Civil Society Watch

The question of the one and the many, of unity and diversity, has been posed since the beginning of political thought in the West. The American Founders were well aware of the vexations attendant upon the creation of a new political body. They worked with, and against, a stock of metaphors that had previously served as the symbolic vehicles of political incorporation. As men of the Enlightenment, they rejected the images of the body politic that had dominated medieval and early modern political thinking. For a Jefferson or a Madison such tropes as "the King's two bodies" or John of Salisbury's twelfth century rendering, in his Policraticus, of a body politic with the Prince as the head and animating force of other members, were too literalist, too strongly corporatist, and too specifically Christian, to serve the novus ordo saeclorum. But they were nonetheless haunted by Hebrew and Christian metaphors of a covenanted polity: the body is one but has many members. There is, there can be, unity with diversity.