ABSTRACT
Federalism is an American invention. For most of human history,people thought that governments had to be highly centralized, as inmonarchy or tyranny, or highly decentralized, as in loose confederations of sovereign states. The U.S. Founders thought that carefully written constitutions allowed two levels of government, national and state, to act over the same territory and people simultaneously. Yet, the Founders were practical men; they knew that shared powers invited conflict. The struggle between national and state actors for the power and resources to define and address the dominant issues of American political life is a permanent feature of American federalism.
