Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

DOI 10.1007/s12108-007-9002-1

The Most Cherished Myth: Puritanism and Liberty

Reconsidered and Revised

Milan Zafirovski

Published online: 22 September 2007

# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007

Abstract This paper revisits and reconsiders the prevailing assumption or

conventional wisdom about the association or affinity between Puritanism and
liberty in historically Puritan societies, especially America and to a lesser extent
Great Britain. It argues and elaborates on that the “Puritanism and liberty” equation
or link is a naïve assumption, speculative explanation or cherished liberal-democratic
mythology analogous and related to, as well as even more enduring and prevalent
than, what contemporary sociologists call the “beloved myth” of an elective affinity
or connection between Calvinism and modern capitalism. The paper aims to fill in a
void in the current sociological literature in which attempts to question and reveal
the Puritanism and liberty equivalence as a myth are relatively infrequent. Overall,
the paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on the relationships between
Puritanism, Calvinism and other ascetic Protestantism on the one hand and modern
democratic society on the other.

Keywords Liberty . Puritanism . Calvinism . Protestantism

Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but corresponded in many

points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories (Alexis
Tocqueville).
Puritanism and democracy have worked together [and America] is a lineal
descendent of Puritanism (Edward Ross).
Puritanism [is] anti-authoritarian (Max Weber).

M. Zafirovski (*)
Department of Sociology, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
24 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

Introduction

Some contemporary sociologists argue and substantiate that what Weber explicitly
posited as the “elective affinity” or “inner relationship” between Protestantism, more
precisely Calvinism, and modern Western capitalism as an economic system is a
“beloved myth” (Delacroix and Nielsen 2001; also Cohen 1980; Collins 1997;
MacKinnon 1988). Similarly, one can posit, identify and demonstrate another
“beloved myth” in Western Protestant societies. This is what Weber only implied or
intimated but most other sociologists, from Tocqueville, with some qualifications, to
Parsons et al., establish and extol as the link and even equivalence of Protestantism,
specifically Puritanism as what Weber calls an “Anglo-Saxon,” English-American
derivative1 of Calvinism, with liberal-secular democracy and society, or simply
liberty (as objected in Zaret 1989).
That is what this essay precisely intends to do. In doing so, it aims at contributing
toward dispelling or questioning one of the most cherished political, historical and
sociological myths within modern Western society, on the meta-theoretical
assumption that what Weber calls the vocation and Merton the ethos of social and
other science is to dispel or question rather than perpetuate and rationalize myths as
un-scientific, empirically ungrounded, spurious beliefs par excellence. To wit, if
sociology as a science refrained from or failing in doing so, metaphorically modern
societies would have still held the medieval theological belief that the “sun revolves
around the [flat] earth” not only as a historical exemplary myth but also, alongside
perhaps creationism, as a prime symbol for the master of all myths in Western
society—i.e. more sociologically, would have been prevented from seeing that the
“emperor has no cloths.” “Puritanism and liberty” is a sort of sociological equivalent
or proxy of geocentric theory and pseudo-biological creationism in medieval
theology—which is not an inappropriate comparison given that, like Calvinism,
Puritanism was deeply rooted in medievalism and traditionalism overall (Goldstone
1986; Gorski 2000)—as argued and elaborated in the essay.
Further, the assumed link and equivalence of Protestantism or Calvinist
Puritanism with liberty, i.e. liberal democracy and society, is perhaps the most
cherished political myth. It is probably the most commonly held and enduring false
collective belief or “sacred” tradition, the perennial cause for celebration in
contemporary Western Protestant societies, notably historically Puritan America
(Munch 2001) and to a lesser extent Great Britain. It even radiates beyond-viz.
traditional Catholic, Orthodox-Christian and non-Christian, including Islamic,
countries—albeit via negative evaluation and rejection of Puritanism’s supposed

1
For instance, Weber remarks that English and by implication American Puritanism, especially its concept
of God-set calling, “was derived from Calvinism,” specifically the doctrine of predestination. In turn, he
suggests that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination is the “dogmatic background of the Puritan morality
in the sense of methodically rationalized ethical conduct.” Alternatively, he implies that Calvinism was
already a sort of European Puritanism, as Sombart states explicitly, and what he calls Protestant
sectarianism by the expression “Calvinism and the other Puritan sects.” On this account, English-
American Puritanism, while a logical geographic derivation and extension, sociologically was a kind of
redundant multiplication or replication via escalation and intensification, simply just a different more
appealing (“catchy”?) name, of what Weber calls Calvinism and its radicalism or extremism.
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 25

quality and legacy of freedom, democracy, liberalism, individualism, secularism,

rationalism, and modernism.
This societal myth is in sense reflected and perpetuated by Western social science
to the effect that in classical and contemporary sociology “key elements of liberal-
democratic ideology are seen as secular extensions of Protestant [especially Puritan]
ideas” (Zaret 1989:163). For illustration, Weber posits and stresses the so-called anti-
authoritarian tendency of Puritanism, especially, though he only implies this
distinction, while being in what Comte calls opposition and Simmel protest,
distinguished from governance or power, to existing authoritarian religious–political
institutions and ruling powers, such as Catholicism in Europe, Anglicanism in Great
Britain, and Episcopalism in the US South. This is an assumption that most
Weberian and other subsequent sociologists, including Tawney (1962) despite his
attempted revision of Weber in other respects, Parsons (1967) and in part Merton
(1968), adopt and elaborate, while extolling the assumed Puritan “anti-authoritarian
tendency” in an often invidious distinction from non-Puritanism and pre-Protestantism
such as authoritarian Catholicism (yet see Bendix 1977; Merton 1939). Thus,
following or echoing Weber and anticipating Parsons in this respect, Tawney
(1962:234–72) argues that Puritanism made “enormous contribution” to political and
economic freedoms, as well as social progress, in Western societies to the effect that
its “theory had been discipline; its practical result was liberty.” Specifically, Tawney
suggests that British and American liberal democracies and societies are primarily
Puritan creations or legacies by contending that they are historically indebted to
Puritanism more than to any other religious and political force, contending that
“democracy owes more to Nonconformity than to any other single movement.”
Further, even more explicitly building on or “using” Weber, Parsons (1967:53)
argues that, in virtue of its extolled “immediacy of the individual soul to God,”
Puritanism and Protestantism overall, in sharp contrast to Catholicism, constitutes
the “primary source” of contemporary European liberalism and individualism,
notably individual religious liberty, thus by implication liberal democracy. This
argument has been embraced and elaborated by most Parsonian and many other
sociologists2 (yet see Alexander 1983; Giddens 1984; Munch 2001), including partly
Merton (1968) in respect with the assumed crucial role of Puritanism in the rise of
modern Western science and technology (for a critique, cf. Becker 1984, 1992). For
example, some Parsonian sociologists (Mayway 1984) comment that Parsons
considers Puritanism in early Great Britain and America to be a liberal-democratic
or individualistic as well as utilitarian religion, ideology and politics, in virtue of the
Puritan project of reconstructing these societies, including polity and societal
community or civil society, in “more spiritual and horizontal terms” than its
Christian and other, supposedly less so, precursors or rivals, including Catholicism
and Anglicanism both denounced as “less” or “non-Christian,” as in England and the

2
Alexander (1983:132) comments that Parsons’ “complex relation to the Puritan heritage is evident.” In
turn, Giddens (1984:273–4) dismisses Parsons’ claim that “half a million years of human history
culminate” in the American Puritan-based social-political system as “more than faintly ridiculous.”
26 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

US South, plus pre-Christian “pagan”3 religions (e.g. ancient Indian cults

condemned and persecuted as “ungodly” in New England). And, even some
contemporary non-Parsonian or neo-Marxian sociologists suggest that Puritanism
was instrumental in the creation of modern democracies in Great Britain and
America by treating the seventeenth century English Puritan Revolution, along with
the 1789 French Revolution and the American Civil War and implicitly the
Revolution, as an instance of liberal-bourgeois revolutions creating a “combination”
of parliamentary democracy with a capitalistic economy, while removing various
“obstacles to a democratic version of capitalism” (Moore 1993:413–5; also
Goldstone 1991).
The aforesaid of the Puritanism and liberty link a fortiori holds true of historical
and contemporary America, while to a lesser or diminishing extent of Great Britain
given the Puritan Revolution’s eventual defeat, discredit or tempering by counter-
vailing forces like Anglicanism (Munch 2001) as well as Lockean liberalism and
secularism (Zaret 1989). In particular, in America Protestantism’s, notably Puritan-
ism’s, supposed connection or equation to freedom and political democracy (Parsons
1967), as well as modern science and technology (Merton 1968), has become the
original and major element of the American civil religion (Munch 2001) or religious-
like creed (Lipset 1996) of “liberty, justice and equality for all” in Jefferson’s
rendition and meaning, including political democracy and civil liberties, plus free
market enterprise. In a sense, Puritanism is at the root, heart and soul, even in some
celebratory views (Gelernter 2005) an equivalent, of what Weber calls Americanism
(Lipset 1955)—whose “professed” virtues he describes yet as Puritan-rooted “pure
hypocrisy”—Merton (1939) names American nativism or ethnocentrism, and other
US sociologists term superior, though admittedly “double-edged,” libertarian-
democratic exceptionalism (Lipset 1996) and triumphalism (Bell 2002). To that
extent, Puritanism represents what Weber describes, referring to modern Calvinist
capitalism, as the “most fateful force” in American history and society, or simply, as
Tocqueville specifically describes it, America’s “destiny.”
Thus, Tocqueville states or predicts that Puritanism embodies America’s
presumably democratic and free, so comparatively and historically exceptional
(Lipset and Marks 2000), “destiny,” i.e., to use Durkheim’s words, its institutional
genesis and evolution (functioning), its past, present and future alike. For example,
Tocqueville anticipates Weber, Parsons and other celebratory US sociologists by
stating that under Puritanism in New England a “democracy more perfect than
antiquity had dared to dream of started in full size and panoply from the midst of an
ancient feudal society [old England],” as epitomized in a “body of political laws”
that he describes as in “advance of the liberties of our age.” Generally, for
Tocqueville Puritanism is “not merely a religious doctrine,” but also an ideology or
political theory that corresponds “in many points” to the “most absolute democratic

3
Registering the demolition of paganism by Christianity, Pareto remarks that today “no one any longer
believes in Apollo, in Athena [and] Zeus” or pagan gods overall, and even implicitly predicts the identical
or similar outcome,as the effect of “pure rationalism,” in respect with what Weber calls the Christian “God
of Calvinism” or Puritanism. Needless to say, this Paretian prediction or implication is equivalent to
medieval heresy or blasphemy for Puritan-inspired fundamentalists in America (and Christians overall), a
“mortal sin” that their Puritan fathers (like Catholic Inquisitors) punished with death.
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 27

and republican” ideologies or theories in Western societies, albeit he provides

various qualifications, if not implicit contradictions, of Puritan “democracy,”
“republic,” and “liberties.” Also, seemingly evoking Tocqueville, Weber’s contem-
porary, early US sociologist Edward Ross contends that the American “land of
freedom” is just the “lineal descendent” of Puritanism and that the latter and
democracy “have worked together” in America4, yet curiously or contradictorily
adding that democracy thereby found its own “antidote,” even admonishing of
“Puritan tyranny.”
Building and elaborating on Tocqueville, Ross and Weber, most contemporary US
sociologists, political scientists and historians adopt the argument that America’s
values and institutions of liberty, equality, justice and democracy, just as of modern
capitalism and free market enterprise, are originally rooted in or historically linked
with Calvinist Puritanism. Thus, some analysts attribute their origins to the
“Calvinist doctrines of religious transcendence and human sin” (Means 1966:378)
or predestination. These doctrines and Calvinism overall formed Puritanism’s
theological basis geographically transferred and sociologically realized in arch-
Puritan New, as well as old, England and subsequently, as through the Great
Awakenings, in America as a whole, especially the South turned a neo- or pseudo-
Puritan, specifically Baptist-Methodist (Mencken 1982), “Bible Belt” (Bauman
1997; Putnam 2000).
The above argument has become a sort of sociological paradigm, conventional
wisdom or venerable historical story in America and in part other Western societies
like Great Britain, either as a cause celebre for Puritanism and Protestantism overall
in what sociologists call the Puritan “Anglo-Saxon” and other Protestant “zone”
(Inglehart and Baker 2000), or a major reason for its negative evaluation and
rejection on typically anti-liberal or anti-democratic grounds in other world zones
like traditional Catholic, Orthodox-Christian and Islamic and other non-Christian. As
a sociological analysis concludes, the “story of the Protestant [Puritan] contribution
to freedom is a familiar one: the doctrines of Luther, Calvin and Puritanism often
have been linked to the development of modern spiritual and political freedom”
(McLaughlin 1996:248).
In sum, what sociological and historical studies describe as the “naïve
assumptions about Puritanism and liberty” (Coffey 1998:962) or “liberal mythology”
(Gould 1996:148), including “inconsistent and speculative” (Zaret 1996) expla-
nations of the origin of the democratic public realm by the first, for example, the
English Puritan Revolution, prevail in the social-scientific literature, as well as
American and other Western society as a whole, including polity. In this connection,
it is the purpose and task of this essay to suggest and show that these assumptions
and explanations of Puritanism cum liberty and democracy are at best naïve or
speculative, at worst empirically spurious or ungrounded, simply cherished myths.
As indicated, the naïve assumption or the mythical linkage and equivalence of
Puritanism with freedom and democracy is seemingly similar to and usually
intertwined with the “beloved” economic myth (Delacroix and Nielsen 2001) of the

4
Anticipating Ross and Weber, conservative philosopher Emerson contended that “few bodies or parties
have served the world so well as the Puritans.”
28 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

Weberian elective affinity or “intimate relationship” between Calvinism and modern

capitalism or the free-market economy in Western Protestant societies. Moreover, as
hinted, “Puritanism and liberty,” specifically liberal-secular political democracy and
free civil society, is perhaps a more naïve assumption or beloved and enduring myth
than that connecting Calvinism with what Weber calls rational, sober bourgeois
capitalism and US libertarian economists extol as free market enterprise in America.
This holds true so long as liberty as well as justice and equality “for all” in
Jefferson–Madison’s rendition are more general, commonly, virtually universally,
accepted or less debatable as “American values” than a laissez-faire—originally, just
as Calvinism cum Puritanism (Elwood 1999; Heller 1986), a French term and
concept or invention after all—economy and state or unfettered capitalism, a term
originating also in Europe anyway, as Marx, Weber, Sombart, Schumpeter and
Parsons imply, including “free market enterprise.” It does so, even if the latter are
considered special cases of liberal-democratic values and institutions—as in Locke–
Hume–Smith’s and Jefferson’s implied holistic view of private property as an
integral element of human freedom, life and happiness, as also Weber and Tönnies
suggest5—rather than questioned or modified, if not partly discredited, as since the
New Deal and Keynes’ “end of laissez-faire” or even before (e.g. the Progressive Era
and the demise of social Darwinism).
In addition, the naïve assumption or myth about Puritanism and liberal democracy
is more cherished or enduring than that concerning Protestantism and modern
capitalism in the sociological and economic literature. In the current literature the
supposed link of Protestant Puritanism with liberal democracy and free civil society
or political-civic liberties is, as noted, virtually canonical, axiomatic or well-
established in its being even less questioned, criticized or denied than that of
Protestantism to modern capitalism or market-economic freedom, which has since its
original Weberian formulation been subject to a myriad of controversies, revisions,
critiques or even denials, ranging from Sombart and Tawney to contemporary
sociologists and historians. In short, it has evolved in a case of Veblen’s conventional
wisdom in social science just as in an element of ideological-political orthodoxy or
correctness in society.
Further, “Puritanism and liberty” in the sense of liberal political democracy and
free civil society, constitutes or belongs to what contemporary sociologists
(Bourdieu 1988:166) describe as the field of doxa or taken-for-granted collective
ideas and beliefs “beyond question” in the scientific literature, as well as Western
societies, more than does “Calvinism and capitalism” as, in Weber’s words, an
economic system, instead becoming or belonging to the realm of divergent opinion

5
For example, Tönnies refers to freedom, and then to property and honor as by implication its particular
elements. More explicitly, he considers property, described “as a particular sphere of law,” especially in
what he calls Community, to be “entirely the consequence and product of freedom.” Notably, Tönnies
suggests that “inner morality is hardly a direct concern of the [modern] state. Its task is only to suppress
and punish aggressive and anti-social behavior [on the conclusion that] dead morality and religion cannot
be revived by coercion or education.” Yet, Puritanism posits and acts precisely the opposite by being
concerned with “inner morality” and aiming to revive “dead morality and religion” by primarily coercion,
and secondarily by education or persuasion via fascist-like propaganda (Adorno 2001).
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 29

or heterodoxy in view of the Weberian thesis’ continuously questioned, if not

declining, explanatory role in sociology and other social science6 (Delacroix and
Nielsen 2001; Lachmann 1989; MacKinnon 1988; also Cohen 1980; Collins 1997).
On this account, “Puritanism and liberty” is really the most naïve ideological-
sociological assumption or the most cherished, explicit and positive societal and
scientific-though science, including sociology, is assumed to be opposite to and
explode myths–myth in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant zone (Inglehart 2004), notably
originally, historically and persistently Puritan America (Munch 2001). Alternative-
ly, it is also a naïve assumption and a negative myth in most other non-Puritan
(Lutheran, Anglican), non-Protestant (Catholic, Christian-Orthodox) and non-
Christian (Islamic, Hindu) societies, yet, as Weber and Parsons imply, in the form
of perceiving, negatively evaluating and rejecting Protestantism in liberal-democratic
and individualistic, just as capitalist terms, so in opposition to their own different
values (viz. traditional Catholicism and fundamentalist Islam).
In Weber’s words, if supposed or mythical Protestant capitalism is what he calls the
“most fateful force” in and eventually becoming the “iron cage” for modern
democratic society, then the related naïve assumption or mythology of “Puritanism
and liberal democracy” is even more “fateful” or powerful, enduring and sacred. This
is most strikingly in America, starting with New England, since what Tocqueville calls
the founding of the “American republics” in the early seventeenth century by the
Pilgrims belonging to that “English sect the austerity of whose principles had acquired
for them the name of Puritans,” and, as noted, proposes or prophetically predicts that
the “destiny of America [is] embodied in the first Puritan” [sic!].
At the minimum, “Puritanism and liberty” in America persists as a beloved myth,
more specifically liberal mythology, analogous and usually linked to that of Calvinist
Protestantism and capitalism (Delacroix and Nielsen 2001) in Western societies. For
instance, Tocqueville himself intimates or predicts this linkage between the two
myths describing Americans as “at the same time a puritanical people and a
commercial nation,” i.e. as both Puritans and capitalists, thus implicitly anticipating
the Weberian “elective affinity” between Puritanism and modern capitalism, albeit he
apparently separates or treats as independent rather than connecting the Protestant
“ethic” and the capitalist “spirit,” unlike Weber and Parsons.
As typical, naïve assumptions and even the most sacred, positive and beloved
myths, including “Protestantism and capitalism,” are confronted with and contra-
dicted by social reality, including history, thus dispelled, questioned or scrutinized by
sociology and other science, as exemplified by Weber’s celebrated, yet widely and
ever-disputed7, revised (Alexander 1998; Collins 1997) and often denied (Cohen
1980; Delacroix and Nielsen 2001; MacKinnon 1988) Protestant-Ethic thesis in the
sociological and other literature since Sombart’s dispute and rejection and Tawney’s

6
To do justice to Weber, he perhaps preempts such critiques by stating that he has “no intention” of
holding such a “foolish and doctrinaire” thesis as that the spirit of capitalism “could only have arisen as
the result of certain effects of the Reformation, or even that capitalism as an economic system is a creation
of the Reformation.”
7
Alexander (1998:171) comments that “Weber’s equation of the spirit of capitalism with seventeenth and
eighteenth century English entrepreneurs has been widely disputed.”
30 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

revision. By assumption, as with “Protestantism and capitalism” and similar

economic myths and orthodoxies, “Puritanism and liberty” in the specific sense of
political democracy and free civil society is a societal myth, specifically “liberal
mythology” (Gould 1996), no matter how positive, beloved enduring in society and
surviving in the scientific literature, precisely because it essentially does no justice to
a complex, contradicting reality, past and present, in America and elsewhere.
Against this curious societal and literature background, this essay purports to
accomplish the following. First, it re-conceptualizes, questions and contradicts the
assumed equivalence or link of “Puritanism and liberty” in America and elsewhere
as a myth in the sense of a commonly shared empirically false belief, i.e. a
spuriously “sacred tradition,” ungrounded ideological orthodoxy and contradicted
conventional wisdom rather than a self-evident truth, paradigm, or premise, as done
in the previous literature as well as society as a whole.
Second, it contends and demonstrates that “Puritanism and liberty” in terms of
liberal political democracy and free civil society is factually a beloved myth or naïve
assumption essentially contradicted or unsupported by history and current reality in
America and beyond. It does so by positing and showing that Puritanism constitutes
or reproduces, typically theocratic, authoritarianism or un-freedom rather than
liberal-secular democracy and society, or political and civil liberty. This can be
considered or described as the counter-thesis of a functional equivalence, historical
link or, to use Weber’s famous expression about Calvinism and capitalism, factual
“elective affinity” between “Puritanism and un-freedom.” In short, this is the
argument of Puritan ideas, institutions, practices and “signs of illiberty” (Dahrendorf
1979) in society, including the polity and culture, plus the economy (outside of the
scope of this essay).
Third, the essay specifically elaborates on the above thesis by proposing that
Puritanism represents or generates political and social authoritarianism, government
and cultural repression rather than liberal-secular democracy and a free civil society
or culture. Fourth, it does by positing and reexamining the Puritan authoritarian,
including theocratic, heritage in historical and contemporary America after the
official “disestablishment” or discredit of Puritanism both as a historical social
system, like New England’s theocracy during the 1620s–1830s, and a concept or
word (“Puritans”) in the early nineteenth century and later.
As indicated, most of the previous sociological and other literature from
Tocqueville, Ross and Weber to Parsons et al., has adopted, perpetuated or
contributed to rather than dispelled or effectively questioned the admittedly “liberal
mythology” or the “naïve” assumptions and “speculative” explanations concerning
“Puritanism and liberty.” Alternatively, the sociological literature identifying,
acknowledging or implying the factual and potential link or equation of “Puritanism
and illiberty,” distinguished from the mythical or naïve equivalence between the first
and liberty, if not completely absent, then is relatively scarce (e.g. Baltzell 1979;
Gorski 2000; Munch 2001; Tiryakian 1975; Stivers 1994; Zaret 1989, 1996), at least
by comparison with more numerous historical and other social studies to examine or
enumerate would require a separate essay (cf. Bremer 1995; Coffey 1998; Gould
1996; Sprunger 1982; Walzer 1963).
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 31

In addition, these relatively rare sociological theoretical and/or empirical analyses

are often limited in scope, historically, comparatively or both, for present purposes.
Thus, many pertinent sociological analyses primarily focus on the links between
“Puritanism and illiberty” in Great Britain, specifically England (e.g. Gorski 2000;
Zaret 1989, 1996), and largely at its early times like the seventeenth century Puritan
Revolution, rather than or secondarily in America, including Puritan-ruled New
England, during its history and present, as this study’s main concern, though with
some relevant exceptions (cf. Baltzell 1979; Munch 2001; Stivers 1994; Tiryakian
1975).
Also, even when focusing on America these sociological analyses appear to be
somewhat too equivocal, ambivalent and qualified, or not categorical enough, in
respect with the functional equivalence, historical link or factual affinity between
“Puritanism and illiberty,” for present purposes, albeit with rare exceptions being
unequivocal, yet narrower in scope than the present study, in this respect (e.g. the
categorical identification of a repressive Puritan Boston compared with a tolerant
Quaker Philadelphia in Baltzell 1979; also Klausner and Baltzell 1998). Thus, some
pertinent sociological studies (Munch 2001; Tiryakian 1975; also Lipset 1996) seem
to in part downplay or qualify the original and persisting equivalence, linkage or
affinity between “Puritanism and illiberty” in America by suggesting a sort of dual
or ambivalent, i.e. liberal-democratic and the opposite, historical impact and modern
legacy of the Puritan religion, morality and politics in American history and
modernity. Still, a recent work that probably comes most closely to what is intended
and attempted to do in this essay is a comparative-historical analysis of the formation
and transformation of liberal-democratic as well as capitalist modernity relative to
Puritanism or ascetic Protestantism in Western societies, specifically Great Britain
and America (Munch 2001).
The essay elaborates, expands and improves on these studies by, first, specifically
focusing on the functional equation, historical link or empirical affinity between
“Puritanism and illiberty” in America commonly considered, as Tocqueville
observed and prophetically predicted, to be the originally, historically and
persistently most Puritan (Munch 2001) and/or sectarian-Protestant (Lipset 1996)
society in the Western world, even the modern “Anglo-Saxon zone” (Inglehart
2004). Second, it does so by unequivocally and categorically (as done in a narrower
or local comparative context by Baltzell 1979) proposing and demonstrating that the
“Puritanism” half of the equation primarily, with secondary variations, generates the
other or “illiberty” via societal authoritarianism, in particular theocratic control and
repression of society.
The rest of the essay offers and substantiates theoretical propositions, empirical
generalizations, and predictions or expectations with respect to Puritanism and
liberty or rather illiberty. Section 1 presents a theoretical proposition and empirical
generalization about Puritanism and freedom in society in general. Presented in
Section 2 is a theoretical proposition and empirical generalization about Puritanism
and freedom in polity in particular. Analogously, Puritanism and freedom in culture
is the subject of a theoretical proposition and empirical generalization in Section 3.
Section 4 formulates a theoretical proposition and empirical generalization
32 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

concerning Puritanism and anti-humanism. Section 5 provides a corresponding

summary of Puritanism’s totalitarian institutions, indicators and legacies. A last
section concludes.

