The soul of the polity: Beginnings of American constitutional thought

The Constitution of the United States is not simply a system of government designed to preserve, protect, and defend the wealth, interests, and property of those who wrote it. The American founding text also seeks to serve as a reflection of what its people imagine themselves to be. In earlier theories of constitution, such as in Plato\u27s Republic, this process of looking to the people and their beliefs about who they were in designing a constitutional order was seen as the process of linking aspects of the “soul” with the structure and function of the polity. I will demonstrate that the tripartite government established by the American constitutional system and the tripartite polity-as-soul-as-polity imagined in Plato\u27s constitutional system in the Republic have their beginnings in the same impulse toward a certain form of political order. These are the beginnings of American constitutional thought. Evidence for these claims comes from analyses of the American and the Platonic systems, and then their comparison. This will allow for a determination of whether the theories of order in the two systems are similar and on what levels those similarities may or may not exist. As that comparison unfolds, the outlines of a theory of constitutional design will emerge. The development of this theory will bring to light the power of human artifice necessary for constitutional creation, as well as make clearer the sense of the role and place of what are seen as natural constraints in constitutional systems. These two aspects of constitutional thought combine with the use of such tools as history, religion, and myth to comprise the hegemonically manipulated space in which constitutional polities exist and perhaps succeed. A rejuvenation of the link between soul and polity will help the study of constitutions to move beyond the merely partisan. Constitutions and the constitutional impulse thus emerge not simply as statements of elite political power, but as attempts to project the perceived souls of the people into the perceived soul of the polity