ABSTRACT
OF all the distinctive features of the political system of Althusius none is perhaps so striking as the spirit of Federalism which pervades it from bottom to top. While the construction of society in the form of a corporatively articulated whole was an essential idea of the purely medieval system, yet there was this difference, that while the medieval construction was from the top downward, we have here by means of the social contract a reconstruction from the bottom upward. It is even more remarkable that in Althusius this federalistic structure appears in conjunction with that same sharply defined and concentrated idea of sovereignty which had dissolved the medieval idea of the articulated body of society and was henceforth the great lever of all centralizing efforts.
