Compromise and the American Founding

Alin Fumurescu is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston. In 2013, he won the American Political Science Association's Leo Strauss Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of political philosophy. He is the author of Compromise: A Political and Philosophical History (Cambridge, 2013), which has been translated into Chinese and Romanian. He has written several book chapters on compromise in edited volumes, and he is regularly invited guest speaker to international conferences on compromise.

'The American political tradition has always been driven by principle, and yet somehow open to compromise. In this unprecedented work, Alin Fumurescu investigates how colonists and early Americans - largely through competing and evolving conceptualizations of 'the people' - re-imagined the nature of compromise, its potentials and perils. In light of our current, increasingly polarized and uncompromising politics, the nuanced analysis here is as timely as it is valuable.' Robert Martin, Hamilton College

• 1. Introduction: 'one political being called a people …'; 1.1. One people, two bodies; 1.2. Compromise and the challenge of realism; 1.3. E Pluribus Unum; the people's two bodies – then and now; 2. The uncompromising Puritans: 'If the whole conclave of hell can so compromise …'; 2.1. '… Puritanism was in the eye of the beholder'; 2.2. '… As the entrails of a creature cut down the back'; 2.3. '… They look backward as well as forward'; 2.4. '… They don't weigh the intellectual furniture …'; 2.5. '… Until a better light will be available to guide them'; 3. The uncompromising patriots: 'friends, brethren, enemies will prove …'; 3.1. '… We are breaking to pieces in our churches'; 3.2. In the wake of the awakening; 3.3. 'How then do we new Englandermen derive our laws?'; 3.4. The king 'unkings himself'; 4. The compromising confederates: '… mounting a body of mermaids on alligators'; 4.1. '… A rope of sand'; 4.2. 'We are the state'; 4.3. '… Mutual sacrifices should be made to effect a compromise …'; 5. The constitution: '… that greatest of all compromises'; 5.1. 'The states must see the rod …'; 5.2. '… To smoke the calumet of union and love'; 5.3. 'The house on fire must be extinguished …'; 5.4. 'It will wait upon the ladies at their toilett …'; 6. 'This is essentially a people's contest': 'Shall we compromise?'; 6.1. '… Fresh from the loins of the people …'; 6.2. 'Party spirit … only ask to lick the sores of the body politic'; 6.3. 'The day of compromise has passed'; 7. Conclusions: resuscitating the people's two bodies; 7.1. Parties without partisanship?; 7.2. Purged Individualism and Facebook; 7.3. “We, the people …'.