Puritanism and Liberty in Society

The following proposes and substantiates a certain number of theoretical propositions,

empirical generalizations and expectations about the relationship of Puritanism to
liberty or rather un-freedom in society generally, polity and culture particularly. These
propositions, generalizations and expectations are divided into four: the first concerns
Puritanism and liberty in society as a whole, the second Puritanism and liberty in
polity, the third Puritanism and liberty in culture, and the fourth Puritanism, liberty and
anti-humanism, presented and elaborated in this order below.
A first proposition, generalization or expectation is that the more human societies
and historical times are mastered (ruled, controlled), permeated or influenced by
Puritanism, the more they are likely to be generally un-free in the sense of
totalitarian or authoritarian, i.e. coercive, repressive and tyrannical, specifically
theocratic, than others, and conversely. Both sociological theory and previous
empirical research suggest and support this proposition, generalization and
expectation. This proposition is suggested by and restates and specifies what can
be described as the sociological “iron law” or theoretical argument of Puritanism and
totalitarianism by analogy to Michels’ expression for the link between political
organization and oligarchy. This “law” in its present restatement posits and predicts
that “who says Puritanism, says totalitarian and sectarian society, specifically
societal tyranny and exclusion through theocracy and oligarchy.”
Previous sociological and historical research also suggests and corroborates the
above proposition, generalization and expectation. In essence, it indicates that the
“iron law” holds true of virtually all historically Calvinist-Puritan societies in Europe
and America and historical periods since the derivative genesis and development of
Protestant Puritanism out of Calvinism during the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, with almost no pertinent or secondary (Sprunger 1982)
exceptions to the theoretical “rule” or empirical pattern, despite US Puritans’ claims
to their American libertarian-democratic superior exceptionalism (Lipset 1996). Yet,
the latter is also claimed to be paradoxical universalism or universalistic
particularism (Munch 2001), while, as sociological studies (Amenta et al. 2001;
Quadagno 1999) suggest, actually being inferior or “backward” in liberal-secular
democracy, i.e. political liberties and rights, as well as in economic egalitarianism
and universalism such as social policy and the welfare state primarily due to
Calvinist Puritanism (Hudson and Coukos 2005). And these secondary exceptions, if
any, only factually confirm rather than, as logically expected, contradict the “rule” or
the “iron law” of Puritanism and totalitarianism.
For illustration, a historical study suggests that early Dutch Puritans’ positive
view on religious liberty, tolerance and pluralism was the “exception” (Sprunger
1982:460) within the context of Puritanism and in this sense effectively confirmed
the general “rule” or “law” of Puritan totalitarianism, including coercion,
intolerance, exclusion and monism or anti-pluralism. And it was a secondary or
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 33

minor exception; after all, many of these Dutch Puritans or Calvinists were exiles or,
in Weber’s words, “upper-class refugees” from Great Britain before and after the
English Puritan Revolution in seventeenth century non-Puritan and evidently
pluralist and tolerant Holland, not because but in spite of an “official intolerant
Calvinist Church”8 (Hsia and Nierop 2002), with, as he notes, its “very numerous
dissenters,” ranging from various Protestant groups (including Lutherans) to
Catholics. Admittedly, like original European Calvinism, for “domestic” or dominant
English-American Puritanism religious liberty, tolerance and pluralism, including the
internal multiplicity of churches or sects, was not, as commonly and rather naively
assumed a liberal virtue, but rather a “catastrophe” to be explicated by theological
dogmas and averted by theocratic coercion (Sprunger 1982:460). As Tawney
(1962:213) remarks, Puritanism was or “would have been scandalized” by religious
tolerance, just as political and even economic individualism, with the conditional
“would” signifying that the latter was a sort of non-entity, taboo or exception, and
intolerance the rule, pattern or method. Puritan intolerance was premised on what
Weber calls the “methodical doctrine of sanctification” as an intolerant dogma
aiming at sainthood as a sort of, in his words, “spiritual aristocracy” of saints or
angels, and theologically derived from the harsh Calvinist dogmas of predestination
and corruption of humans, including Calvin’s depreciation of “all pure” human
feelings or emotions (also Heller 1986).

Freedom and Tolerance as an Exception, Un-Freedom and Intolerance as the Rule

The above exceptional case hence indirectly confirms that what Weber identifies and
extols as the Puritan “anti-authoritarian” tendency was, as he actually implies,
typically an exception or accident, not a rule or pattern, within Puritanism and
primarily when and while the latter was in what Comte calls “opposition” and
Simmel “protest” or weakness versus existing non-Puritan institutions and powers.
This is what many of these Dutch Puritans basically showed: as exiles from England
in a foreign, albeit officially Calvinist9 and so promised (Hsia and Nierop 2002),
land, they in a sense made “virtue out of necessity” by extolling religious freedom
and tolerance as what Weber may call a survival device and/or Machiavellian
strategy. Thus, Weber notes and predicts that Puritanism as an epitome of sectarian
Protestantism (also Lipset 1996), like any “pure sect,” simply must for its own
“survival,” when within a different social context or, in Mill’s words, not
“sufficiently powerful,” claim and preach religious toleration, pluralism, freedom
of conscience, as well as separation of church and state. This is what precisely and
predictably these English Puritans did whenever outside of England as in Holland, as
well as their own country under the Anglican Church, just as did their American

8
According to Hsia and Nierop (2002:2), the “central paradox” of the Dutch Republic was the “existence
of a confessionally pluralistic society with an official intolerant Calvinist Church that discriminated against
Catholics.” This indicates or confirms that religious pluralism, tolerance and liberty were established in
Holland, just as in Europe and America, not because, as usually naively assumed, but in spite of and even
opposition by Calvinism, including Puritanism.
9
Hsia and Nierop (2002:37) remark that “the English Puritans considered the [Dutch] Republic, with its
dominant Calvinist Church, as a Protestant paradise.”
34 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

transplants in the “old” South during Episcopalism prior to, and as the cause or
target of, the Puritan-incited Great Awakenings and beyond in America where
Puritanism was not established yet as dominant or just not “sufficiently powerful,”
and do their fundamentalist revivals in the twenty-first century.
And alternatively, whenever and wherever, as Mill observes and predicts,
Puritanism becomes “sufficiently powerful” or in, as Comte puts it, government
control, it denies, destroys or restricts what it extolled, advocated or generously
demanded primarily for itself while being in opposition or protest: religious and
other liberty, pluralism and tolerance, plus “separation of church and state,” and
eventually human life. That was what most of those English-Dutch exiles did or
would have likely done upon/if returning to England in the wake of the victorious
Puritan Revolution and by participating in or supporting Cromwell’s ensuing
totalitarian rule and his theocratic “Parliament of Saints.” In addition to and even
more than these exiled English-Dutch Puritans, Tocqueville American “Puritan
Fathers” strongly demonstrate that religious liberty, tolerance and pluralism was an
“exception”—and mostly as a survival or Machiavellian strategy while in
opposition, protest or weakness versus non-Puritan powers-within Puritanism. As
analysts observe, “if the principle of freedom was used by [American] Puritans to
criticize the centralization of power [yet] it could be directed against their efforts, for
the local [Puritan] congregations stifled the expression of individual freedom”
(Stivers 1994:31) in early America.
Puritans thus confirm, rather than, as they and their admirers claim, contradicting
the rule or “iron law” of Puritanism and totalitarianism, including what Dahrendorf
(1959) describes as totalitarian monism or anti-pluralism. This is what Tocqueville
precisely suggests by stating that in early America the Puritan master or law-giver,
“entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration that he had himself
demanded in Europe, makes attendance on divine service compulsory, and goes so
far as to visit with severe punishment, and even with death, Christians who chose to
worship God according to a ritual differing from his own.” His cited case in point is
New England’s Puritan sacred law that “Whosoever shall worship any other God
than the Lord shall surely be put to death.” Hence, if there are exceptions that ever
factually, albeit illogically, as Pareto would object, confirm a rule, then such are
those exceptional cases of Puritan religious freedom and toleration, yet typically
demanded for Puritans mostly or extolled solely when in political “wilderness,”
confirming rather than, as they claim, contravening the “iron law” or theoretical
argument of Puritanism and totalitarianism, notably totalitarian theocracy and
intolerant sectarian oligarchy. This Puritan dualism of freedom and tolerance as an
exception and of un-freedom and intolerance as a rule is crucial in reconsidering
Puritanism, yet denied by its adherents and often overlooked by others, so it is useful
to elaborate on and document it more.
For example, Weber observes that, in the context of what he describes as the”
fanatical opposition of the Puritans to the ordinances of the King, permitting certain
popular amusements on Sunday outside of Church hours by law,” the “King’s threats
of severe punishment for every attack on the legality of those sports were motivated
by his purpose of breaking the anti-authoritarian ascetic tendency of Puritanism,
which was so dangerous to the State.” If so, then he suggests that “anti-
authoritarian” is better understood as “anti-authority” or “anti-government,” and
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 35

only when Puritanism is in Comte’s “opposition” and Simmel’s “protest” or, as Mill
implies, not “sufficiently powerful,” against established religious-political institu-
tions and powers, like Anglicanism and Monarchy in Great Britain, as well as
Episcopalism in the “old” US South. This is also suggested by Weber’s historical
observation that the “feudal and monarchical forces protected the pleasure seekers
against the rising middle-class morality and the anti-authoritarian ascetic con-
venticles,” since (or if) in such cases “anti-authoritarian” largely means anti-
authority or anti-government while in opposition, protest or weakness, rather than
truly democratic. Even their creators or saints would hardly describe such “ascetic
conventicles” as “anti-authoritarian” in the sense of democratic but only as “anti-
authority” against the existing government, as in fact Pareto explicitly suggests by
using the word “insanity” or “follies” to describe their activities, such as medieval
monks and Calvinist Puritans alike tormenting others and themselves, which is
hardly the exemplary practice of democracy and tolerance.
Alternatively, Puritanism miraculously loses or becomes oblivious of (in
Tocqueville’s words, “forgets”) its extolled “anti-authoritarian” tendency in favor
of, as Comte observes and predicts, repression and theocracy whenever establishing
itself in what he calls “government” and Weber and Simmel political power or
domination, i.e. becoming, as Mill put it in a diagnosis and prediction alike,
“sufficiently powerful.” And, this authoritarian or totalitarian rule whenever and
wherever in power is what precisely makes Puritanism prefigure or converge with, if
not inspire, fascism and other totalitarianism (plus fundamentalist Islam), and
conversely sharply separates it from and opposes it to liberalism, i.e. modern liberal-
democratic ideas, institutions and practices. After all this is what Weber himself
implicitly admits by the identification of an “unexampled tyranny,” including the
“least strong” religious toleration and so pluralism, in those societies such as “old
and New England” that were “dominated by Puritanism.” In particular, he does so by
identifying the Puritan “theocracy of New England.”
Counterfactually, were Puritanism really, rather than just anti-government, and
always, not only when in opposition, protest or weakness, “anti-authoritarian,” this
Puritan theocracy as a supreme instance of authoritarianism and even totalitarianism
(Stivers 1994) would have never occurred, as would its “unexampled tyranny” overall.
For example, had it been actually “anti-authoritarian,” Puritanism would have not
eliminated, as Simmel suggests, “real heretics” or religious and political dissenters and
dissent as one of the defining elements or results of a non-authoritarian, democratic
society. Particularly, if early American Puritanism was actually “anti-authoritarian”
when establishing itself in power, as in New England, not just while in opposition, as
in the Episcopal South, what happened in reality as authoritarian outcomes should
have never happened in theory—i.e. “Salem with witches” would have been a fantasy,
nightmare or dystopia rather than a historical reality and model of a sectarian and
repressive society (Putnam 2000). The same can, with proper qualifications, be said of
various sequels or survivals of “Salem with witches” as both a reality and a symbol
like “Monkey Trials” (Boles 1999) in the post-Episcopal “Bible Belt” (Mencken
1982), Prohibition and “dry” Southwestern states (Merton 1968), the war on drugs
(Friedman 1997; Reuter 2005) and other repressive old-new temperance wars (Wagner
1997) in America, plus Puritan-rooted nationalism, military crusades and imperialism
(Steinmetz 2005) against the “evil” world.
36 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

The preceding hence anticipates and even with almost mathematical precision
predicts the future pattern of conduct for Puritan-based American fundamentalism. It
is, first, “anti-authoritarian” while in opposition or weakness versus “liberal” or
“blue” times and states like the 1960s and the US coast, through anti-government,
denounced as “big government,” activities, including terrorism a la “Christian”
militia. Second, it is authoritarian or totalitarian control and repression to the point of
official terrorism and theocratic tyranny whenever and wherever in political power,
as in “conservative” or “red” periods and states such as the 1980s–2000s and the
South. If there is such thing as what Weber calls Calvinist “iron consistency” or
“methodical” conduct and some US contemporary sociologists refer to as a “method
in the madness” (Smith 2000)—a word Hume originally used to describe early
English Puritans (e.g. Presbyterians)—within Puritanism and its fundamentalist
revivals in America, it consists in this double pattern, dualism of being “anti-
authoritarian” as an exception, and authoritarian as a rule or “iron law.” And, Weber
no doubt discerns this pattern but does not establish it explicitly or elaborates on it
and emphasizes it in the way Comte does as well other social analysts like Mill and
Simmel. In short, this pattern reveals the Puritan, Calvinist-rooted illiberal model or
syndrome of freedom for Puritanism or Calvinism and un-freedom for others. Thus,
in original French and Dutch Calvinism and consequently in English-American
Puritanism the celebrated “love [of freedom] did not necessarily translate into
‘liberality’, a willingness to grant others the freedom you demand for yourself” while
either in opposition or governance10 (Kaplan 2002:18).

