The American escape from this tradition, in which the secular must be grounded in and ratified by the transmundane, occurred, Arendt asserts, not owing to the development in America of a modern, posttraditional mode of thought but rather to the unexpected vagaries of political life in the New World as the early European settlers experienced it:

In Arendt’s account, this response to the New World led to a form of political authority in which the traditionally legitimating reference to absolute principles or transcendental imperatives was replaced by a practice of perpetual political transfiguration driven by the constant reinterpretation of the fundamental, founding, “constitutional” law. “The very authority of the American Constitution,” Arendt writes, “resides in its inherent capacity to be amended and augmented” (p. 202). But delimiting the origins of the phenomenon of an almost infinitely plastic, augmentable, amendable interpretive authority to the experiences of the Europeans after crossing the Atlantic—as Arendt does when she insists on the trope of American exceptionalism, in which the raw experience of the New World shatters and relativizes European “absolutes” of long standing—needlessly brackets a whole field of prior American political discourse. The continuing presence of that discourse is, moreover, responsible for the persistent attachment of a sense of the sacred to an allegedly secular national project.³ John Winthrop’s sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity,” delivered not after crossing the Atlantic but during the voyage of the members of the Massachussetts Bay Company, suggests that the problematics of an interpretive authority show up in many dimensions other than constitutional interpretation, which for Arendt becomes “the true seat of authority in the American Republic” (p. 200).

The place named in the subtitle, however, is ambiguous: Win-throp’s sermon is uttered “on the Attlantick Ocean,” a geographic rather than a political space, and one situated, moreover, between two worlds: Great Britain and North America, Old England and “New-England.” And this fact alone, I want to hazard, embodies and conveys something about the kind of political discourse Winthrop’s speech is. Anachronistically relying on, and metaphorically extending to the political, Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science, we might distinguish normal and revolutionary political discourse.⁵ As normal science involves approaching scientific inquiry guided by a paradigmatic exemplar and integrating puzzling and apparently idiosyncratic facts into the terms of a dominant, uncontroversial theory, so normal political discourse addresses political experiences and problems within the framework of settled practices, institutions, assumptions, concepts, and values. And as revolutionary science involves the invention of a new approach to scientific inquiry and a new theory that displaces the semantic horizon of its predecessor by way of accounting for anomalous facts, so revolutionary political discourse involves the reinvention of conventional terms of appeal, contestation, and adjudication. Normal political discourse relies on agreed-upon names, procedures, expectations; revolutionary political discourse aims to invent these. Of course there need be no simple relationship between revolutionary political discourse and revolutionary political action. Ancient discourses can obscure the birth of the new, and sometimes the old can be preserved only with the most radical transformation of its conceptual articulation. The relationship between political discourse and political action, as Marx shows brilliantly in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is always complexly ironic and overdetermined.

One form often taken by revolutionary political discourse, or by discourses that aspire to such an achievement, is the discourse of founding, and Winthrop’s sermon conforms to that genre in not assuming the existence of a settled order but, rather, aiming to persuade others to accept the political terms it constructs and offers. The text of the Modell mentions its place of utterance, but that place possesses no traditionally sanctioned political significance. Speaking on the Arbella, in the Atlantic Ocean, to a literally unsettled group in the midst of a voyage away from one place of habitation and toward another, Winthrop speaks from a site designed for motion, not a fixed location but one whose meaning is wholly informed by its not being where it “should” be, by being on the way to somewhere else. Is it too much to find in the context of this event a dramatic sign of a departure from classical political assumptions?

Classically, political discourse is addressed to communities fixed in space and time; the fate of the polis as a whole is an overriding concern precisely because on it depend the lives of its associated members; it is impossible simply to fabricate a new polity as one makes a vase or a temple. Thus even where political action is thought to be in the service of or guided by the transmundane or transhis-torical—bodies politic ideally serving the right growth of souls, as in Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophical politics—the classical discourse of the political still remains tied to the concrete particulars and idiosyncratic histories of communities rooted in their own pasts. We see this, for example, in both Plato’s and Aristotle’s detailed examinations of their own societies and in Socrates’ difficulties, in Book 5 of the Republic, in explaining how a good regime could be constructed out of the human material available from the less good regimes. Winthrop’s gesture, in this context, is new, revolutionary, utopian; for his political discourse is situated in a place that is no one place, and it concerns not given, ineradicable features of a concrete society but motions, projects, possibilities, and voyages.

Above all, the forum of Winthrop’s discourse signifies that the temporal rather than spatial dimension is central to Puritan understandings of what America and politics in America must mean. But while on the one hand Winthrop speaks from an indeterminate, unsettled place of “passage” (as the text puts it), on the other hand, he speaks with authority because he has already invested this passage with a highly specific and dramatically charged ideal meaning—so much so that he can as much as say what America is without the colony’s having yet been truly founded. His subtitle defines “North America” as “New-England.” North America, like everything else in the Puritan imagination, has a double meaning: an uncharted, uncivilized terrain in which new communities might be established without resistance;⁶ also, the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, not only a new (and better) England but, more important, a New Jerusalem. Moreover, Winthrop’s authority to define the mission of the Puritan colony as sweepingly as he does in the Modell is attributable to the vagaries of the company’s charter, which, in neglecting to specify that its meetings take place in London so that policy would ultimately be governed by the Crown, made it possible for Winthrop to merge the roles of company head and colonial governor, company policy and state legislation.⁷

According to the charter, the owners of the Massachusetts Bay Company were empowered to

For all the powerful Crown and company backing of Winthrop’s authority to found a community, however, that authority cannot be reduced to merely its official or statutorial aspects. Along with these we must register what might be called his interpretative authority, which consists in his ability to weave, from the elements of Puritan federal theology and the circumstances of the New World, a political discourse that is authoritative because it connects the intentions and prospects of the community’s members to fundamental precepts of puritan federal theology. It is authoritative, that is, because Winthrop, as a master reader and interpreter of Scripture, grounds his claims about the nature of the political project upon which the group has embarked in God’s Word itself.

The text of Winthrop’s discourse begins by linking God’s will with one of the politically most striking facts about the human condition, namely, inequality: “God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in subieccion” (p. 282). The series of stark contraries—rich/poor, mighty/lowly, power/power-lessness—is framed and softened, however, by the very grammar of the sentence in which they occur, which articulates them as the outcome of the singular event of God’s holy will. The apparently basic fact of inequality, then, is really not so basic as it might appear, given that what is truly fundamental is that all humanity be as God ordains and that all are essentially one as expressions of God’s plan. From this perspective, the differences in power and privilege which divide human communities are insignificant in comparison to everyone’s shared identity as a child of God and participant in God’s plan. Yet at the same time, the way in which such divisions are rendered insignificant also has the effect of establishing them as unalterable givens. No mere artifact of European society and history, inequality of wealth and condition enters into the way in which God has constituted humanity as social beings.

In singling out the problem of inequality by beginning with it, Winthrop seems to make of inequality the political problem, at least from a secular point of view. Human beings differ from one another d...