This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Federalist Papers" by Alexander Hamilton. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.
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How do you define a confederation? Is a confederacy a good or bad government structure?
The definition of confederation is an association of independent states or political communities. Confederacies have a weaker national government.
Read more about how to define a confederation and understand the strengths and weaknesses of confederacies.
How to Define Confederation
A confederation is a form of government that loosely unites states or political communities that are otherwise independent. They are an inherently unstable and weak form of government. Under a confederacy, the overarching state tends to lack the proper authority to perform important central functions like raising an army, administering justice, collecting revenue, or regulating coinage, because its constituent members are too powerful and can block any initiative.
There is a general problem that can define confederations (all of them)—the central government could act upon the states of which it was composed, but not upon the actual people of those states. The states, not the people, were the fundamental political units. The Articles of Confederation were no exception.
As a confederacy, the Articles of Confederation created an association of independent states. It was an inherently unstable and weak form of government. The central government lacked the strength to perform important functions like raising an army, administering justice, collecting revenue, or regulating coinage, because the individual states were too powerful and could block any initiative.
This issue was one that could define confederation governments going back to the days of ancient Greece. They were beyond salvation because the entire system of government they created was inherently unworkable; they needed to be discarded and replaced wholesale.
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- The genius of the founding fathers in how they designed the United States Constitution
- Why it was critical for the United States to form a union rather than stay separated as colonies
- How Alexander Hamilton anticipated social issues that are still relevant today
