5 - The Constitution

Summary

I suggest that the main reason why the Constitution was, for generations to come, reverentially referred to as “the greatest of all compromises” was not primarily because it set up an example of how meaningful compromises can be reached by combining appeals to interests and to affections, but because it formalized with a surprising degree of success the paradigm of the people’s two bodies. The fact that the famous three words that open the Constitution, “We the People,” were never elaborated upon in the text that followed, far from being a weakness, allowed a lot of room for maneuver in defining “the people.” The result was a written compromise between the two understanding of the people, qua corporation of corporations, hierarchically structured, on the one hand, and qua collection of equal individuals, on the other. One might argue that it formalized for centuries to come the paradigm of the people’s two bodies, this peculiarly American foundational double helix.