Failure of Articles of Confederation

The Articles of Confederation failed to provide a substantial enough defense for the protection of states against the interest of foreign powers, and from the confliction of interests in and between states. This failure led to the conception of a national or federalized state. The question of how to correct the problem of a coherently unified defense against foreign power was easily answered with the creation of a national army; but how could this new government protect states’ interests from themselves within the confines of a democratic governmental system? I contend that through the bureaucratization of a federalized system the early American government was able to use the same state based interest that hindered the survival of the confederacy to sustain the feasibility of the newly formed state.
The blueprint for this bureaucratization can be traced to the Madisonian model of government. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison comes to the realization that “ the latent cau...