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359 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1965)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0359 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD A volume of essays which probes the central characteristics of the American sys- tem of intergovernmental relations needs no special introduction. In recent years there has emerged a significant quantity of literature, much of it in a scholarly vein, seeking to capture and interpret the essential attributes of our indigenous fed- eralism. Like one's perception of the Grand Canyon or the Mona Lisa, however, such an interpretation depends in the last analysis upon the background, expecta- tions, and value judgments of the interpreter. Most writing on American federalism has traditionally been philosophical and legalistic in nature. Particularly is this true of just about all of the very late eighteenth-century, and much of the nineteenth-century, commentaries on this sub- ject. Debates over the Founding Fathers' intent about the relations among the levels of government and how to implement it, both in the formative period and in the subsequent crises of an intergovernmental nature generated by slavery, seces- sion, reconstruction, and industrial expansion, provided the raw material for this reflective, often abstract approach. The ever-present concern about pragmatic fac- tors, inescapable in a viable economic and political system, successfully minimized at the operating level any sterile preoccupation with principles of federalism for their own sake; or, worse, entanglement in the still more uncertain quest for spe- cificity regarding the meaning of those principles in terms of 1787 and the proper inferences to be drawn from them in chronologically and ecologically different situa- tions. As a consequence, politicians maneuvered and administrators administered within and among our levels of government, while scholars detachedly ruminated. The former displayed little interest in-or awareness of-conceptualizations by which to steer or with which to make somewhat better sense out of why and whither they steered. And the latter, freely conceptualizing, largely were devoid of re- alistic insights into the dynamic nature of our federal system and the patterns of intergovernmental relations it evoked. The result was an errant understanding of the character of that system, deriving from traditional or classical deductive scholarship. Obviously where major prem- ises were faulty or irrelevant the conclusions deriving from them would prove no less unsound. The long-prevalent image of the nature of intergovernmental rela- tionships in the United States was one of virtually self-contained, nonassociating levels of government, except in somewhat unique or noncontinuous circumstances. One noted student of the Constitution designated this legally perceived arrange- ment dual federalism. The important point here remains the practically general absence of any predisposing orientation towards scientific, objective inquiries into the political and functional or operating-as contrasted with the legal-character of American federalism. Lord Bryce was probably the major single exception, in terms of his writings, before the era of the Great Depression. While it is true that the nature of the operating interrelationships among the levels of government in the American system prior to the early' 1930's was less in- tricate and systematized than they would become following the advent of the New Deal, it is perhaps even truer that our frame of reference for understanding the more complex patterns of emergent federalism was indistinct. This evolving com- ix

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