The making of an American thinking class : intellectuals and intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts
An interpretation of the political and intellectual history of Puritan Massachusetts, this text envisions the Bay colony as a 17th-century one-party state, where congregations served as ideological "cells" and authority was restricted to an educated elite of ministers and magistrates.
History
xv, 276 pages ; 23 cm
9780195149821, 0195149823
1001998040
IntroductionPrologue: The Struggle for the Company1: The Creation of the New England Way: Cultural Authority and the Puritan Thinking Class2: John Cotton, Roger Williams, and the Problem of Charisma3: John Cotton and the Dialectic of Antinomian Dissent4: Antinomianism Defeated5: Ordering the One-Party Regime6: Establishing Orthodoxy7: rom the Cambridge Platform to the Half-Way Covenant8: The Restoration and the Politics of Declension9: Increase Mather and the Decline of Cultural DominationAppendix A: Key TermsAppendix B: Toward a Postrevisionist Interpretation of Puritanism: Religion, Society, and PoliticsNotesIndex
Originally published: 1998