Puritanism and Despotic Medievalism

Generally, as mentioned, the “iron law” of totalitarianism is an appropriate or at least

convenient expression, since sociological research suggests that Puritanism
originates, evolves and functions as what Tawney (1962) calls “iron” or totalitarian,
Comte and Simmel repressive and “orthodox” Protestantism, and Weber specifically
tyrannical, theocratic and radical or extreme Calvinism. Further, sociological
analyses indicate that Puritanism eventually descends into medieval-type totalitar-
ianism or despotism through, as Weber implies, its “almost” Inquisition-style social
control and “unexampled tyranny” overall, or, in Tawney’s words, “inquisitorial”
discipline. Thus, Tocqueville, Weber, Tawney and other sociologists suggest that
Puritanism was essentially rooted in and derived from despotic medievalism and
traditionalism overall, and remained substantively, albeit not always formally,
medievalist and generally traditionalist, rather than, as in the myth of Puritan
modernity and liberty, modern and liberal-democratic. In extension, religious-
political conservatism, of which Puritanism was and remained an exemplar,
originally was, as Mannheim (1986:88) puts it, “nothing more than [medievalist]
traditionalism become self-reflective” in opposition to emerging modernity, notably
liberal-secular processes and revolutions, from the Renaissance, counteracted and

10
Kaplan (2002:18) specifically refers to historian Robert Fruin’s statement about officially hegemonic
Calvinism in Holland and his “citing as an example the way the Dutch ruled their colonies” to indicate the
Calvinist lack of “willingness to grant others the freedom you demand for yourself.” Overall, Kaplan
(2002:18) comments that “he might well have cited the Reformation as another example.”
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 37

even, as Pareto put it, “halted” by Calvinism and Protestantism overall, to especially
the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Against this background, original Puritanism as an offspring and transplant of
Calvinism in old and New England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries was a counter-reaction to and even reversal of what it condemned as the
artistic and humanistic “ungodly” Renaissance. This is what Parsons (1967:57) admits
by observing that there were only “few points on which the Puritans and the men of
the humanistic Renaissance could agree,” such as the “negative valuation of ritual,”
and conversely, those of disagreement being multiple and usually intense. Predictably,
subsequent Puritanism continued and even reinforced this pattern or “method in the
madness” (Smith 2000). This was exemplified by early Methodism as what Mill and
Weber describe as an English-American revival or intensification of Puritanism via the
“methodical doctrine and [practice] of sanctification” or Puritan-style saints, primarily
in adverse reaction to the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution, just as
religious conservatism overall during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and
beyond was a counter-Enlightenment (Nisbet 1966). In sum, Puritanism was and
remained basically medievalist and traditionalist, and alternatively, anti-modernist
and anti-liberal, specifically hostile to and reversing the humanistic Renaissance as did
Calvinism, and an anti-Enlightenment as by original Methodism and even more by
other Puritan revivals or survivals like American Baptism.
In general, sociological analyses suggest that Calvinism, even Protestantism as a
whole, and consequently Puritanism originally “was not a “modernizing” movement;
it aimed to establish a “purer” medieval socio-political and religious order”
(Eisenstadt 1965: 671), a Calvinist-Puritan euphemism for feudal-style despotic
theocracy. In this view, the “original political impulse” of Calvinism and so
Puritanism, plus early Lutheranism, was not in a “liberal” or democratic direction
but rather in a more “totalistic” one [by] restricting autonomous activities in both the
economic and the political field” (Eisenstadt 1965: 671). Another sociological study
describes Calvinism in Europe like Holland and Prussia, and implicitly its extension
Puritanism in Great Britain and America, in terms of “disciplinary revolution” and to
that extent medieval-like repressive counter-revolution or restoration (Gorski 1993).
As also observed, Calvinism or Puritanism, if not all Protestantism, lacked what its
adherents rejected or despised as “liberality” defined as granting one’s freedom to
others (Kaplan 2002), thus being illiberal in character.
In particular, as mentioned, a sociological study considers and describes early
American Puritanism and its New England theocracy as the deeply medievalist and
“most totalitarian” subtype of otherwise authoritarian Calvinism, and thus, as the
latter is the most repressive, of Protestantism and perhaps all Christianity, alongside
feudal Catholicism (Stivers 1994). And the “iron law” of Puritan totalitarianism
operated, continues and is likely to operate in virtually all societies or regions ruled
or dominated by Puritanism, from early Great Britain under the rule by Cromwell’s
Parliament of Saints” and pre- and post-revolutionary America, notably New
England ruled by Tocqueville’s first Puritans a la Winthrop et al. and their
descendents he visited two centuries later, to the “new” South turned into a “Bible
Belt” via the Puritan-inspired Great Awakenings and to contemporary American
society (e.g. “red” states) during yet another neo-Puritan, fundamentalist revival and
rule. It also did, does, and will likely do so in virtually all historical periods during
38 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

the totalitarian genesis and evolution, or rather and via the permanent theocratic
counter-revolution of Puritanism, spanning from the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth century to the twenty-first century, from the “old” Europe and Great
Britain to the “new nation” of America.
To paraphrase Mill’s observation in respect of its “putting down” of artistic and
related individual liberties (“amusements”), Puritanism wherever and whenever
“sufficiently powerful” or in power acts as, or in accordance with, the “iron law” of
totalitarianism, notably totalitarian theocracy and sectarian oligarchy. Conversely, as
implied, when it is not, Puritanism temporarily suspends its “iron law” by, as
Tocqueville remarks for English-American Puritans, demanding mostly for its
members, or extolling religious and other freedom and tolerance, in order to simply
survive in and eventually destroy a la Machiavelli a non-Puritan political-cultural
environment, as evidenced by its behavior in Great Britain prior to and after its
English Revolution (Goldstone 1986; Moore 1993), Holland (Gorski 1993; Hsia and
Nierop 2002; Munch 1981; Sprunger 1982) during the “exile” phase, as well as the
“old” US Episcopal South before the Great Awakenings (Boles 1999; Rossel 1970).
Simply, what was denied to, yet righteously demanded by, Puritans when not
“sufficiently powerful,” viz. in Anglican Great Britain and the Episcopal US South,
they eventually deny to non-Puritans whenever and wherever becoming so via their
revolutions or revivals, as in Cromwell’s old and Winthrop’s New England, the
Southern “Bible Belt”—i.e. liberty and tolerance, including religious freedom and
toleration itself.
In turn, Puritanism’s demand and advocacy of “liberty” for the sake of its own
survival in a non-Puritan social system and as a Machiavellian strategy of ultimate
totalitarian rule perhaps misled Weber, Parsons and others to identify and extol
Puritan “anti-authoritarian” tendencies proved to be actually spurious or historically
temporary, as are, for that matter, those in fascism, communism and fundamentalist
Islam when also in opposition, protest or “wilderness,” and demanding “freedom”
and “democracy” for themselves, yet denying them to others when in power. On this
and other accounts, as sociologists and historians suggest, Puritanism constitutes or
functions as a functional equivalent or a historical prototype of fascism (Friedland
200211; McLaughlin 1996), communism (Tiryakian 1981; Wallerstein and Zukin
1989), as well as of fundamentalist Islam (Smelser and Mitchell 2002; Turner 2002;
Van Dyke 1995). While its relations to fascism, communism as well as Islam are
beyond the scope of this essay, these apparent mutual totalitarian affinities or
convergences indirectly suggest and confirm the above rule, pattern or “iron law,”
i.e. that Puritanism is inherently or eventually totalitarianism.
In general, sociological and historical research indicates that nearly everywhere
and at all times, except for those situations when not “sufficiently powerful” or in
power, as for example, in Anglican Great Britain, Holland, and the Episcopal South,
Puritans have emerged and acted as the “iron” or “hotter sorts” of Protestants
(Gorski 2000), Christians or religious figures, i.e. as extreme, even inquisitorial
moralistic disciplinarians, totalitarian theocrats, or tyrannical self-proclaimed and
self-righteous saints. In particular, a comparative-historical sociological analysis

11
For example, Friedland (2002:419) suggests that fascism’s, specifically Nazism’s, (nationalistic)
“semiotic print matches” that of Puritan-rooted fundamentalism in America.
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 39

suggests that American Puritanism, from New England’s Puritan theocracy to its
contemporary survival or revival in Protestant fundamentalism, has almost
invariably acted “against the reality of a liberal and pluralist society” (Munch
2001:269–70) in America and, via crusade-like wars on the “evil” world as a whole,
beyond, and to that extent political democracy and civil liberties. In sum, plausible
theoretical arguments and compelling historical evidence suggest and warrant the
“iron law,” i.e. the proposition, empirical generalization and expectation, about
Puritanism and totalitarianism in general, particularly totalitarian theocracy and
sectarian oligarchy. The same holds true of the other propositions, empirical
generalizations or expectations about Puritanism and totalitarianism or un-freedom,
as presented below.

Puritanism and Liberty in Polity

A second proposition, empirical generalization or future expectation is that the more

societies and times are mastered, permeated or influenced by Puritanism, the more they
are likely to be un-free in the sense of totalitarian or authoritarian specifically in political
terms, i.e. anti- and pre-democratic than others, and conversely. As in the previous
general case, both sociological theory and empirical research suggest and corroborate
this specific proposition and expectation. By analogy, this proposition can be considered
the concrete, political version and restatement of the general sociological “iron law” or
theoretical thesis of Puritanism and totalitarianism or authoritarianism.
In this sense, the law can be specifically reformulated that “who says Puritanism,
says political totalitarianism, including state repression or government tyranny in the
typical form of totalitarian theocracy and sectarian dictatorship and exclusion
through oligarchy, or alternatively anti- and pre-democracy.” Thus, Mannheim
(1967:181-2) implies that Puritanism, like moral-religious and political conservatism
of which it is an epitome within Protestantism (Lipset 1996; Martin 2002; Munch
2001), represents and engenders what he calls an “authoritarian, pre-democratic”
ideology or “mind” and institutional system rejecting the idea of social progress and
democracy in favor of “static, hierarchically ordered models” like aristocracy,
oligarchy and theocracy, in sharp contrast and opposition to Enlightenment-rooted
liberalism’s democratic ideas, institutions and practices.
Even more important, previous sociological and historical research also warrants
the above proposition, generalization and expectation. As hinted, it suggests that
virtually in all societies and times mastered or pervaded by it, Puritanism emerges,
operates and remains as “iron,” even, as Weber and Tawney suggest, inquisitorial
Protestantism in the sense and form of political totalitarianism or authoritarianism to
the point of becoming and remaining, as during its New England theocracy, the
“most totalitarian” form of government and polity within Calvinism (Stivers 1994)
and by implication Protestantism and all Christianity. Simply, nearly everywhere and
always, from seventeenth century old and New England through the post-Episcopal
US South after the Great Awakenings to twenty-first century America, notably the
“Bible Belt,” Puritans, especially Puritan elites, and their descendents arise, survive
or revive, and act as the “iron” or “hotter sorts” of Protestants and Christians in the
specific political sense. They do as would-be total masters of society and totalitarian
40 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

dictators or authoritarian rulers in accordance with Weber’s identified Calvinist-

