Johannes Althusius was a notable German philosopher of the 17th Century, best known for his 1603 book Politica, in which he described a concept of federal polity. Essentially, the Althusian model holds that a properly functioning society consists of numerous individual facets of government, in which many smaller political bodies with rights of their own peacefully co-exist; the purpose of the king in such a society would be minimal beyond security and protection of the existing rights, rather than an all-powerful central government with sole responsibility for making and enforcing laws.

By contrast, English thinker of the same century Thomas Hobbes envisioned a far different societal model in his 1651 work Leviathan. As opposed to the significance of local, regional, and other smaller forms of government outlined in Althusius’ view, the Hobbesian model prefers a singular central government unit to which all under it are solely subordinate. Such a massive central government in this case is endowed ultimate power and control over all individuals within its jurisdiction. In recent centuries, this view has taken precedent over the more conservative Althusian model.

The Althusian and Hobbesian models coincide directly with two distinct theories that have been proposed with respect to the United States of America: the compact theory and the nationalist theory. The former holds that state and local governments each reserve their rights, and that the overarching national government simply binds these smaller entities together for the purposes of protection–not to rule over them. This, of course, resembles the Althusian model, whereas the nationalist theory embodies the Hobbesian view, holding that the central government is the unchallenged authority.

Promoters of the compact theory insist that the United States was founded under such a pretense, due to the very fact that the states existed before there ever was a central government binding them together, and further evidenced by the wording used in the Constitution–referring to the states not as a singular entity, but rather in a plural manner for the collective states–indicating that the Founding Fathers themselves viewed the new nation as a group of states, rather than as having been merged into a singular entity.🔹