ABSTRACT
In its own terms and given the exigencies of history and the fractured and imperfect reality of human existence, such an attempt was predestined to failure. Any attempt to posit a perfect social order, over and against the chaos and mutability of human existence is bound to fail. And yet, such attempts are the very stuff of our history, intimately connected to what Max Weber defined as those universal problems of meaning addressed by theodicies; that is, the promise of salvational religions to overcome the inherent finiteness of human existence, the problems posed by the discrepancy between fate and merit and the “perfection of the transcendent order” in contradistinction to the “imperfection of reality.”2 e attempt by Puritans in New and old England to impose the orders of grace into the workings of the world was precisely such a theodic vision of redemption. In England this vision expired with the failure of the Barebones Parliament; in New England it was transformed to become a major component of the modern worldview. is precisely is its interest to us. e idea of the individual as the moral foundation of the social order, of the political realm (not politics per se) as a soteriological arena, the transcendental status accorded to individual rights, the notion of collective identity, and membership based on the acceptance of a set of (abstract) principles (of justice) rather than on ascriptive criteria are, after all, the overarching principles (if not always the practice) of modern states and societies. As we have attempted to argue, the development of these ideas (as well as the particular saliency they have always held in the United States) cannot be understood without reference to seventeenth-century developments and the transformation of ascetic-Protestantism into the secular political creeds of the eighteenth century. In this sense and as noted in the Introduction, seventeenth-century New England Congregationalism has been taken as a “case study” of modernity, in some ways paradigmatic and in some ways illustrative of broader historical trends that took place in different societies at different times.
