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

Abstract

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.