Blumenfeld on Splitting the Atom of Sovereignty: Ancient Greece and the Origins of American Federalism

Brian Blumenfeld, Independent Scholar, has published Splitting the Atom of Sovereignty: Ancient Greece and the Origins of American Federalism. Here is the abstract.

In an era when history and tradition increasingly inform the legal reasoning of judges, jurists and advocates from across the ideological spectrum, one historical theme engrained in our constitutional origins remains undeservedly obscure. Appearing throughout the original debates over the U.S. Constitution are investigations into and arguments about the federal governments (or “leagues”) of ancient Greece. A mere browse through the primary records of the founding reveals the esteem with which that era drew lessons and heeded warnings from these classical federal precedents. In laboring over how to form a more perfect union, Americans in the 1780s looked not only to their contemporaneous political conditions for viable answers, but also looked to history for how federal unions were formed, how they functioned, and why they succeeded and failed. The greatest lesson learned from Greek federalism, repeated throughout the founding era, was how the three principal federal governments of ancient Greece—the Amphictyonic Council, the Achaean League, and the Lycian League—all ultimately collapsed because their central governments were insufficiently empowered to withstand the coactive forces of domestic centrifugalism and foreign intervention. This failure, and the solutions for preventing its recurrence in America, figured prominently in the policies and polemics of the founding. Notwithstanding the prevalence of these classical references, there is no single source in the legal or historical literature that provides an adequate account of the Greek federal leagues and their role in the founding. The net outcome is that the scholar, student, jurist or advocate examining our constitutional origins is often confronted with references to Greek federalism, and yet is regrettably left without a source for adequately understanding the subject. As a corrective, this article catalogues and contextualizes the references to Greek federalism found throughout the records of the Constitutional Convention, the ratification debates, and the Federalist Papers; and then reviews the constitutions and histories of the three main Greek federal leagues that appeared throughout the founding. The end result will remove the bewilderment too often evoked by the subject, and will allow the reader to effectively engage with the themes of Greek federalism when conducting constitutional and historical analysis.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.