¹ History and Theory, III, 1 (1963), 59–90.

² Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, 1965).

³ “Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology,” 77.

⁴ 312, italics added. “The Puritans were in no sense the products of a new order slowly growing up within traditional feudal society, as Marxist theory would have it. They were the products … of disorder,” 313, italics supplied. Walzer very explicitly locates the source of the Puritan ethos in the conditions of social disruption: “Coping with disorder meant being reborn as a new man self-confident and free of worry, capable of vigorous, willful activity,” 313.

⁵ “Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology,” 79.

⁶ See Revolution of the Saints, 3–16, also, for example, 214.

⁷ Ibid., 302. “Puritanism was [the] effort [of anxious or ‘unsettled’ men] to capture control of the changing world and their own lives — hence the insistent concern of the saints with order, method, and discipline,” 310.

⁸ Ibid., 3, italics supplied.

⁹ Ibid., 13.

¹⁰ See Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (New York, 1958), 179.

¹¹ Revolution of the Saints, 27. Walzer's definitions of terms like “theology” and “ideology” seem to me far too arbitrary and unsophisticated. He uses very unclear language to indicate what he is talking about: “The power of a theology lies in its capacity to offer believers a knowledge of God and so to make possible an escape from the corrupted earth and a transcendental communion.” “The power of an ideology, on the other hand, lies in its capacity to activate its adherents and to change the world.” (One has the impression that a good deal is being put over on the reader by using the word “power” in each of these sentences.) I see no warrant whatsoever for defining theology in this other-worldly way, and thereby leaving to “ideology” everything that affects worldly change. A more serious failure to grasp the lessons Weber has taught us regarding theological activity could hardly be imagined. Just because Calvin's theology was not uniformly “other-worldly” (though there are clearly many “other-worldly” elements) does not make it any less theology. Walzer has not understood this fact; he has therefore reinterpreted Calvin in an incredible way.

¹² Ibid., 27.

¹³ Ibid., 27–28, italics supplied.

¹⁴ ibid., 47.

¹⁵ See ibid., 225.

¹⁶ Ibid., 303.

¹⁷ “Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology,” 88.

¹⁸ Of course, in “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in From Max Weber, ed. by Gerth and Mills (New York, 1958), 302–22, Weber does concern himself more with this matter.

¹⁹ Protestant Ethic, 152.

²⁰ Whitgift's Works (London, 1851–53), II, 270–71.

²¹ J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1957), 173.

²² I do not find convincing Walzer's general assumption that the primary concern of the Puritans was politics. Obviously, political events bore enormous significance for them, but always in relation to ecclesiological affairs. Many of William Haller's conclusions about Puritanism raise serious problems for the kind of interpretation Walzer recommends. “[M]ost Puritans … left the things of government alone and advanced their interests in the church by preaching within the established scheme of things … Puritans became numerous and influential, and constituted authority undertook their repression, but they owed their success and whatever followed upon it to their personal address as leaders and spokesmen of self-conscious groups of questing souls brought together by what seemed spontaneous conviction and held together by nothing more than voluntary association,” Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1963), 106.

²³ Perry Miller, The Seventeenth Century (Boston, 1961). 398–99. Though Miller is here describing the “federalist theologians” with Puritanism, I am inclined to root this conception of order more generally in Calvin's whole theological orientation. Similarly, I believe it to be generally relevant to Puritanism as a whole.

²⁴ For example, Weber writes: “The significance of the rational element in religious metaphysics is shown in classical form by the tremendous influence which especially the logical structure of the Calvinistic conception of God exercised on life,” fn. 66, Protestant Ethic, 232. Cf. “Social Psychology of the World Religions,” From Max Weber, 286–87.

²⁵ In the Protestant Ethic, Weber employed a method of what I call “doctrinal selectivity,” whereby he singled out certain individual doctrines like “predestination,” “calling,” etc. and traced their respective fortunes. This was suggestive, but detracted from understanding the broader theological-ethical framework of Calvin's thought.

²⁶ “They only obey God whose deeds fulfill the demands of the rule of the law, who, therefore, submit themselves willingly to its authority,” Calvin: Commentaries, ed. by J. Haroutunian (Philadelphia, 1958), 268. “For if we obey God only from necessity, if it were possible to escape from him, our obedience would cease,” Institutes, III, 8, 11.

²⁷ “The practical consequence of Calvin's theocratic views was to maintain the authority and independence of the church against the Erastianism into which Germany and England fell. Wherever Calvinism spread, it found means for combating the political absolutism that was enveloping Europe … Calvin did not seek rapport between the church and the state through a control of the state by the church. He held rather that the church should determine freely, without interference from the political order, the dimensions of life directly concerned with religion,” Thomas G. Sanders, Protestant Concepts of Church and State (New York, 1964), 254–55. “The distinctive marks of Calvin's influence is that he claimed for the Church more independence than he obtained,” Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History (New York, 1961), 134, 6.

