Separatism, the <i>Mayflower</i> , and the Congregational Theory of the Corporation

Recent literature has increasingly recognized the historical significance of corporations as not only vehicles for, but also drivers of, political thought. Our intellectual approaches to corporate theory have coalesced around two competing understandings of the corporation—namely that of the concession theory and its modern pluralist rival. This binary distinction, however, does not account for or explain the existence of other premodern notions of incorporation that withstand reconciliation with either theory. One of these neglected traditions is the congregational theory of the corporation outlined in this article, which had also channeled the language of incorporation through a religious and contractarian prism. We may trace its roots to the schismatic practices of the Elizabethan Separatists and their impulse to incorporate themselves into spiritual bodies politic articulated in their distinct ecclesiology. Their church-building drive had been formative for the spiritual descendants of the early Separatists, the Mayflower Pilgrims, who translated these religious precepts into political terms through the eponymous agreement sealed aboard their vessel upon its arrival in Cape Cod Bay, which would serve as a model for other such compacts in New England. On the other side of the Atlantic, this theory of the corporation mustered by the Separatists would come to influence the contractarianism emblematic of the seventeenth-century political theories of the state.