ABSTRACT
More concretely, this study seeks to analyze how a particular set of cultural assumptions on the nature of collective identity and sources of social authority emerged out of the religious beliefs of the first generation of settlers in New England and crystallized three generations later into perduring patterns of normative order. ese are seen to turn, most significantly, on the emergence of the individual social actor as an autonomous moral entity, on a politics based on the premises of reason and equality, and on a cultural order devoid of any transcendent matrix. e origin as well as development of these assumptions are viewed as part of a process that can usefully be conceived as the symbolization, routinization, and, in fact, institutionalization of charisma within society.
