A well-constructed union

Alison L. LaCroix

This dissertation traces the history of American federalism from its origins in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century attempts at colonial confederation to a later-eighteenth-century effort that, unlike the others, happened to be successful. Specifically, the study examines the intellectual history of American federalism, an area of inquiry that has been touched by many scholars but that has not been the focus of sufficient study in its own right. The project aims to recover the antecedents of federalism's novel proposition that a group of states could successfully unite to create a government structure based on a central---or federal---authority, to which authority the states surrender some but (crucially) not all their own powers, and which authority wields power over individual citizens. American federalism, I argue, was revolutionary because it concerned statehood. It sought to...