Rousseau, the American Puritans, and the Founding of the People's Two Bodies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3970627 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alin Fumurescu (0000-0002-8343-9136, University of Houston), Haimo Li (0000-0002-5470-3153, School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University, 220 Handan Rd., Yangpu District, Shanghai 200437, China, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 706-724 |
| Publication date | 2023-10-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The European Legacy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1084-8770 • E-ISSN: 1470-1316 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10848770.2023.2242637 |
| OpenAlex | W4385549371 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 33 |
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
Art · Environmental ethics · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · European Political History Analysis · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence
Inventing the People
The Religious Roots of the First Amendment
Democratic sovereignty and democratic government
Natural Rights Liberalism from Locke to Nozick
Thomas Jefferson's Library
The Autobiographies of Noah Webster
Revolutionary New England, 1691-1776
The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine
Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787
Fame and the Founding Fathers
The Conservative Tradition in America
Contested Truths
The First American Constitutions
Thomas Paine's American Ideology
Toward Democracy
The Communion of Citizens
The People’s Two Bodies
The Early History of the Tradition of the Constitution
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |