Editorial
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/001955612015010v |
| Subject Matter | Article |
v
EDITORIAL
Greetings to the readers from a new editor!
Public Administration is a
new
and dynamic discipline with modem
parameters but ancient roots. Like other modem social sciences, it developed
in the wake
of
the crystallisation
of
the modem nation-state born in the trail
of
the bourgeois revolution
in
France in 1789.
It
was Germany, however,
which produced the first major classic theoretician
of
the nation-state in
Hegel in the 18th century.
It
was, however, the Idealist theory
of
state in
need
of
liberal democratic reorientations
by
John Stuart Mill, Mcivor,
Harold Laski and others.
The bourgeois revolution in the United States
of
America (USA)
triggered
by
the American War oflndependence {l 775· 1782), on the other
hand, produced the first federal nation-state -in a democratic reincarnation
of
the Tudor monarchy
of
the United Kingdom (UK)
of
England, Scotland,
Wales, and Ireland (now Northern Ireland). This pioneering federal state
was fabricated in the first written Constitution made
by
the Philadelphia
Convention
in
1787 (after the failed Articles
of
Confederation drafted by
the Continental Congress). The earliest major classic theoretical exposition
of
this model
of
government -the preferred term
in
Anglo-American
tradition had been 'government' as against the European penchant for the
term 'state' -are (
i) The Federalist ( 1987) authored
by
Alexander Hamilton,
James Madison, and John Jay, all among the prominent makers
of
the US
Constitution; and
(ii)
Democracy in America (2 volumes) (English Trans.
1945)
by
Alexis
De
Tocqueville, a French traveller across the USA in 1831
for nine months. In uniting previously independent states, the Americans
crafted a constitutional contract premised on a combination
of
the theory
of
separation
of
powers they borrowed from Montesquieu and John Locke in
European political tradition and their own newly devised theory
of
federal
division
of
powers, creating
in
the process the mechanism
of
institutional
checks and balances.
Canada adopted the first parliamentary-federal Constitution in 1867,
followed
by
Australia in
1901
, departing from the US presidential-federal
model. India was the first Afro-Asian country to adopt a similar Constitution
in
1950 in the British Commonwealth parliamentary-federal tradition. These
constitutions seek to combine contradictory principles
of
parliamentary
centralism with federal decentralism in view
of
their considerable cultural
To continue reading
Request your trial