was owed, who supported such
taxation. An equally popular justification for strengthening
Congress was trade regulation. Subsequent accounts have
painted a fanciful picture of competing trade barriers among
various states that disrupted the American economy. The
prevailing practice regarding interstate trade prior to the
Constitution, however, was complete reciprocity among
the states. What American merchants were actually after was
uniform navigation laws discriminating against foreign shippers.
At the same time, American artisans wanted nationwide
protective tariffs, unmarred by competing state exemptions.
All direct efforts to strengthen the Articles of Confederation
proved futile because proposed amendments
required the unanimous ratification of the states. Consequently,
Hamilton and Madison assumed leadership of the
nationalists and attempted to bypass this bottleneck by calling
for a special convention to meet in Philadelphia in 1787.
Aiding this movement was a growing antidemocratic mood