Puritan imperative of absolute “mastery of the world,” specifically theocratic tyrants
and oligarchic despots, and to that extent anti- and pre-democratic rather than, as in
conventional wisdom, democratic forces in politics.
Notably, as hinted, Puritanism represents or produces political totalitarianism
through its intrinsic or eventual totalitarian “monism” in the form and sense of anti-
pluralism, intolerance and anti-liberalism generally in politics as well as morality,
religion and all culture or society. Thus, even some US conservative sociologists
identify and implore original Puritanism as the main and even self-perpetuating, via
its survivals or revivals in sectarian Protestantism, source of what is observed as
pervasive and persisting intolerance and other related illiberal tendencies and
practices in contemporary American politics and society (Lipset 1955; 1996). By
implication, such tendencies originate in and hence perpetuate what J. S. Mill
identifies as original Puritans’ “fanatical” political as well as moral and religious
intolerance wherever and whenever they become “sufficiently powerful,” including
Great Britain in the wake of the Puritan Revolution, New England during the long
“Biblical Commonwealth” of the 1620s–1830s, and the US South in its “Bible-Belt”
phase, especially via and following the Second Awakening of the 1800s.
In turn, predictably, continuing and expanding the Puritan tradition (Dunn and
Woodard 1996), contemporary US religious fundamentalists and/or political
conservatives praise and celebrate Puritanism for what their counterparts in
moderate, liberal Protestantism (Martin 2002), not to mention secular liberals,
deplore and fear, i.e. its political anti-liberalism, in particular its anti-pluralism,
implicitly intolerance and other anti-democratic elements. Thus, US (Straussian)
religious and political conservatives (Deutsch and Soffer 1987) admit and even
unapologetically proclaim that Puritan-rooted American “Christian” conservatism,
more specifically Protestant fundamentalism (Lipset 1996), theologically condemns
and politically opposes and attacks what they disdainfully brand as the “liberal
democratic ideal” of liberty on the account of liberalism elevating the “dedication to
individual freedom” over those “higher” and “greater than humans” values that
Puritanism extolled, viz. Deity, faith and moral purity. To that extent, they implicitly
concede with apparent approval and celebration (or a sort of self-incrimination) that
both original Puritanism and its fundamentalist revivals are anti-democratic and anti-
libertarian, rather than, as Puritans and their descendants explicitly claim and are
usually believed in America, conversely. In a sense, the above anti-liberal and anti-
democratic proclamation, so to speak, “euthanizes” or self-contradicts the typically,
though not only, conservative-promoted “naïve” assumptions and “speculative”
explanations and justifications of Puritanism and other sectarian Protestantism
as liberty, democracy and pluralism, i.e. the Puritan “libertarian-democratic”
mythology.12

12
Cynics may comment that US neo-Puritan fundamentalist or extremely conservative (to invert the
expression in Sen 1977) “irrational fools” are proud of what most others within modern Western society
would be ashamed or embarrassed about, i.e. attacking the “liberal democratic ideal” of political and other
freedom, including attacks on rationalism and science, as epitomized and symbolized, alongside proto-
Puritan “Salem with witches” (Putnam 2000), by the “embarrassing” (Boles 1999) “Monkey Trial” of
biological evolutionism in Tennessee during the 1920s and its various sequels in the “Bible Belt” as a
whole and beyond ever since, up to the early twenty-first century.
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 41

More important than these internal contradictions, sociological and historical

analyses suggest that American Puritanism in particular, ranging from its original
New England theocracy to its expansion via the Great Awakenings and to its recent
fundamentalist revivals (Dunn and Woodard 1996), has typically operated in
opposition to a “liberal and pluralist” polity (Munch 2001:269–70), hence secular
democracy, notably political freedoms, rights and equality, and the substantive
differentiation between religion and politics, as well as, albeit not always openly and
even often tactically accepting, the formal (legal-constitutional) separation of church
and state.
Thus, an otherwise sympathetic study admits that, like their ancestors in the old
country, New England’s Puritan Pilgrims and masters like Winthrop et al. did not
really establish or even envision some liberal-secular democracy but instead what
they called mixt aristocracie “binding the people to their government rather than
ensure pluralism [or] encourage the expression of popular views” (Bremer 1995:90).
Moreover, these leaders admittedly “rejected the concept of democratic government
[and] denied the legitimacy of popular rule,” with the people’s role in politics
reduced to merely “choose a ruling class” (Bremer 1995:90), and thus to legitimate
and perpetuate the Puritan mixt aristocracie. For example, according to another
historical study, New England’s original or supreme Puritan master, “Winthrop did
not think much of “democratical government”” (Gould 1996:35–213) but apparently
did so of mixt aristocracie, i.e. “aristocratic assumptions of hierarchy, deference, and
order,” with the resulting “severity” of their own “new,” officially “republican” or
anti-monarchic ideas and institutions versus the “old” world.
By design or in effect, this Puritan mixt aristocracie was a sort of theocratic
aristocracy or aristocratic theocracy in virtue of being what Weber describes in
specific reference to New England’s Puritanism as “aristocratic rule by the
ecclesiastically qualified” or “domination over the sinful world by religious virtuosi
belonging to the ‘pure’ church.” In Michels’ terms, it was oligarchic theocracy or
theocratic oligarchy, thus confirming and exemplifying the “iron law” of Puritanism
and totalitarianism, including sectarian oligarchy. This is implied in the observation
that New England’s mixt aristocracie comprised a “relatively small number of
leaders” who were “chosen for high office with monotonous regularity,” with “free”
people being reduced and “expected to exercise the vote as a means of confirming
their adherence to the social covenant and ratifying the right of the Winthrops to
rule” (Bremer 1995:90–1), so preserving or evoking medieval Divine Rights of
theocratic rulers in a non-monarchic, “republican” form. The mixture or partial
tension of theocracy and aristocracy is also implicit in the observation that the
“Puritan migration to America was accompanied by an Old Testament theocratic
legacy that makes figures such as John Winthrop [etc.] good guys [sic!] whose
severity resulted from their being hopelessly shackled to aristocratic assumptions of
hierarchy, deference, and order” (Gould 1996:213).
Strikingly, the above observation thus finds that in the post- or neo-Puritan
conservative continuations, reconstructions and interpretations of Puritanism, its
creation, history or legacy of theocracy is “good” as the supposedly ultimate
realization of the Old Testament—which probably explains and justifies the
perennial project for a “Biblical Commonwealth” in America, notably the South,
since the Great Awakenings—and that of aristocracy as “bad” and “un-American.”
42 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

Or “predictably” is perhaps a better term (than “strikingly”), given that US religious-

political conservatives, if not, as based on various surveys, most Americans, tend to
adopt and extol the “Old Testament theocratic legacy” through their perpetual design
or, as Comte says, dreams of what Weber calls Calvinist Biblical theocracy or
bibliocracy sanctified as “godly society.” Conversely, they, at least by words, reject
and disdain aristocracy as the “elitist” heritage or vestige of the “old” feudal Europe,
overlooking that both theocratic and aristocratic legacies were transplanted to the
“new nation” from the “old world,” including European feudalism which America
supposedly lacked or has overcome (Lipset and Marks 2000; Nisbet 1966). For
example, such neo-Puritan curious, yet predictable reconstructions overlook or deny
that original Puritanism’s design of America (New England) as “Christian Sparta”
(Kloppenberg 1998), as the American rendition of the “biblical garden” (Gould
1996), was even an “older” European legacy or vestige than any feudal aristocracy
or elite that US Puritanical conservatives declaratively condemn as “foreign,”
though, as Weber says about New England’s and ante-bellum Southern ruling
groups, they always “wanted to live like feudal lords” and to make others their
servants or, as Tönnies implies or predicts, slaves. In sum, in Puritanism and its
fundamentalist revivals and survivals, theocracy is really, as Merton (1939) implies,
“native” or “all-American”13 although “sweetened” (Beck 2000) as and through
“apple pie” authoritarianism (Wagner 1997), while “aristocracy” nominally (or
hypocritically) “un-American,” thus overlooking or denying that both are historically
“foreign,” including “European” (specifically, “English”), just as intertwined and
mutually reinforcing, as New England’s Puritan mixt aristocracie itself showed.
In any event, another historical study indicates that early American Puritans,
apparently following their English parents, “longed for a godly rather than a liberal
society, and sought not the freedom of the sinner, but the freedom of God Almighty”
(Coffey 1998:962). Moreover, they eventually materialized this “longing” more fully
and enduringly, via what Weber calls New England’s Puritan theocracy from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth century, than their English ancestors had ever done or
dreamed about before or after, thus proving that American Puritans and their
descendents have from the beginning been and remained consummate masters
(“over-achievers”) in totalitarian rule, notably in theocratic control and repression. In
this sense, Tocqueville’s “Puritan Fathers” and their descendents proved more
successful and/or resilient than their British “grandparents” have ever been, before or
after the ultimately “abortive” Puritan Revolution.
They were so primarily because, as mentioned, Puritanism was less, if ever,
moderated in America than in Great Britain by counteracting religious and secular
forces such as Anglicanism (Munch 2001) and other moderate Protestantism (Martin
2002) as well as by secular liberalism and pluralism (Zaret 1989; also Chaves and

13
On a lighter note, it seems that these curiously opposite reconstructions of Puritan theocrats and
aristocrats as “good” and as “not so good” guys, respectively are rooted in the seeming belief or claim of
US religious-political conservatives, if not most Americans, that “God [Christ] is American”—notably,
“God is conservative American” (Heineman 1998)—and so is consequently a “godly society” qua
theocracy. Conversely, they rest on their belief or claim that “aristocracy” or “elites are not “American,”
but instead “foreign,” “European” and “feudal,” albeit most of US conservative and other ruling groups, if
Weber is correct, “always wanted to live like feudal lords,” from Winthrop et al. to Southern slave-owners
and to capitalist “robber barons” and their modern mutants.
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 43

Gorski 2001). In particular, this holds true in spite or perhaps because of

Episcopalism denounced as “foreign” and eventually deposed by the Puritan-
provoked Great Awakenings in the old South, thus converted into a neo-Puritan
“Bible Belt.” For example, the “Biblical Commonwealth” established and
maintained for two centuries (the 1620s–1830s) through the official establishment
of early Puritanism as the state Congregational Church in New England was a
supreme historical example, just as a perennial model or inspiration for subsequent
American religious conservatism, as in the “Bible Belt” South, of a “godly rather
than a liberal society,” in which human liberty and eventually life was vanquished,
depreciated and sacrificed to “God Almighty.” This Puritan bibliocracy was
historically more enduring as well as politically “purer” or more totalitarian (Stivers
1994) than its already repressive British version, Cromwell’s short-lived (the 1640s–
1660s) “Holy Commonwealth” established and ruled by this self-proclaimed, with a
proxy of Divine Rights14, “Lord of the Domain” and his “Parliament of Saints.” In
this sense, American Puritans achieved what their English and European Calvinist
progenitors could only dream of or attain temporarily and then eventually fail—i.e.
to establish and perpetuate for long an anti-liberal and anti-democratic cum
sanctified as “godly” society of un-freedom and depreciation of human life both
replaced by and sacrificed to Divine freedom.
In retrospect, this anti-liberal or theocratic “longing” of US as well as British
Puritans apparently sought to reestablish or reenact in the “new world” and England
what Weber calls “Calvinistic” theocracies, specifically bibliocracy, or state churches
in the “old” Europe, and was theologically premised on and rationalized by, in his
words, Calvin’s harsh dogma of God’s “absolute transcendence” versus humans, or
predestination. In turn, this reaffirms that anti-liberally “over-achieving” American,
like somewhat “under-achieving” British (Munch 2001), Puritanism proved to be
almost completely unoriginal relative to, even “parasitic” on, European, more
precisely French, Calvinism (Elwood 1999; Heller 1986), and in extension, given the
latter’s medievalist roots (Eisenstadt 1965), and as Tawney (1962) and other analysts
(Bremer 1995; Coffey 1998; Stivers 1994) imply, Christian medievalism in the
specific form of official theocratic Catholicism. Thus, “in England Calvinists
[renamed English Puritans] deposed and executed a king and temporarily abolished
the monarchy” (Elwood 1999:171). And, in New England and America overall these
French-rooted Calvinists, now rechristened American Puritans, established a
theocracy cum the “Biblical Commonwealth” after Calvin’s “Genevese [theocratic]
model of the civitas Dei where the Church dominates the state” (Frijhoff 2002:47).
Hence, American Puritanism’s sole or chief originality, exceptionality or novelty in
this respect is its more fully and enduringly attaining what its British ancestors and its
theological parent, European Calvinism only partially and transiently attained or
eventually found out, as in post-Puritan England and post-Calvinist Europe, to remain
just “longing” for establishing or, as Comte put it, a mere “dream” for restoring
totalitarian theocracy. And this is what the description of original American Puritanism
as the most absolute (Munch 2001) or totalitarian (Stivers 1994) Calvinism and thus
Protestantism essentially signifies. In sum, as before, convincing theoretical arguments

14
For example, Weber points to, in reference to Puritan writer Richard Baxter, to “Cromwell’s
usurpation.”
44 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

and ample historical evidence alike justify the proposition, empirical generalization or
expectation about Puritanism and political totalitarianism, or anti- and pre-democratic
ideology and polity, notably totalitarian theocracy and sectarian oligarchy.

