Hybrid | The Fragile Power of Political Nations: Adam Smith’s Federative

The Fragile Power of Political Nations: Adam Smith’s Federative

Speaker: Professor Thomas Poole, Professor of Law, LSE

Chair: Dr Ewan Smith, Associate Professor of Public Law, UCL Laws

About this event

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.

About the speaker

Thomas Poole joined LSE in 2006, and has been Professor of Law since 2015. His research interests include UK constitutional and administrative law, legal and political theory, foreign relations law, constitutional history, law and empire, and the history of political thought. He is author of Reason of State: Law, Prerogative and Empire (Cambridge, 2015) and co-editor of volumes on Hobbes and the Law (Cambridge, 2012), Law, Liberty and State: Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law (Cambridge, 2015) and The Double-Facing Constitution: Legal Externalities and the Reshaping of Constitutional Order (Cambridge, 2019).

Tom is General Editor of the Modern Law Review and General Editor of the Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Law (with David Dyzenhaus).. He also sits on the editorial boards of Public Law Review, Human Rights Law Review and the NILS UK Law Review. Tom has held visiting positions the University of New South Wales (2003-4 & 2005-6), the European University Institute (2007), Melbourne University (2008), the University of Toronto (2008), Princeton University (2008), Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas (2013-14), Auckland University (2016) and the University of Western Australia (2017).

About the Chair 

Dr Ewan Smith joined UCL Laws as Associate Professor of Public Law in 2022. Prior to that he was a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, the Shaw Foundation Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and an Early Career Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights.

Ewan read law at Oxford, at the University of Paris and at Harvard Law School. He has previously worked at Peking, Tsinghua and Renmin Universities in China and at the National University of Singapore. In 2023, Ewan was a Hauser Global Fellow at New York University Law School and in 2024 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Bologna. 

Ewan is admitted to practice in New York, where he worked for Debevoise and Plimpton LLP. Between 2005 and 2015, he worked for the UK Foreign Office.

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