"Power" in Puritan Massachusetts

This is a singular book. On the one hand, it is another installment in the long-running series, initiated by Perry Miller in the 1930s, focused on Puritanism in America. Based in an extensive reading of New England’s political development, from the Cambridge Agreement of 1629, which granted the charter for the projected colony to the planters themselves, to that document’s revocation in 1684 as King Charles II contemplated a Dominion of New England, this study offers hearty intellectual fare. On the other hand, for those whose latest read in the field is, say, Janice Knight’s Orthodoxies in Massachusetts (1994), a fairly recondite theological tour, Darren Staloff’s The Making of an American Thinking Class is not what one might expect. ¹ Indeed, as he puts it, some students of American Puritanism “may feel bemused” by his interpretation of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, for in one sense his book “is not about the Puritans at all”—not about, that is, the intricate set of religious beliefs that underlay so many emigrants’ decisions to cross the Atlantic (p. 192). Staloff hunts a different beast. He wishes to interrogate “the social and political features of early Massachusetts history that gave technical theological doctrines such powerful efficacy” (p. xiv).

Because Staloff’s undisguised shibboleth is “power,” readers might fear that they have in store yet another exhilarating, if finally enervating, New Historicist ride. But not so, for the presiding genii are not Michel Foucault and his acolytes but rather Alvin Gouldner and George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, whose works on the sociology of intellectuals initially provoked Staloff to consider how the ministers and magistrates in Puritan Massachusetts comprised a “collective interest” who created a new form of political authority which the author calls “cultural domination” (p. xv). But this, too, might bemuse readers, for it is hardly a radical proposition. Half a century ago Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker wrote an entire book called The Puritan Oligarchy, and in our own time Sacvan Bercovitch has expended much ink on the Puritans’ supposedly hegemonic discourse. ² Less ideologically driven, Timothy Breen and David D. Hall have provided their own detailed analyses of the ways Puritan magistrates and ministers, respectively, built and consolidated their institutional positions in the New England colonies. ³

So what’s the news? To find it, we first have to work through Staloff’s vocabulary, drawn from sociology and calculated to raise the hackles of those for whom words like “intellectuals” and “intelligentsia” suggest the prospect of crude Marxist reductionism. Thankfully, Staloff offers resistant readers an appendix in which he glosses his central terms. With regard to power, for example, particularly its political incarnation (the form which he wishes to trace in seventeenth-century Massachusetts), Staloff notes uncontroversially that it is “the ability to affect public policy or the institutions and practices of the state” (p. 189). Nor does he choose to define the slippery term “class” in any exclusionary way. For him “class” simply has to do with the “divergent interests arising from the social division of labor and reward.” Finally, by the phrase “thinking class” in his title, he intends both intellectuals, “whose vocation requires the assimilation and production of high culture” and an intelligentsia “whose vocation requires the assimilation and application of high culture,” these groups comprising “constituent strata” (p. 191) which in New England were represented, respectively, by ministers and magistrates. He details their complex and ever-shifting relationship because this thinking class, so central “to the colony’s settlement and foundation,” was an “extremely cohesive and class-conscious group” who constructed the institutions of church and state the better to “facilitate the transformation of their high cultural and theoretical expertise into social and political power” (p. xiv). Unremarkable as this might seem—we have long been aware of the Puritan oligarchy’s drive to bend their fellow colonists, like the Native Americans and the very landscape itself, to their collective will—Staloff reads such institution...