Puritanism and Liberty in Culture

A third related proposition, empirical generalization or prospective expectation is

that the more human societies and historical times are mastered, permeated or
influenced by Puritanism, the more they are likely to be un-free, i.e. totalitarian or
authoritarian, specifically in cultural terms or to epitomize an un-free civil society
and historical period than others, and conversely. Like before, sociological theory
and empirical research prompt and justify this specific proposition and generaliza-
tion. By analogy to the previous, this proposition represents the specific cultural or
civil-society variant and reformulation of the general sociological “iron law” or
theoretical argument of Puritanism and totalitarianism.
If so, the above yields the analogous restatement of the “iron law” to the effect that
“who says Puritanism, says cultural totalitarianism, including moralist repression,
religious coercion and war, theocratic religion and culture wars, or simply un-free civil
society.” In Mannheim’s (1967) terms, in virtue of being a paradigmatic type of, and
like other, strident moral-religious conservatism, Puritanism constitutes and
reproduces a totalitarian ideology or an authoritarian “mind” and cultural complex
overall. The latter is specifically manifested in repressive morality, theocratic
religion and other religiously over-determined culture, such as art, education, science
and even technology, in the service or function of theology. In other words, Puritan
totalitarian ideology and culture overall expresses itself and eventuates in a non- and
pre-democratic civil society—if there is such thing, as a seeming contradiction in
terms—devoid of individual liberties, human rights and privacy suppressed,
subordinated and ultimately sacrificed to “higher” supra- or anti-human powers
and purposes, both sacred like Deity, piety, church and morality (Deutsch and Soffer
1987), and “secular,” including nation, state, patriotism and anti-communism (Dunn
and Woodard 1996), for example, what Weber calls Americanism (also Lipset 1996)
and Merton American nativism within original Puritanism.
More importantly, previous sociological and historical research also yields or provides
a rationale for this proposition, empirical generalization and possible prediction. It
indicates that in virtually all Puritan societies and historical periods, Puritanism emerges,
functions and persists as “iron” and even inquisitorial Protestantism (Tawney 1962)
through its cultural totalitarianism or authoritarianism. Moreover, as implied, Puritanism
typically tends to climax into the “most totalitarian” or tyrannical type of Protestantism,
and even of Calvinism with its originally harsh theology, repressive or intolerant
religion, and medieval-style despotic theocracy. As indicated, this is what precisely
Puritanism became during its total and repressive “mastery of the world” in New
England via the “most totalitarian” Calvinist theocracy (Stivers 1994), specifically
Weber’s bibliocracy designated as the holy “Biblical Commonwealth.”
On this account, Puritanism, especially its early and subsequent American
transplant, not only applies, extends and implements in Anglo-Saxon settings, but
further radicalizes, escalates and intensifies European Calvinism already, as Weber,
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 45

Simmel and others suggest, the most radical, orthodox and despotic type of
Protestantism in cultural, including moral-religious, as well as political terms. If
American and other Puritanism can, as it does, claim any novelty, creativity or
exceptionality relative to Calvinism and in extension religious medievalism from the
“old” Europe, then it primarily consists in this intensification or “re-invention” of
Calvinist and medievalist Christian cultural, notably moral-religious, radicalism,
orthodoxy and despotism, not, as in the Puritan “liberal mythology,” in their
mitigation or, alternatively, in liberalism, secularism and rationalism.
By analogy to the previous proposition, almost everywhere and always, at least in
Mill’s scenario or prediction of whenever and wherever being “sufficiently
powerful,” Puritans arise and act as the “iron,” “inquisitorial” or “hotter” sorts of
Protestants and “born-again” Christians not only in political, but also cultural, terms
in an intertwined and mutually reinforcing process, so a sort of “method in the
madness,” as referred to contemporary US fundamentalists by some explicitly
empathetic sociologists (Smith 2000). Specifically, they do as the most intolerant,
disciplinarian, oppressive and absolutist moralists (“saints”), as well as the
staunchest religious fundamentalists (“virtuosi”) or radicals cum crusaders, the most
tyrannical theocrats and the most aggressive culture (as well as military) warriors.
To that extent, Puritans represent and operate as implacable antagonists and
ultimately “terminators” or impediments of liberal-secular and human civil society,
as actually and even consistently happened during Puritanism’s long-standing
invariably totalitarian history, when in power. Puritanism’s totalitarian history
involves its repressive “Holy Commonwealth” (Zaret 1989) through Cromwell’s
holy wars and massacres, its totalitarian theocracy via Divine rule by Winthrop et al.
in New England (Munch 2000), its theocratic transforming or designing the old
South (Boles 1999) and eventually all America into a “Bible Belt” after the Great
Awakenings. It perhaps climaxed, apart from the 1920s symbolized by the infamous
an admittedly embarrassing “Monkey Trial” (Boles 1999), during the twenty-first
century as though no great changes ever happened, or perhaps the “more things
changed, the more they stayed the same,” from the seventeenth century and “Salem
with witches” (Putnam 2000). This apparent lack of substantive (as distinguished
from formal) change or, alternatively, the striking persistence and, in Weber’s words,
Calvinist “iron consistence” in cultural and other societal totalitarianism during a
four-century span is what the implicitly admitted (Smith 2000; Wuthnow 1998)
Puritan-evangelical “method in the madness” or, more neutrally, the “methodical”
doctrine, practice and imposition of sanctification as the idea and reproduction of
saints and their rule, signifies in a long-term, historical sense15.

15
Bourdieu (2000) implies that societal “madness” is defined by absolute power acting, and thus making
the world, “mad”; if so, then Puritanism and Calvinism overall conforms with this definition on the
account of its pursuit of total mastery or domination of society. In short, if what Keynes’ calls “madmen in
authority” are defined by absolute rule, then Puritans and other Calvinist are salient (though not sole)
exemplars in this respect. Relatedly, if Keynes’ “madmen” are, as often, defined by a lack of or inability
and unwillingness for relevant and necessary change, i.e. by rigid constancy and persistence or tenacity, in
the face of changed situations, both original Calvinists/Puritans and their descendants meet this definition
through their systematic, constant, persistent or tenacious totalitarian destruction of human freedom and
eventually life, rationalized as methodical sanctification, from Calvin’s sixteenth century Geneva to
seventeenth century old and New England’s “Biblical Commonwealth” to the twenty-first century “Bible
Belt.”
46 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

Recall, that Puritans tend to be the most tyrannical moral saints and religious
virtuosi in Protestantism and Christianity overall is what Weber suggests
rediscovering-viz. after Comte, Mill and in part Tocqueville, albeit de-emphasizing,
compared to its assumed “elective affinity” with modern capitalism-Puritanism’s
“unexampled tyranny” in culture or civil society as well as polity. As it stands, this is
a striking, if not for most Puritan descendents or admirers “shocking,” rediscovery
indicating not only that Puritanism is the system or design of tyrannical control and
repression in religion, morality and all culture, just as in polity, but a historically
unprecedented and/or comparative unrivaled one within Protestantism, Christianity
and other world religions excluding, as Weber and other sociologists imply, Islam
and in part Hinduism (cf. Archer 2001; Bauman 1997; Turner 2002). Weber also
implies the above describing Calvinism and hence its Anglo-Saxon transplant
Puritanism as the “most absolutely unbearable form of ecclesiastical control of the
individual which could possible exist” or simply as “excessively despotic” to the
point that this despotism “almost amounted to an inquisition” counteracting
the “liberation of individual powers.”
In particular, recall Mill identifies and deplores the “fanatical” moral-religious and
other cultural, plus political, intolerance of original Puritans (“Methodists and
Calvinists”) in Great Britain and America. Also, some contemporary sociologists
(Bauman 2000:106) confirm and evoke Mill by diagnosing the so-called sadistic
intolerance to cultural otherness by Puritan descendents or revivals within modern
American evangelicalism seeking and often, as in the old US South turned into a
“Bible Belt,” attaining total mastery or totalitarian control of society. Predictably,
such Puritan-rooted intolerance and exclusion especially targets “sexual mores”
(Bauman 2000:106), as well as “infidels” like atheists or agnostics construed as
supremely “un-American” persons (Edgell et al. 2006) in a manner reminiscent of
the proto-Puritan “Salem with witches” or McCarthyism and its own pseudo-Puritan
witch-trials.
Notably, as hinted, sociological and historical analyses identify and document
remarkable continuities in Puritan moral-religious and other cultural totalitarianism
during American history. Predictably, these continuities specifically consists in that,
just as Puritanism in seventeenth_eighteenth century New England was the “most
totalitarian” subtype of Calvinist-Protestant theology, religion and theocracy, so is,
with minor modifications or adaptations, Puritan-inspired fundamentalism (Dunn
and Woodard 1996) or Protestant sectarianism (Lipset 1996) in America, notably the
South, during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Munch 2001). Thus,
according to some sociologists, like Puritanism as its perennial model or inspiration,
revived evangelicalism in the “Bible Belt,” as epitomized by increasingly powerful
Southern Baptism, belongs to a “wider family of totalitarian solutions,” together
with Islamic fundamentalism as its manifest enemy and yet latent ally, to the
perceived menace or burden of individual liberty in culture or civil society, just as in
polity (Bauman 1997:184). In this view, both neo-Puritan evangelicalism and
Islamic fundamentalism are appealing and proto-totalitarian alike in that “their allure
is the promise put paid to the agony of individual choice by abolishing the choice
itself” (Bauman 1997:70).
In sum, cogent theoretical arguments and previous strong evidence provide the
rationale for the proposition about Puritanism, both in its original and derivative
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 47

forms, as a species of cultural, notably moral-religious, totalitarianism expressed in a

repressive morality, theocratic religion and intolerant culture, thus an antipode to a
free secular civil society, just as to a liberal-democratic polity.

Puritanism, Liberty and Anti-Humanism

A fourth proposition, empirical generalization or prospective expectation is that the

more human societies and historical times are mastered, permeated or influenced by
Puritanism, the more they are likely to be anti-humanist in secular terms and to that
extent less free, liberal-democratic than others, and conversely. Like in the previous
cases, sociological theory and previous empirical research alike yield or justify this
theoretical proposition and expectation about Puritanism and anti-humanism and
consequently totalitarianism or authoritarianism considered to be its special case or
ultimate product16 in the form of human un-freedom and repression.
In theoretical terms, by analogy to the previous, this proposition may restate the
general sociological “iron law” or theoretical thesis of Puritan totalitarianism in the
sense that “who says Puritanism, says anti-humanism, including antagonism to
secular humanism, inhuman theology, religion and theocracy, even barbaric
inhumanity, and consequently despotism and primitivism.” Within sociological
theory, Comte among the first implicitly posits and predicts Puritan anti-humanism
by stating that “all emancipation of the human mind became more repugnant” to the
new “official Protestantism,” as well as to non-official or oppositional Protestant
sects, than even to the old “most degenerate” Catholicism. By implication, Comte’s
“official Protestantism” involves, alongside Calvinism in France (briefly), Geneva
and Holland, as well as Lutheranism in Germany and Anglicanism in England,
officially “established” Calvinist Puritanism in Great Britain (including also
Scotland) via a “Holy Commonwealth” ruled by a “Parliaments of Saints” following
the victorious yet eventually failed Puritan Revolution (Goldstone 1986; Moore
1993), especially and enduringly in New England by the “establishment” of the
Puritan, Congregational Church in power for two centuries. And, Comte’s Protestant
“sects” primarily included, as also Weber and other sociologists (Munch 1981)
imply, Calvinist-based Puritan militantly sectarian denominations in opposition or
protest against non-Calvinist or non-Puritan settings and powers, viz. Catholic
France and Holland in the sixteenth century, Lutheran Germany and Anglican
England in the seventeenth century, the US Episcopal South during the eighteenth-
nineteenth centuries, etc. Notably, Comte implies that this anti-humanist repugnance

