TY - JOUR
AU - Simeon, Richard
AB - 206 Publius/Summer 1996 The British Tradition of Federalism, by Michael Burgess. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and London: Leicester University Press, 1995, 197 pp., $39.50 cloth. When asked to review a volume on The British Tradition of Federalism, this reviewer assumed that both the book and the review would be very short. The conventional wisdom is that federalist ideas in Great Britain have always fallen on stony soil. The British emphasis on the unitary state, and especially on parliamentary sovereignty (which A. V. Dicey elevated "al- most to a deity" in British constitutional tfiought) is fundamentally hostile to the idea of shared and divided sovereignty embedded in federalism thought. Recently, the animus of Thatcherite thinking against federal ideal, whether expressed internally in terms of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, externally in relations to the development of the European Union, or do- mestically in relation to the devolution of powers from London to the re- gions, has reinforced the view that the British might often wish federalism for others, but never for themselves. Michael Burgess, one of Great Britain's leading students of federalism, sets out to challenge this conventional wisdom. His goal is to demonstrate that there is 
TI - Book Reviews
JF - Publius: The Journal of Federalism
DO - 10.1093/oxfordjournals.pubjof.a029868
DA - 1996-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/book-reviews-h70B36qlb2
SP - 206
EP - 208
VL - 26
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -