'DIVIDING SOVEREIGNTY': FEDERALISMO Y REPUBLICANISMO EN LA TEORÍA POLÍTICA DE JAMES MADISON

This paper explores the inner theoretical relationship between republicanism and federalism in the political thought of James Madison. In fact federalism is conceived from his point of view as a cultural and institutional device to build a true democratic government in a modern big country as the United States of America. This “happy combination” of republicanism and federalism, goes hand by hand with a design of the Union, not as a “consolidated” and centralized one, as Hamilton defended; but as quite distinctive system “partly national, partly federal”, where the states’ rights were protected in their substantive self-government and in their participation with free own voice in the general shared-government of the Union. Moreover, the political and theoretical differences between Madison and Hamilton, were notorious not only respecting the whole conception of the American State, but also reach decisively another field: what kind of Nation “America” was to be. This principled and deep differences about the nature of the American democracy (based in the “vigor of government” or in the principles of republican revolution), the model of American federalism (consolidated and eroding the state’s powers or decentralized based on “dividing sovereignty”) and the nature of the American Nation (urban and industrialist “Great commercial society” or rural and commercial republic of the republics), gave birth to the creation of the Republican Party (with Thomas Jefferson) –The Democratic Party after Jackson– and the first American party system. consolidation.