For all of the conceptual ambiguity associated with the term “populism,” at least one thing is certain: populists are uncompromising. Whether on the right or left, it is safe to say that a populist is someone who rejects the politics of elite compromise in the name of the pure people. As Alin Fumurescu’s new book suggests, the association of populism with uncompromising purity is apt, because populism is an inheritance of early modern Puritanism. However, it is only a partial inheritance. Populism, as Fumurescu argues, constitutes one side of the Janus-faced tradition launched by the Puritans.
Fumurescu’s ambitious book develops an intriguing theoretical framework for explaining the development of American political ideas, centering on the notion of the people’s two bodies. The author refers to the paradigm as a “foundational double-helix,” inaugurated by the Puritans and refined until the Civil War, which has defined the contours of the American tradition. It consists in a dual understanding of the people as both “a collection of equal individuals, ruled by a majority of wills” and “a corporation, hierarchically structured, ruled by reason for the sake of the common good” (p. 2). According to Fumurescu, the versatility of the American political tradition is attributable to the fact that it has never fully committed to either understanding, permitting political actors to flexibly alternate between the two ideas as necessary. Fumurescu’s hope is that recovering this mostly forgotten history of the people’s two bodies will enable us to more skillfully navigate between the present-day Scylla and Charybdis of populism and elitism and to facilitate the restoration of a politics of compromise.
Across seven chapters, the book provides a chronological account of the founding of the American people (distinguished from the American founding simpliciter). After a substantive introduction, chapter 2 begins the story in colonial New England, where Puritan settlers first practically experimented with a “bidimensional covenant” that combined a horizontal agreement “between equal individuals to create a new theologico-political people” with a vertical agreement “between this newly formed people and its elected aristocracy of merit” (p. 29). Fumurescu then tracks the dialectic of the people’s two bodies through the Great Awakening and Colonial Crisis (in chapter 3), arguing that disputes between colonists and Parliament intensified as each side rallied around a distinct understanding of the people, each with a corresponding vision of legitimate representation. Chapter 4 explores independence-era state constitution-making, which the author interprets in light of the people’s egalitarian body, and the Articles of Confederation, which he suggests replicated features of the corporatist model. The book thereafter attends, in chapter 5, to “that greatest of all compromises” (p. 139)—the Constitution of 1787—explaining how the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention deftly combined the people’s two bodies in a document authorized in the name of a people that it strategically neglected to define. Chapter 6 shows how at least some of the compromises struck at the convention led to mounting contestation over the definition of “the people” in the lead-up to the Civil War, which by war’s end culminated in a final settlement on a national understanding of the demos (over a conception of multiple state peoples). The book closes with a provocative conclusion, applying its theoretical framework to a range of contemporary phenomena, including partisanship, Facebook, and identity politics.
Overall, the book is rich with theoretical and historical insight, and specialists in American political thought will find much of interest in each of the chapters. Scholars of religion and politics will take special interest in the central importance the author places on Christian theology in the origin and development of American political ideas. More generally, it is difficult not to admire the meticulous research and exceptional erudition displayed throughout the book. The author exhibits an impressive facility with both the primary and secondary literatures and seldom shies away from an astute digression when the opportunity arises. Alongside developing the theoretical paradigm of the people’s two bodies, the book also closely attends to shifting understandings of the individual, building on Fumurescu’s earlier (2013) work, Compromise: A Political and Philosophical History. Indeed, the author imports much of the conceptual vocabulary developed in the previous book—although, unfortunately, not all of it is adequately explained to the reader.
Despite the book’s many merits, it bears noting a few weaknesses. The book’s richness and sophistication often manifest in a dense and freighted reading experience. Quotations from primary and secondary sources abound, including some extensive block quotes from the scholarly literature, many of which may strike the reader as unnecessary and cumbersome. More substantively, despite purporting to address popular sovereignty “in a more creative way than democratic theory does today” (p. 9), there is minimal engagement with either contemporary democratic theory or recent scholarship on the history of popular sovereignty. This is surprising given the recent torrent of research on “the people,” popular sovereignty, and populism. Indeed, readers acquainted with this literature may find the claim that the people possess “two bodies” unsurprising, if not familiar. This is not merely because, as the author briefly notes in a footnote, the phrase was previously used by Edmund Morgan, Sheldon Wolin, and Eric Santner, but also because a number of prominent political theorists have already described the people to be two-sided—from Bonnie Honig’s claim that the people is always and also a multitude (Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy, 2009), to Jason Frank’s conception of the “double inscription” of the people as both constituted and constituent power (Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America, 2010), to Richard Tuck’s historical reconstruction of the orienting distinction between (popular) sovereignty and government (The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy, 2016). The reader is left wondering how Fumurescu’s framework of the people’s two bodies builds on, departs from, or modifies the various positions staked out in this well-grooved literature. Indeed, throughout the book each of the people’s two bodies is affiliated with a motley constellation of ideas (on the one hand: democracy, liberal contractarianism, majoritarianism, individualism, and populism; on the other: republicanism, covenantalism, hierarchy, federalism, and technocracy) whose relationship to one another goes unexplained, making the paradigm difficult to situate within the landscape of contemporary theory.
Democratic theorists are likely to find unsatisfying the book’s uncritical attitude toward the question of the people’s boundaries. In what sense can the Puritans—who preceded the formation of the American state by more than a century—be said to have contributed to making the American people? If we concede the Puritans’ place, then why not indigenous Americans or enslaved Africans or even settlers in colonial Virginia? Fumurescu suggests “for the making of the American people… these groups… have provided less important contributions, insofar as the idea of a people implies a certain set of contrived beliefs” (p. 1; emphasis in original). Although the author establishes the influence of the Puritans’ ideas, the framing nonetheless seems to presuppose the givenness of the very people in question—a presumption that recent democratic theory has deeply problematized. Moreover, the issue of boundaries raises the question of race, which is sidelined in the book (despite some scant discussion of slavery in chapter 6) but which has often sharply marked the limits of American peoplehood. Indeed, the racialized exclusions foundational to the American polity may be understood as the frequent cost of compromise. Which raises the question, Is this a cost we can afford? The answer, of course, depends on who “we” are, which is fortuitously a question for which Fumurescu’s book provides important food for thought.
