Rousseau, the American Puritans, and the Founding of the People’s Two Bodies

ABSTRACT

Rousseau’s influence throughout the American founding has been a subject of disagreement for almost three centuries. In this article we claim that this disagreement reveals some enduring misunderstandings of the concept of ‘the people’. Almost a century before Rousseau was born, the American Puritans actually created a people that came to resemble Rousseau’s theoretical distinction between the Will of All and the General Will (the people’s two bodies), that is, between the people understood as a collection of individuals ruled by the will of the majority, and the people understood as an organic whole ruled by reason for the common good. We show that though coming from different perspectives, the Puritans and Rousseau arrived at surprisingly similar conclusions regarding the need to balance the people’s two bodies. Theoretically, one can understand both the ambivalent attitude of the Americans toward Rousseau, and the disputes between the partisans of a republican, conservative American founding, and those who advocated a liberal and revolutionary founding, as well as the repeated attempts to propose some kind of synthesis of the two approaches. Yet practically attempting to strike the proper balance between the people’s two bodies was and remains an endeavor that comes with both great opportunities and great dangers for any people, for, whenever this balance is disrupted, the results can be catastrophic.

KEYWORDS:

• Rousseau
• American Puritans
• the People’s Two Bodies
• social contract
• political contract

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Spurlin, Rousseau in America, 18.

^2. Dame, Political Literature, xx.

^3. Adams, First American Constitutions, 225.

^4. See, for example, Dotts, Educational Foundations, 85–86; Merkl, “Popular Sovereignty,” 453.

^5. See, for example, Daly, Rousseau’s Constitutionalism, 42; Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, 421–23; Nelson, Thomas Paine, 185.

^6. Leuba, “Rousseau et le milieu calviniste de sa jeunesse,” 11–51. See also Mason, “The Communion of Citizens,” 25–49.

^7. Murphy, “An American General Will,” 200.

^8. Fumurescu, Compromise and the American Founding; Fumurescu, “The People’s Two Bodies,” 842–53.

^9. It would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of the Puritan legacy in the founding, but it would be equally exaggerated to reduce its role to a mere influence among many others.

^10. Quoted in Haddorff, Dependence and Freedom, 123.

^11. See Rodgers, Contested Truths, 114.

^12. Gervinus, Introduction to the History, 98. For other authors that sided with Bushnell at the time one finds William T. Brantly (1880), James B. Bryce (1888), David Ritchie (1893). For people arguing in favor of Rousseau’s major influence on the founding, see Thomas H. Green (1886), Lewis H. Meader (1899), and Henry J. Tozer (1895).

^13. To give just a few examples from a plethora that is impossible to cover here: In the first camp—Laski, Political Thought in England, 165–66; Zuckert, Natural Right and the American Imagination, 9. In the second camp—Adams, Political Ideas of the American Revolution, 164; Ball and Pocock, Conceptual Change and the Constitution, 102. In the third camp—Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, 19; Bloom, “Rousseau’s Critique of Liberal Constitutionalism,” 160.

^14. Rousseau, The Essential Writings, 89.

^15. DePlato, American Democracy, 143.

^16. O’Hara, Conservatism, 141. See also Rosenblatt and Schweigert, Thinking with Rousseau, 2.

^17. Lund, Rousseau’s Rejuvenation, 213.

^18. Ibid., 2. In this camp, we also have scholars such as Billias, American Constitutionalism Heard, 180, 406; Broadwater, Jefferson, Madison, and the Making, 12–13; Glendon, The Forum and the Tower, 124; Miller, The Religious Roots, 5.

^19. Davis, A Colonial Southern Bookshelf, 39.

^20. Bentley, Journal of a Visit to Paris, 60, 61.

^21. Tuck, “Democratic Sovereignty and Democratic Government,” 137–38.

^22. Tröhler, Languages of Education, 213.

^23. See Dabydeen, Gilmore, and Jones, The Oxford Companion, 128; Bonwick, English Radicals, 8–9.

^24. Moore, How to Create the Perfect Wife, 207.

^25. Ibid., 101.

^26. Adams, Revolutionary New England, 288–89.

^27. See Otis, The Collected Political Writings.

^28. Moore, Slavery and the Making, 65–66.

^29. Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology, 138.

^30. See McAlexander, “The Creation of the American Eve,” 254–60.

