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Compromise and the American Founding: The Quest for the People’s Two Bodies. By Fumurescu Alin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 266 p. $99.99 cloth.
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,...