16
The fourth proposition posits and predicts that Puritanism tends to be or lead to anti-humanism, not that
the latter involves or results in authoritarianism, as both a secondary and relatively non-controversial more
general argument, though conceivably, as anti-humanists allege, humanism may also have authoritarian
elements or outcomes. “Anti-humanist” liberal democracy and free civil society appears as prima facie an
inner contradiction or oxymoron, as does its opposite, “humanist” totalitarianism or authoritarianism,
including theocracy. In general, “anti-humanism” is or involves “authoritarianism,” and conversely, so
long as humanism logically and empirically entails the recognition, protection and promotion of human
freedom, just as reason, creativity, responsibility, dignity and life.
48 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

represented the eventual product or integral element of Puritanism’s totalitarian rule,

specifically its theocratic repression, and its “retrograde” conservatism whenever
attaining its ideal of total mastery of society or simply “in government.”
Also, Comte’s contemporary Spencer suggests that Puritanism entails or
engenders anti-humanism in that he observes that Puritans and other Protestants,
“in substituting the conception of a God so comparatively unlike themselves as not
to be influenced” by forgiveness for sin and other humane methods in favor of
condemnation and harsh punishment, emerge and act as “hard and cold” and in that
sense non- or supra-human. Moreover, Spencer implicitly posits or predicts that
Puritanism results in barbarism alerting to what he calls the “barbarizing of colonists,
who live under aboriginal conditions” and citing the “back settlers of America,”
including implicitly the early Puritans/Pilgrims in New England, as well as their neo-
Puritan descendents in the South and the “Wild West” to “sufficiently exemplify it.”
Hence, he would likely agree that Puritanism exemplifies and reveals what he
denotes as indications of “barbarous” practices or a “deficient moral sense” of
humanity such as, first and foremost, “disregard of human life,” plus “habitual
violation of personal liberty” and others, e.g. theft and dishonesty via conquest and
what Weber and other analysts identify as the “pure” and “vigorous hypocrisy” of
honesty (Bremer 1995) or rather its appearance as the “best policy.” Also, some
contemporary analysts almost replicate Comte’s observation of repugnance to human
emancipation by stating that that contemporary US Puritan-inspired religious
conservatism “abhors” secular humanism (Van Dyke 1995:89).
Even Parsons (1967), usually both emulated and criticized as the American
exemplar of a Protestant sociological theorist with a “Puritan heritage” (Alexander
1983; also Mayway 1984), albeit with the “Kantian core” of ethical universalism
(Munch 1981), implicitly recognizes and predicts Puritan anti-humanism. Signifi-
cantly, he states that the outcome of what he somewhat invidiously distinguishes,
relative to non-Protestantism, as the individual’s “immediacy” to God in Puritanism
and Protestantism overall is the “corresponding devaluation of his attachment to his
fellows, above all the tendency to reduce them to impersonal, unsentimental terms
and to consider others not so much from the point of their value in themselves as of
their usefulness, ultimately to the purposes of God, more immediately to his own
ends” (Parsons 1967:54–5). As it stands, this statement unwittingly acknowledges
that Puritanism, if not Protestantism as a whole, tends to be anti-humanism in two
intertwined and mutually reinforcing respects, ways or forms. It does so in, first, a
theological, spiritual, transcendental or purely religious (“purposes of God”), and,
second, a Machiavellian or utilitarian (“own ends”), respect. This may seem a
contradictory, as Tocqueville intimates by “puritanical and commercial,” but still not
impossible combination, as shown by Calvinist-capitalist Franklin, Weber’s personal
epitome for combining Puritan godliness and moralism, plus “pure hypocrisy,” with
the “spirit of capitalism” or utilitarianism.
Notably, previous sociological and historical research strongly suggests and
supports the proposition and expectation of Puritanism and totalitarian anti-
humanism. Recall, a classical and poignant case in point is Weber’s observation
that Calvinism and consequently Puritanism as its offspring, more than Lutheranism,
is interested “solely in God, not in man; God does not exist for men, but men for the
sake of God” (also cited in Bendix 1977:59). Moreover, he observes that Puritanism
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 49

represents or contains, especially in its stern admonition “against any trust in the aid
of friendship of men” expressing what he calls a “peculiar misanthropy,” the “most
extreme form” of humans’ exclusive and total trusting in an absolutely transcen-
dental and thus implicitly merciless Divinity, in accordance with the Calvinist
doctrine of God’s absolute transcendence or predestination, and to that extent of anti-
or non-humanism. In essence, Puritanism devaluates, subordinates and ultimately,
literally or symbolically, sacrifices humans to what Weber calls the “God of
Calvinism” as an exact opposite, in virtue of this absolute transcendence and implied
mercilessness (“non-fatherly” figure), of the pre-Calvinist Christian “Father in
heaven.” By implication, Puritanism’s “most absolutely unbearable” religious
coercion and “unexampled tyranny” or “most totalitarian” Calvinist theocracy is a
special case or ultimate result of its “most extreme” anti-humanism in secular terms,
and conversely, in an interconnected and mutually reinforcing process (albeit Weber
only intimates this connection and reinforcement).
Further, Weber strongly and explicitly suggests its anti-humanism by detecting, in
his words, Puritanism’s “extreme inhumanity,” predictably rooted in what he
considers the Calvinist harsh, gloomy and inhuman dogma of God’s absolute
transcendence substituting the “Father in heaven of the New Testament, so human
and understanding” with a “transcendental being, beyond the reach of human
understanding.” Puritan extreme inhumanity manifests itself in what he describes as
“a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness” and helplessness of individuals forced,
via worldly asceticism and societal achievements, to “serve the glorification of God
and for that purpose alone.” Also, Tawney (1962:229) identifies anti-humanism in
early Puritanism by observing that the “moral self-sufficiency of the Puritan nerved
his will, but corroded his sense of social solidarity” and basic humanity. In this
connection, Tawney poses the rhetorical question: “For, if each individual’s destiny
hands on a private transaction between himself and his Maker, what room its left for
human intervention?,” with the implied negative answer, thus no or weak humanism.
For example, a historical study admits of theological or theocratic non-humanism
in original American Puritanism by observing that Puritans in New England were
persuaded and persuading others that humans (of course, excluding themselves)
were “fundamentally depraved and deserving of damnation” (Bremer 1995:17),
consequently death in this world for deadly sins cum crimes such as blasphemy,
sorcery and adultery, as epitomized and symbolized by “Salem with witches.” In this
view, these Puritan anti-humanistic conceptions and eventually methodical practices
and institutions were rooted in and rationalized not only “scripturally” by the
inhuman and gloomy Calvinist dogma of predestination (and Biblical interpretations
generally) but also “experientially” with the Puritans’ real-life encountering a
“sinful” and “corrupt” world, thus finding or “constructing” “evil” and “sin”
everywhere and anywhere then in themselves.
Another historical study also finds that New England’s early Puritans were
convinced and acted accordingly—i.e. basically inhumanly—that “notorious
sinners” deserved no “judgment of charity” and hence “not all would be saved,”
notably those whose lifestyles were “subjected to Puritan attack [by] the saints”
(Gould 1996:23). The study concludes that Puritan anti-humanism, manifest in its
typical Calvinist gloom generating inhuman “malignant” effects or symbols,
originates in or is anticipated by the “dark side [of] the values of the Mayflower
50 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

Compact and Winthrop’s speech aboard the Arabella” (Gould 1996:206–10). A

sociological study generalizes and condenses these historical observations by stating
that Puritanism embraces and reinforces the Calvinist and in part Lutheran, as well
as perhaps the prior Catholic or general Christian (as suggested in Bremer 1995),
dogmatic “emphasis on the fundamental evilness and powerlessness of men”
(McLaughlin 1996:248), thus functioning as an functional equivalent or variety
(Hudson and Coukos 2005) of European Calvinism in Anglo-Saxon societies. To
summarize, sociological theory and research suggest and rationalize the proposition
and expectation about Puritanism as anti-humanism and consequently totalitarianism
as its dimension or outcome epitomizing human un-freedom and subjection.

Puritanism’s Institutions, Indicators and Legacies of “Freedom”: A Summary

The above four propositions, empirical generalizations and expectations yield a

corresponding classification of Puritanism’s elements destructive of freedom. To
paraphrase Dahrendorf (1979), the Puritan, including neo-Puritan, institutions,
practices and “signs of illiberty” or totalitarian “degrees of un-freedom” can be
classified into the following categories, all revealing what can be described as
Puritanism’s inherent syndrome and/or ultimate outcome of totalitarianism.
One category involves Puritanism’s elements, indicators and legacies of societal
un-freedom or totalitarianism in society generally, manifested in, first, its fear,
suspicion, contempt of freedom, second and as a corollary, its suppression and
ultimately elimination of human liberties and even life, viz. via the widespread use
of the death penalty for sins and/or crimes.
Included in another category are Puritanism’s elements, indicators and legacies of
political illiberty or totalitarianism in polity in particular. These are further
subdivided and manifested in Puritan anti-liberalism and non-democracy, including
anti-pluralism and anti- and pseudo-democratic tendencies, as well as extremism in
politics as revealed in radicalism and absolutism, political intolerance, total control,
coercion and repression, repressive (and, as many Americans say, “dumb”) laws and
Draconian sanctions, and the like. They are also epitomized and expressed in Puritan
anti-egalitarianism, socio-political and economic alike (Putterman et al. 1998), and
militancy and its expressions in militarism, aggressive nationalism (Friedland 2001)
or nativism (Merton 1939), and expansionism or imperialism (Steinmetz 2005;
Tiryakian 2002).
Still another category comprises Puritanism’s elements, indicators and legacies of
civil illiberty, i.e. socio-cultural, including moral, religious, artistic and educational,
totalitarianism or authoritarianism. They specifically contain the elements, indicators
and legacies of Puritan moral totalitarianism, a sort of “moralistic fascism” expressed
in oppressive ethical discipline, moralist intolerance and absolutism, and the
coercive imposition of Puritanical morality on civil society. They also incorporate
the elements and indicators of religious totalitarianism as manifested in intolerance
and coercion in and wars of religion, fundamentalism, anti-secularism and
totalitarian theocracy, represented by the “Holy Biblical Commonwealth,” the
“Bible Belt,” etc. Included in addition are those of Puritan artistic-cultural
totalitarianism or authoritarianism, including the suppression of the arts and
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 51

antagonism to non-religious culture. Lastly, this category includes the elements and
indicators of Puritan educational-scientific totalitarianism or authoritarianism,
reflected in the hostility to and suppression of secular education and science, just
as totalitarian uses of sciences and technologies.
A last category entails Puritan totalitarian anti-humanism, as specifically revealed
in antagonism to secular humanism, sheer inhumanity, barbarism and inhuman
primitivism, and other anti-humanist dimensions. Consequently, Puritanism’s
contemporary legacies or revivals, primarily in America as the most enduringly
and intensively Puritan society, incorporate all of the above, notably anti-liberal
political-moral repression reaching or approaching “moralistic fascism,” religious
and other extremism, artistic-culture suppression and regression, as well as pervasive
anti-egalitarianism and anti-humanism.

Discussion

Within classical sociological theory, Weber is famous for arguing, and seemingly
extolling for it, that Calvinism and consequently Puritanism as its English-American
derivative aims at and eventually attains ascetic mastery or control of the world of
“mundane affairs,” including the “damned,” by the “elect,” “godly,” “pure” or “saints,”
i.e. domination over a sinful and ungodly society by “religious virtuosi” claiming to
belong to the “pure church.” As also known, Weber consistently and sharply, and, critics
would say, invidiously, distinguishes this Calvinist-Puritan or Protestant tendency and
practice from what he seemingly depreciates as “passive adaptation” or “mere
accommodation” to the world, an older counter-tendency attributed to pre-Protestant,
especially Oriental, religions, including traditional Catholicism. It is essentially in terms
of this difference between mastery of and adaptation to the physical-social world that
Weber explains the rise, development and expansion of modern capitalism in post-
Reformation Calvinist Europe and America (the “Occident”) in contrast to the other
parts of the world (especially the “Orient”), including medieval Catholic countries like
Renaissance Italy17 (Cohen 1980; also Alexander 1998) and even non-Christian,
Asian societies (Collins 1997). Yet this is a comparative-historical explanation that
some contemporary sociologists describe as a “beloved myth” (Delacroix and Nielsen
2001) in the sociological literature and Protestant societies in general.
More important to our present purpose, what is, however, less known or
emphasized by his successors like Parsons (yet see Bendix 1977) is that Weber
implies, albeit downplays or de-emphasizes by comparison to its assumed “elective
affinity” or “intimate relationship” with modern capitalism, that Calvinism-
Puritanism’s ascetic mastery, control or domination of the “sinful,” “ungodly” world
intrinsically tends to be total or absolute, consequently or ultimately to function as
and eventuate in totalitarian or totalistic (Eisenstadt 1965) social rule and
dominance. Notably, Weber intimates, though not explicitly establishes, that such
mastery becomes or seeks to be generally total, and specifically functions as or

17
Alexander (1998:171–2) remarks that “if the Italian capitalists of the early modern city states
[manifested] the capitalist spirit [then], the Weber’s correlation between capitalists and Puritans is based on
a restricted sample and fails to substantiate his theory.”
52 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

results in what he describes, as does Ross, as Puritanism’s “unexampled tyranny” or

