The Making of an American Thinking Class

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.