Althusius at the Antipodes: The Politica and Australian Federalism
JURISPRUDENZ, POLITISCHE THEORIE UND POLITISCHE THEOLOGIE, Frederick Carney, Heinz Schilling, Dieter Wyduckel, eds., pp. 529-546, Duncker and Humblot, Germany 2004
18 Pages Posted: 12 Dec 2008
Date Written: 2004
Abstract
Australian federalism has often been seen as little more than a political compromise, devised by pragmatic and relatively unsophisticated politicians who did little more than represent the special economic and political interests of the colonies they represented. If there was a guiding political philosophy that lay behind the construction of the Australian federal Constitution, it was not so much republican or classically federalist along the lines of the American framing, but rather utilitarian and British in orientation.
In this essay it is argued that this characterisation of Australian federalism is both exaggerated and misconceived. The framers of the Australian constitution drew on state-of-the-art scholarship on federalism and were in this way inheritors of a very rich tradition of federal republican political philosophy, traceable ultimately to the covenantal political theory systematically set forth by Johannes Althusius in his Politica Methodice Digesta first published in 1603.
Keywords: Australian federation, federalism, republicanism, covenant, Althusius, Madison, Locke, Hobbes
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