The Making of an American Thinking Class : Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts

A radical new interpretation of the political and intellectual history of Puritan Massachusetts, The Making of an American Thinking Class envisions the Bay colony as a seventeenth century one-party state, where congregations served as ideological 'cells' and authority was restricted to an educated elite of ministers and magistrates. From there Staloff offers a broadened conception of the interstices of political, social, and intellectual authority in Puritan Massachusetts and beyond, arguing that ideologies, as well as ideological politics, are produced by self-conscious, and often class-conscious, thinkers. This pathbreaking study offers a radical new interpretation of the political, religious, and intellectual history of Puritan Massachusetts. More than simply a theologically inspired Biblical commonwealth, the church state of the Bay Colony was a seventeenth-century one-party state, where congregations served as ideological cells. Authority within this "regime" was restricted to an educated elite of ministers and magistrates, who used their biblicist and high-cultural expertise to legitimate their empowerment. The course of events in Puritan Massachusetts was dictated by the struggles of laypersons against this Puritan "thinking class," eventually leading to the erosion of the Puritan intellectuals' political authority and the colony's transformation into a Puritan lay republic in the years before the loss of the charter. By highlighting the ways in which godly intellectuals fomented a new ideological politics and thus destabilized traditional political authorities, Staloff has raised questions about the presumed moderation of the Puritan movement, revealing its potentially radical and innovative side. More generally, this work offers a strategy for synthesizing the hitherto disparate fields of social and intellectual history by treating intellectuals as a distinct social group with their own interests and agendas. MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict Acknowledgments 8 Contents 12 Introduction 14 Prologue: The Struggle for the Company 20 1 The Creation of the New England Way: Cultural Authority and the Puritan Thinking Class 28 2 John Cotton, Roger Williams, and the Problem of Charisma 43 3 John Cotton and the Dialectic of Antinomian Dissent 57 4 Antinomianism Defeated 72 5 Ordering the One-Party Regime 90 6 Establishing Orthodoxy 108 7 From the Cambridge Platform to the Half-Way Covenant 131 8 The Restoration and the Politics of Declension 160 9 Increase Mather and the Decline of Cultural Domination 186 Appendix A: Key Terms 206 Appendix B: Toward a Postrevisionist Interpretation of Puritanism: Religion, Society, and Politics 209 Notes 224 Index 286 A 286 B 286 C 287 D 288 E 289 F 289 G 289 H 289 I 290 J 290 K 290 L 290 M 290 N 291 O 291 P 291 Q 292 R 292 S 292 T 292 U 293 V 293 W 293 Few radical movements have enjoyed the auspicious conditions of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts. Darren Staloff. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 207-268) And Index.