Responses to Rubin and Feeley

Abstract

I have read the Rubin-Feeley article, Federalism And Interpretation, with pleasure and profit. I love their robust conclusion with its thumping disdain for federalism, that pitiful enterprise, an incomplete state, prone to self-destruction?unless it can somehow transform itself into a unitary regime, like the good, old USA. So, while I strongly disagree with certain crucial points in their analysis, I wish to emphasize that the merits of the essay justify and encourage more of their kind of thinking about federalism. The title of the book on which the article is based, Federalism: Political Identity and Tragic Compromise, summarizes their argument. Certain features of a federal system, they contend, gravely weaken, and may well destroy it. They feel that we students of federalism are not taking our subject seriously enough to see this inherent frailty. We do not get to the heart of the matter. Our thoughts lack real federal theory/' a failing they propose to remedy. My criticism may be set right by the longer text of the book. Be that as it may, the intellectual stimulus which I have experienced by attempting this critique testifies at any rate in my opinion to the merit of their work. They propose to raise the level of our understanding of federalism by examining this type of structure from the viewpoint of two familiar perspectives of social positivism and interpretivism. I heartily approve of this procedure. It is an ingenious analytic device, illuminating facts and posing important questions. The two methods of inquiry reveal different aspects of human activity. The positivist conducts his inquiry by external observation in the manner of physics, chemistry, biology, and other natural sciences. Positivist social science, write Rubin and Feeley, ...begins from the base-level assumption that human beings... have an identifiable internal structure that governs their response to identifiable external forces. Both the internal structure of human beings and the forces that act upon them can be discerned by an external observer, that is, through the techniques of empirical observation. In contrast, interpretive social science begins from the base-level assumption that human action is primarily determined by an internal process that exists within the mind of each person and is not fully accessible to external