THE ENDS OF FEDERALISM

Abstract

To preserve federalism or to modify it or to make it effective and equitable are considerations that obviously raise the question of what precisely federalism is. But to ask what federalism is should raise instantly also the question of what human purposes or ends we seek to have it serve. Indeed it is only in the light of the ends of federalism that the nature of federalism becomes visible. All political institutions and processes are intelligible only in the light of the purposes or ends for which men devise them or which, unintentionally, they come to serve. They have no nature or meaningful pattern, nothing worth human attention, save with regard to such purposes or ends. So to speak, political things are the way they serve or fail to serve the ends sought from them. Serve or fail to serve-there's the rub. Institutions are subtle and recalcitrant things. They are not neutral with respect to human purposes; rather each institution and process has its peculiar propensity to produce certain outcomes and not others. But it is not easy to know these propensities, to know which institutions andprocesses are best suited for what ends. Accordingly, human beings often do not do their political work well. They seek more than a given institution can supply, or they seek from it contradictory ends, or they blend processes which work at cross-purposes, etc. Thus deliberate purposes often give way to or become blended with unintended purposes, which institutions generate from their natures. What men want and, as it were, what their institutions want, blend and blur in the practical unfolding of affairs. From this mixture of human intention and institutional nature arises much of the frustration of political life, its confusions, tensions, failures, and partial successes. This is the perspective within which federalism must be understood-as a political arrangement made intelligible only by the ends men seek to make it serve, and by the amenability or recalcitrance of federalism to those ends. At various times, men have sought varying