“most absolutely unbearable” religious control and repression of society and
individuals through Puritan theocracies or “Calvinistic state churches” in Europe,
including England in the seventeenth century and colonial America (New England).
At this juncture, it is to be admitted that saying that the Calvinist-Puritan mastery
of the world intrinsically tends to be total and so totalitarian perhaps means
redundancy or tautology in this respect. This holds true insofar as all religious-
political or at least Calvinist-Puritan mastery seeks, as the very term seems to
indicate, by assumption to be “total,” “absolute,” “complete,” “perfect” or
realistically comprehensive; alternatively “partial” or “incomplete” mastery would
be an internal contradiction, within Calvinism and Puritanism at the minimum.
Simply, the word “intrinsically” is redundant or tautological so long as all, or at least
Calvinist-Puritan, actual or potential would-be masters act as, or wish to become,
“total” or “absolute,” and alternatively “partial masters” are a kind of “walking
contradictions” or, as totalitarian rulers and ideologues warn from Puritanism to
fascism, eventually self-defeating, overthrown by their “ungodly” and “inferior”
servants. This is what Weber basically implies and Comte more clearly establishes
and predicts. If so, then the point is not so much to argue, demonstrate and predict
that Puritanism’s mastery in itself is “total” as that its “total mastery” of the world
tends to function as or generate totalitarian societal rule.
Admittedly, one can make two diametrically opposite, seemingly plausible
objections to the theoretical argument in this essay. The first objection is that the
Puritan or any Protestant active “mastery” of the world is not necessarily total and
totalitarian but has historically been or could be non-total, in the sense of “limited
government,” and democratic. This is what not only Puritans and their fundamen-
talist descendents claim, but also Weber sometimes implies, as by the “anti-
authoritarian tendency,” and Parsons (1967) and his disciples (Mayway 1984)
propose through the Parsonian attribution and celebration of American capitalism
and democracy, as the presumed culmination (Giddens 1984) of all social evolution
and history, to Puritanism and its supposed individualism (i.e. the individual
“immediacy to God”). Yet, Weber’s identification of the “unexampled tyranny” of
Puritanism, notably the Puritan “theocracy of New England” as the “most
totalitarian” (Stivers 1994) and/or morally absolutist (Munch 2001) Calvinist rule,
self-invalidates and disposes of that objection.
The second, opposite objection is that any, including democratic, rule tends to be
active and even total mastery, by analogy, “big government,” of the world and to that
extent “Puritan” or “Calvinist” in Weber’s sense, so “we are all Puritans” (just as
“Keynesians”) in this respect, just as correlatively all world religions have been
systems of “restraint” (Bell 1977). This is also what Weber in part implies by
defining modern democracy or modern democratic capitalism in terms of Calvinist-
style political-economic active or total “mastery of the world,” including “rational
bureaucratic administration,” as do his followers like Parsons et al. However, Weber
and Parsonians again self-invalidate this objection by distinguishing modern
democracy formally based on legal-rational authority as the democratic postulate
or method of legitimation of power from its pre- or non-democratic alternatives with
their formal basis in charismatic and/or traditional authority as instead, in his words,
the “authoritarian principle” of legitimation.
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 53

And Puritanism, like Calvinism, is, as Weber emphasizes, the supreme case of
political domination based on charismatic and traditional, so un-democratic,
authority, typically entwined through what he call the “routinization of charisma,”
especially after its official establishment in power by means of theocracy, as
evidenced by Cromwell’s “Holy Commonwealth” in old, and Winthrop’s “Biblical
Commonwealth” in, New England. This is what contemporary Weberian sociologists
(Lenski 1994:8–9) suggest by observing that legal-rational authority “is dominant
only in modern secular societies” or liberal democracies, while charismatic-
traditional authorities with their authoritarian principle have been “present at one
time or another in all of the older religiously based social formations [i.e. with bases
in] Puritanism, Catholicism, ancient Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism,
Islam.” Such observations so effectively separate liberal-secular democracy in virtue
of its legal-rational authority from Puritanism and other religion due to its
authoritarian charismatic-traditional form, thus contradicting the possible objection
that any democratic rule is “Puritan” or “Calvinist” in the sense of total, either
charismatic or traditional, “mastery of the world.”
Overall, the problem with the second objection is that it simply erases or blurs the
difference between democratic and non-democratic, totalitarian rule or mastery by
suggesting or implying that even democracy is necessarily “undemocratic” or
“authoritarian.” No doubt, the latter outcome is often observed or likely, as Weber
implies, in substantive terms, including restrictions or violations of political liberties
and rights (e.g. voting), not fully free elections, or repressive government control, as
witnessed in the “under-democratized” US South during most of its formally
“democratic” history, up to the twenty-first century (Amenta et al. 2001; Cochran
2001). Yet, the objection fails to distinguish democracy, at least its liberal-secular
Western ideal type (Lenski 1994), from what is non-democracy, such as nominally
non-religious totalitarianism like fascism and fundamentalist theocracy exemplified
or symbolized by the US “Bible Belt” (at least as a theological design) and Islamic
Iran (Bauman 1997). In sum, even if the difference between democracy and non-
democracy is the matter of different pseudo-statistical degrees of freedom and un-
freedom rather than a sharp either-or dichotomy, it is still a relative differential to
which the objection fails to do justice. Either way, both objections are self-
invalidated or self-contradicted within a Weberian and Parsonian framework, as are
preempted in this essay.
In retrospect, in early sociology, Comte explicitly establishes, predicts or
prefigures what Weber implies or intimates. Anticipating Weber, what Comte
significantly denotes as the “Reign” of Puritan saints is, in his view, by assumption
or in actuality total, absolute, pure, sanctified or perfect and consequently or
eventually totalitarian mastery, given, as both imply, the sainthood’s inherent claim
to totality, absoluteness, purity, sanctity or perfection in moral-religious, political and
all other, including even, as Tawney (1962) observes for New England’s Puritans,
economic terms.
Since Puritanism is morally defined and typified by, in Weber’s words, an “ethic
of virtuosi” grounded in the “methodical religious doctrine of sanctification,” the
mastery or reign of Comte’s Puritan saints is likely to be total or absolute in some
sense, or more comprehensive and “purer” than of those not or less militantly
seeking and claiming moral absolutism (Munch 2001), purity and perfection. The
54 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

latter comprise, for example, as Comte and Weber suggest, most Catholics and
Anglicans as the historical raison d’être or agents provocateurs of the Puritan
Revolution in England and beyond, as well as, in Simmel’s view, liberal or moderate
Lutheran and other non-Calvinist Protestants (Martin 2002; Munch 1981). Simply,
Puritan putative saints or religious virtuosi, so a kind of super-humans, methodically
seek to become total masters of what they condemn as the “impure” and “ungodly”
world because of what they are or claim to be: the supreme embodiments of absolute
moral purity and godliness, so God’s representatives or Providential voices on Earth.
Hence, an implied theological rationale is that Divinity’s mastery, rule or
predestination, just as creation, of the world is by Divine design, as Calvinism
especially emphasizes (in Weber’s view), total or absolute. And consequently so is
and shall be by absolute necessity the societal reign by Puritan religious virtuosi or
moral saints as self-proclaimed, to use Weber’s term, God’s agents with their Divine
Rights, exemplified by Winthrop et al. (Bremer 1995; Gould 1996), to implement
Providential Design by establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth (Bendix 1984) to the
point of destroying humans and the world in “the name of divine master.”
In sum, the Puritan mastery or control of the world tends to be total primarily
because it is considered and sanctified as Divinely-ordained or a calling and mission
from Providence, a sort of “manifest destiny,” as implicit in the Calvinist dogma of
predestination, i.e. what Weber calls the “double” Providential decree of salvation
and the elect vs. damnation and the reprobate. In short, Puritanism’s mastery of the
social world is observed and predicted to be either total, thus ultimately totalitarian,
or not “Puritan” at all, which is a critical point for the present aim. Both tendencies
and predictions—i.e. that Calvinist-Puritan mastery of the world is, first, total or
absolute and hence, second, totalitarian or totalistic rule may sound self-evident or
tautological and so redundant, yet have been somewhat overlooked or at best
implied or “buried” beneath the assumed “elective affinity” of Calvinism and
modern capitalism in the sociological literature.
Against this Weberian background of world-mastering Calvinism vs. “merely”
adapting or accommodating pre-Calvinism, Puritanism’s sole or main historical
newness and originality or exceptionality in a sense has been to attain the most total
mastery of the world, consequently or eventually the most totalitarian societal
control, rule and domination, notably the most theocratic coercion and repression,
within Protestantism and Christianity as a whole, if not world religions, with the
exceptions of Islam and Hinduism. This is what Weber admits by identifying, albeit
somewhat downplaying in relation to its assumed “elective affinity” with modern
capitalism, Puritanism’s unexampled tyranny” or “most absolutely unbearable,”
almost Inquisition-style, as also Tawney (1962) suggests, religious control of society
and humans.
In particular, American Puritanism’s only or major historical novelty or
exceptionalism was solely to establish, as well as preserve longer, a more totalitarian
or exceptionally repressive political and moral-religious tyranny in the “new world”
than did other Protestantism and Catholicism in the old, including its British parent,
given its relatively brief rule, in Great Britain. In short, American Puritanism’s
innovation was to originate as and essentially remain, via its historical derivatives or
functional equivalents, what analysts denote as the “most totalitarian” Calvinism and
by implication Protestantism, if not Christianity as a whole (Stivers 1994).
Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59 55

To that extent, American Puritanism actually functioned as and essentially remained

since, via its derivatives and revivals, even “older” and more traditionalist—i.e. more
tyrannical and theocratic—than what it condemned and attacked as the older, traditional
and repressive religions like Anglicanism, Lutheranism and Catholicism, and to that
extent made the “new nation” as sociologically “old” or traditionalistic, if not more, as
the disdained “old world” supposedly overcome and forgotten, but not “forgiven” by
most Puritan exiles.
In particular, American Puritanism eventually acted, as by witch-trials long after
the end of the Inquisition, and persisted, as via various “Monkey Trials” of
evolutionism, as even more medievalist (Munch 2001; Stivers 1994) in the sense of
more despotic and absolutist as well as irrational or superstitious and anti-egalitarian
(Hudson and Coukos 2005; Tiryakian 2002) than medieval Protestantism like
Lutheranism and Anglicanism, and Catholicism itself, as did in consequence the
“new” Puritan nation, despite its supposed and celebrated lack of medievalism or
feudalism (Lipset and Marks 2000; Nisbet 1966).
In Weber’s words, while the supposed opposite to what he calls economic
traditionalism via its “elective affinity” with modern capitalism, English-American
Puritanism, following its parent European Calvinism, was the species of political,
moral-religious and cultural totalitarian or authoritarian traditionalism, notably
tyrannical, theocratic medievalism. And it has essentially remained so via its
subsequent revivals and contemporary survivals, thus making and sustaining the
Puritan “new nation” ever more traditionalist or backward culturally (Inglehart
2004), just as admittedly evincing greater political “backwardness” (Amenta et al.
2001), than the “old” Europe by the early twenty-first century. But such are
apparently (to paraphrase Merton 1968) the perverse or rather normal-pathological,
expected totalitarian consequences of Puritanism’s original and perennial quest,
practice and system of total mastery of the world in virtually all times and societies
subjected to it, from seventeenth century old and New England, epitomized by their
“Biblical Commonwealths,” to twenty-first century America also exemplified by its
“Bible Belt” déjà vu.

Conclusion

To conclude, “Puritanism and liberty” in the sense of an equivalence or association

has acquired the status of a paradigm or conventional wisdom in most of the
sociological and other literature (Zaret 1989) since at least Tocqueville as well as of
a commonly held, almost sacred belief in historically Puritan societies like America
and to lesser extent Great Britain. The preceding has reconsidered the “Puritanism
and liberty” equivalence or association on combined theoretical-empirical grounds.
It has cast doubt on its paradigmatic status in the sociological, especially Parsonian,
and other literature, as well as its near-sacredness in historically Puritan societies like
America, while supporting its questioning and challenging by those relatively rare
social scientists, including sociologists (Zaret 1989; also Munch 2001) and historians
(Walzer 1963).
The main argument and finding has been that the “Puritanism and liberty”
equation proves to be at best a set of “naïve assumptions” (Coffey 1998) or
56 Am Soc (2007) 38:23–59

“speculative explanations” (Zaret 1996), at worst liberal-democratic “mythology”

(Gould 1996). In sum, if the Protestantism and modern capitalism Weberian
connection is a “beloved myth” (Delacroix and Nielsen 2001) in Western societies
and most of the sociological literature, then the association of Protestant Puritanism
and liberty in the sense of democracy is the most cherished “liberal mythology”
(Gould 1996) in historically Puritan societies like America and to lesser extent Great
Britain, as well as in sociology and other social sciences.
The present paper has hopefully contributed to challenging and eventually
resolving what it seems to be the venerable, mythical Panglossian trap of “Puritanism
and liberty,” of “whatever is [Puritan], must be optimal [democratic]” (Winship and
Rosen 1988). Alternatively, in terms of directions for further research, it has perhaps
reopened, or it anyway intends to do so, what can be considered and described as the
Pandora box of “Puritanism and illiberty” as a seemingly “inappropriate” subject for
theoretical and empirical sociological and other analyses. In a way, the Panglossian
myth of “Puritanism and liberty” in most of the sociological literature, not to mention
Puritan societies like America, has made the history and reality of “Puritanism and
illiberty” a Pandora box or taboo that is a high time to be reopened or superseded by
sociology and other social sciences. In a sense, the myth of “Puritanism and liberty” is
a sociological, especially Parsonian, analogue of medieval geocentric theory or
creationism, and the fact of “Puritanism and illiberty” of heliocentric scientific
astronomy or evolutionism as a Pandora box or taboo within theocratic medievalism
and post-medieval religious conservatism, respectively. Just as the “sun revolves
around the earth” absolute religious truth or creationism was to be superseded by the
opposite secular “heresy” or evolutionism (Martin 2002), so the bright and cherished
myth of “Puritanism and liberty” is likely to be eventually replaced by the dark and
adverse evidence of “Puritanism and illiberty” in sociology and other social science,
even if not in persistently Puritan societies and groups like America and US
conservatives. In both cases, the Pandora box of scientific truth had/has to be opened
and the “forbidden apple of knowledge” to be tasted, in spite or rather because of
“absolute truths” and cherished myths like theological geocentric theory or
creationism and their sociological analogue, “Puritanism and liberty.”

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