The Making of an American Thinking Class

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.