Politica

Althusius' Grand Design for a Federal Commonwealth

Politica i-lxii.indd 35 1/11/12 10:08 PM Althusius' Grand Design for a Federal Commonwealth The road to modern democracy began with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, particularly among those exponents of Reformed Protestantism who developed a theology and politics that set the Western world back on the road to popular self-government, emphasizing liberty and equality.1 While the original founders and spokesmen for Reformed Protestantism did much political writing, their writing was often either theological or polemical in character. Only at the end of the first century of the Reformation did a political philosopher emerge out ofthe Reformed tradition to build a systematic political philosophy out of the Reformed experience by synthesizing the political experience of the Holy Roman Empire with the political ideas of the covenant theology of Reformed Protestantism. That man, Johannes Althusius, presented his political philosophy in a classic work, Politica Methodice Digesta, first published in 1603, expanded in 1610, and revised in final form in 1614. Althusius' Politica was the first book to present a comprehensive theory of federal republicanism rooted in a covenantal view of human society derived from, but not dependent on, a theological system. It presented a theory of polity-building based on the polity as a compound political association established by its citizens through their primary associations on the basis of consent rather than a reified state imposed by a ruler or an elite. 1 See, for example, Robert Henry Murray, The Political Consequences of the Riformation: Studies in Sixteenth-Century Political Thought (New York: Russell and Russell, 1960) and Michael Walzer, The Revolution ofthe Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982). XXXV Politica i-lxii.indd 36 1/11/12 10:08 PM xxxvi Althusius' Grand Design for a Federal Commonwealth The first grand federalist design, as Althusius himself was careful to acknowledge, was that of the Bible, most particularly the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament.2 For him, it also was the bestthe ideal polity based on right principles. Biblical thought is federal (from the Latinfoedus, covenant) from first to last-from God's covenant with Noah establishing the biblical equivalent of what philosophers were later to term natural law (Genesis, chapter 9) to the Jews' reaffirmation of the Sinai covenant under the leadership of Ezra and N ehemiah, thereby adopting the Torah as the constitution of their second commonwealth (Ezra, chapter 10; Nehemiah, chapter 8). The covenant motif is central to the biblical world view, the basis of all relationships, the mechanism for defining and allocating authority, and the foundation of the biblical political teaching. The biblical grand design for humankind is federal in three ways. First, it is based upon a network of covenants beginning with those between God and human beings, which weave the web of human, especially political, relationships in a federal way-through pact, association, and consent. In the sixteenth century, this world view was recreated by the Reformed wing of Protestantism as the federal theology from which Althusius, the Huguenots, the Scottish covenanters, and the English and American Puritans developed political theories and principles ofconstitutional design. 2Two of the best available treatments of the federal dimension of the biblical world view are to be found in the works of Althusius and Buber. See, for example, Professor Carney's introduction and Martin Buber's Kingship if God, translated by Richard Scheimann (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1990). This writer has treated the subject in Convenant and Polity in Biblical Israel (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Press, 1994). See also "Government in Biblical Israel," Tradition 13, N o. 4- 14, no. 1 (Spring- Summer, 1973) 105-24 and "Covenant as the Basis of the Jewish Political Tradition," Jewish Journal if Sociology XX, no. 1 (June, 1978) 5-37. The Israel-based Workshop in the Covenant Idea and theJewish Political Tradition sponsored by theJerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the Bar-Ilan University Department of Political Studies and its American-based counterpart, the Workshop on Covenant and Politics sponsored by the Center for the Study of Federalism, have been probing that issue among others. The principal work on the Israeli workshop is available in Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Kinsh1p and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses (Lanham, Maryland: University Press ofAmerica and Center for the Study ofFederalism, 1983). The principal work on the American workshop is available in Daniel J. Elazar and John Kincaid, eds., Covenant, Polity, and...