²⁸ Calvin places important emphasis upon a consensual pattern of church organization in order to “guard against all infringement of the common right and liberty of the Church” (Institutes IV, 3, 15). See for example, Institutes IV, 3, 14–15; IV, 4, 1, 10–11; IV, S, 2. I have argued elsewhere the double emphasis upon theological election and ecclesiological election marks a crucial relationship in Calvin's thought. As one is chosen by God, so one is able to choose, indeed required to choose, with respect to the ordering of God's new community. Josef Bohatec, the great Calvin scholar (whom Walzer apparently has never consulted!), suggests the very apt term, “community of wills,” as a description of Calvin's understanding of the church, Calvins Lehre von Staat und Kirche (Breslau, 1937), 514.

²⁹ Lord Acton, op. cit., 136.

³⁰ See, for example, Ernst Pfisterer, Calvins Wirken in Genf (Essen, 1957), for the most recent documentation on this point.

³¹ J. J. Rousseau, “Social Contract,” VII, in Social Contract, ed. by Ernst Barker (New York, 1960), 184.

³² “Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology,” 61. Walzer's social-psychological method seriously impairs his treatment of Puritan literature. Though he brushes aside Lindsay's Modern Democratic State, there is no investigation of the unavoidably Puritan materials that Lindsay considers. It is significant that, without any scholarly justification whatsoever, Walzer arbitrarily decides to neglect the Left-wing Puritans (see Revolution of the Saints, viii). Of course, he has to in order to sustain his thesis, but that says more about his thesis than it does about the Left-wing! Until it is proven wrong by the evidence, William Haller's judgment must stand as the axiom for all Puritan studies: “The disagreements that rendered Puritans into Presbyterians, independents, separatists, and Baptists were in the long run not so significant as the qualities of character, of mind and of imagination which kept them all alike Puritan,” Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1957), 17- Cf. 174–79. Cf. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints (Ithaca, 1965), 13, 25, for a confirmation of the same point.

³³ Full and Plaine Declaration, 30. The point is there is a tremendous positive theological and ecclesiological investment in consensuality. One even finds statements in the writings of straight-laced Presbyterians like Thomas Cartwright that endorse a pluralistic method of arriving at truth: “For as by striking of two flints together there cometh out fire, so it may be that sometimes by contention the truth which is hidden in a dark place may come to light,” Whitgift's Works, II, 238, italics supplied.

³⁴ William Perkins, Works (Cambridge, 1612), II, 276; cf. II, 252. A firmly voluntaristic theology is evident throughout the works of the 16th-century Puritans like Cartwright, Perkins and Travers.

³⁵ I am suggesting that the basis for whatever “method of analogy” there is in 17th-century Puritan thought rests implicitly in the writings of men like Cartwright. The theory of analogy, by which Puritans were alleged to have applied consensual ecclesiology to the organization of the state, is proposed most classically in A.S.P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty. I realize, of course, that this is a disputed thesis (see, for example, D. B. Robertson, Religious Foundations of Leveller Democracy), but I believe there is still something to it. On the matter of toleration and religious diversity, see Sanders, op. cit, 268.

³⁶ I know of no better treatment of the subtle, but solid, interrelationships among all the Puritan wings — in their voluntarism and consensualism as well as in their military opposition to the Establishment — than exists in Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution. Again, it is significant that, so far as I can tell, Walzer does not employ or refer to this work of Haller's.

³⁷ Politics, Personality and Nation Building (New Haven, 1964), 293–94. Pye goes on: “Nation building calls for submission to newly imposed controls; and in the context of contemporary history this requirement may appear to the individual who is unsure of his identity as ‘foreign’ demands that the self be placed under new and alien ‘controls'.”

Incidentally, it is true that at the end of Revolution of the Saints (300–12), Walzer refers to Puritanism as providing an “ideology of transition” in an age of modernization. However, he makes it clear that there is nothing in Puritanism that could constitute a positive or constructive foundation for legitimating the voluntaristic and universalistic norms of modern society. The Puritans were, as Walzer delights in saying over and again, the “products of disorder.” I should rather say, they were the products of a special kind of order, a kind of order that in certain important respects corresponded positively with the dimensions of modern society.

³⁸ Daniel Lerner, in The Passing of Traditional Society, sees the modernization process as the development towards a “participant society.” This term applies very nicely, I believe, to what existed in Puritan communities.

³⁹ Paul E. Sigmund has written: “Whether in the ‘guided democracy’ of Sukarno, the ‘basic democracy’ of Ayub Kahn, or the ‘democratic dictatorship’ of Sekou Toure, the popular will from which a government or ruling party must derive its legitimacy in a democratic age seems to consist as much in what the people should desire as in what they do desire,” Ideologies of Developing Nations (New York, 1963), 24.

⁴⁰ Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, 1960), ed. by G. A. Almond and James S. Coleman, 559.

⁴¹ “Locke: Heir of Puritan Political Theorists,” Calvinism and the Political Order (Philadelphia, 1965), 108–30.

⁴² Ibid., 113.

⁴³ Lindsay, A. D., Essentials of Democracy (London, 1951), 37.Google Scholar