Bulletin n. 1-2/2014
November 2014
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Alexander-Davey, E.
    CONSTITUTIONAL SELF-GOVERNMENT AND NATIONALISM: HOBBES, LOCKE AND GEORGE LAWSON
    in History of Political Thought , Volume 35, Number 3 ,  2014 ,  458-484
    The emphasis in contemporary democratic theory and in the history of political thought on the peculiarly abstract theory of popular sovereignty of Locke and his twentieth-century intellectual descendants obscures a crucial relationship between constitutional self-government and nationalism. Through a Hobbesian and Filmerian critique of Locke and an examination of the political writings of George Lawson (a seventeenth-century critic of Hobbes), the article shows the necessary connections between popular sovereignty, constitutionalism and a form of national consciousness that renders concrete the otherwise abstract and airy notion of the pre-political community to which government is to be held accountable, and, through amyth of national origin, memories of native traditions of self-government, and stories of heroic ancestors who successfully defended those traditions against usurpers and tyrants, gives substance to theories of constitutional government.
    ©2001 - 2020 - Centro Studi sul Federalismo - P. IVA 94067130016