Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This lecture is part of the International Law Association (British Branch) Lecture Series
This article examines Adam Smith’s concept of the federative: the double-facing constitutional power to conduct international relations today called the treaty or foreign affairs power. We reconstruct Smith’s account of the federative from his major and minor works and demonstrate its importance in his account of law and empire. We first examine Smith’s early “internal federative”, where the power grows from the internal constitutional organisation of the state. What starts as a democratic right to wage war and make peace becomes concentrated over time in the sovereign and its advisors as a “senatoriall” power.
We then turn to the “external federative” in Smith’s later works where the federative is redesigned as a power to unify colonial legislative bodies, connecting the familial sentiments of Britain and America, and forming a model for moving, slowly, towards the conditions Smith deemed necessary for international justice.
This lecture is part of the International Law Association (British Branch) Lecture Series
This article examines Adam Smith’s concept of the federative: the double-facing constitutional power to conduct international relations today called the treaty or foreign affairs power. We reconstruct Smith’s account of the federative from his major and minor works and demonstrate its importance in his account of law and empire. We first examine Smith’s early “internal federative”, where the power grows from the internal constitutional organisation of the state. What starts as a democratic right to wage war and make peace becomes concentrated over time in the sovereign and its advisors as a “senatoriall” power.
We then turn to the “external federative” in Smith’s later works where the federative is redesigned as a power to unify colonial legislative bodies, connecting the familial sentiments of Britain and America, and forming a model for moving, slowly, towards the conditions Smith deemed necessary for international justice.
