The volume grows out of the realization that constitutional and political developments in the West pose a serious challenge to the traditional conceptual framework of federalist scholarship.
Despite the surge of interest that followed the groundbreaking work of Carl Joachim Friedrich and, more recently, Murray Forsyth, the concepts of federation and federalism have remained under-theorized. Federalist theorists have, for the most part, defined their object by opposition to the unitary state.
As a result, they have not developed normative theories of federalism, relying instead on functional-ist models to understand federal phenomena. The dominance of functionalist methodologies is det-rimental to federalist scholarship because it obscures the specificity of federalism by reducing it to a simple means of governance.
The proposed volume offers the first systematic and comprehensive treatment of the foundations of federalism. It develops novel perspectives on the core problems of traditional federalist theory and explores new departures in federalist theory and federal power-sharing. At a time when the ways we order public life have become issues of considerable theoretical and political interest, the proposed volume promises to fill an urgent need.
