A government of limited powers 3attack, and which would have the basic unity through a common currency to
provide the opportunity for economic development. But they did not wish to
destroy the states, or to strip them of their role as the main sources of civil
and criminal law for their citizens. They therefore invented a modern system
of federalism, in which the functions of government were divided between
the newly created government of the United States and the governments
of the states. Their second concern was to create a government which was
strong enough to provide stability for an emerging nation but which would
not be dominated either by a single person or by the elected representa-
tives of the people. They were equally afraid of autocracy and of mob rule.
They adopted a system of separation of powers, setting up barriers between
the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, giving them
the ability to check each other’s actions. It is this combination of federalism
and the separation of powers that gives to the United States its particular
characteristic as a system of limited government, in which no single part of
the system has the power to dictate to the others. The result is the complex
process of policy-making that we will explore in later chapters. Having cre-
ated the structures of government in the Constitution they then turned to the
setting up of the Bill of Rights of 1791, reflecting their fear that the new
government might abuse its power and oppress its citizens. The Bill of Rights
set further restrictions on the power of governments, initially limiting the
power of the federal government and later the powers of state governments,
in ways which are of considerable importance today, particularly in the field
of civil rights.
Federalism
The United States is a federal system of government, in which fifty individual
states each have their own position of legal autonomy and political signifi-
cance, sharing authority and functions with the central government, which,
rather confusingly, is called ‘the federal government’. When the thirteen
original states came together in 1787 to draft a constitution they wished to
unite in order to be able to provide for their common defence and to ensure
that certain essential activities were performed by the future ‘Government
of the United States’. They did not wish to lose their individual identities, or
to give up their power to control those matters which directly affected their
own citizens. Virginia and New York, Massachusetts and South Carolina were
proud of their separate communities, and of the considerable degree of au-
tonomy that they had enjoyed under the distant rule of the British Parlia-
ment. They therefore rejected the particular form of the unitary nation-state
that had been established in Britain and France in which all legal power,
‘sovereignty’, was concentrated in the hands of the central government. They
placed sovereignty in the Constitution, and distributed the powers of govern-
ment between the states and the federal government, so that neither level of
government was all-powerful, neither could simply control the other.