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

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Oxford University Press, Dec 18, 1997 - History - 296 pages
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.
 

Contents

The Struggle for the Company
3
Cultural Authority and the Puritan Thinking Class
11
2 John Cotton Roger Williams and the Problem of Charisma
26
3 John Cotton and the Dialectic of Antinomian Dissent
40
4 Antinomianism Defeated
55
5 Ordering the OneParty Regime
73
6 Establishing Orthodoxy
91
7 From the Cambridge Platform to the HalfWay Covenant
114
8 The Restoration and the Politics of Declension
143
9 Increase Mather and the Decline of Cultural Domination
169
Key Terms
189
Toward a Postrevisionist Interpretation of Puritanism Religion Society and Politics
192
Notes
207
Index
269
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Page 2 - Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them: wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the LORD?

About the author (1997)

Darren Staloff is Assistant Professor of History at City College of New York.

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