^31. Trent, et al., Cambridge History of American Literature, 119.

^32. Paine, The Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. 1, 150.

^33. Paine, The Complete Writings, 299.

^34. Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 11, 349–50.

^35. Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 5, 577.

^36. Jefferson, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 7, 56–57.

^37. See Gilreath and Wilson, Thomas Jefferson’s Library, 47, 80.

^38. Wilson, Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, see “Introduction,” 3–20.

^39. See Webster’s Memoir Number 12 in A Collection of Papers, and Webster’s October 1804 letter to James Kent, in Rollins, The Autobiographies of Noah Webster, 89–93.

^40. Webster, A Collection of Papers, 9–10.

^41. Webster, An oration pronounced, 13.

^42. Quoted in Webster, Sketches of American Policy, xiii.

^43. Adams, Works of John Adams, 148.

^44. See also Ryerson, John Adams’s Republic, 72.

^45. Quoted in Guttmann, The Conservative Tradition in America, 25.

^46. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, 286.

^47. Rousseau, The Social Contract, in Political Writings, 52.

^48. Ibid., 53–54.

^49. Ibid., 71–73.

^50. Ibid., 76.

^51. Ibid., 68.

^52. Ibid., 77.

^53. Ibid., 74–75 (emphasis added).

^54. Robertson, The Original Compromise, 7.

^55. King, The Founding Fathers v. the People, 32–33.

^56. Quoted in Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, 349.

^57. King, The Founding Fathers v. the People, 29.

^58. See, for example, Womersley, Liberty and American Experience.

^59. Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland,” in Political Writings, 161.

^60. Ibid., 251 (emphasis added).

^61. Rousseau, Letter to Beaumont, Seventh Letter, 245. The Edict of Mediation (also known as the Act of Mediation) Rousseau refers to was a compromise orchestrated by the powers of Zurich, Berne, and France (1738), which put an end to the civil strife between the Francophone elites of Geneva and the Calvinist populists, as yet another attempt to reconcile the people’s two bodies.

^62. Rousseau, Letter to Beaumont, Eighth Letter, 256.

^63. Ibid., 245.

^64. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, The Federalist, 455.

^65. See Morgan, Inventing the People, 13.

^66. Rousseau, “Constitutional Project for Corsica,” in Political Writings, 293.

^67. Knupfer, The Union as It Is, 60.

^68. Quoted in Schechter, “The Early History,” 733.

^69. Rousseau, “Constitutional Project for Corsica,” 288.

^70. Ibid., 289.

^71. Ibid., 326.

^72. Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland,” in ‘The Social Contract’ and Other Later Political Writings, 188.

^73. Mayville, John Adams and the Fear, 125.

^74. For an extensive account of the love of fame as a positive motivation during the founding, see Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers, esp. 14–19.

^75. Quoted in Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, 351.

^76. Qunicy Adams, The Social Compact, 8 (emphasis in the original). It should be noted, however, that his understanding of the philosophers he mentions in his lecture is seriously flawed.

^77. Foster, Their Solitary Way, xvi.

^78. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism, xxiv.

^79. Cotton & all (1649), A Platform …, quoted in Frohnen, The American Republic, 53.

^80. Winthrop, Little Speech on Liberty, 34 (emphasis added).

^81. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 14–15.

^82. Ibid., 15.

^83. Stark, Safeguards of the Social Bond, 92.

^84. Little, Essays on Religion and Human Rights, 245–46 (emphasis added).

^85. Quoted in Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins, 18, 17.

^86. Oakes, New England Pleaded With, quoted in Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, 71.

^87. Goodwin, Auto-Machia, n.p.

^88. Quoted in Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins, 16.

^89. Miller, The New England Mind, 53, 56.

^90. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 18–19, 19.

^91. Zuckert, “Natural Rights and Imperial Constitutionalism,” 27–55.

^92. Noll, America’s God, 10.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alin Fumurescu

Alin Fumurescu, PhD, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston, TX, USA. Aside from articles and book chapters, he has published Compromise: A Political and Philosophical History (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Compromise and the American Founding: The Quest for the People’s Two Bodies (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and, with Anna Marisa Schoen, Foundations of American Political Thought: Readings and Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Haimo Li

Haimo Li, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University, Shanghai, China. His academic interest lies in American political thought and contemporary Democratic theory. His publications have appeared in History of Political Thought, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, and Studies in Burke and His Time.