Max Weber Revisited: The "Protestant Ethic" and the Puritan Experience of Order

Harvard Divinity School

Max Weber Revisited: The "Protestant Ethic" and the Puritan Experience of OrderAuthor(s): David LittleSource: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Oct., 1966), pp. 415-428Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1509205 .

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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 59 (1966), 415-428.

MAX WEBER REVISITED

THE "PROTESTANT ETHIC" AND

THE PURITAN EXPERIENCE OF ORDER*

DAVID LITTLE YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL

THE accuracy of Max Weber's grasp of Puritan religious experience has persistently been called into question by the critics of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber is alleged either to have misunderstood the sources of Puritanism, or to have overlooked the real character of Puritan belief and action, or to have misconstrued its social significance. In short, Weber is generally accused of failing to assess correctly the causes, content, and implications of Puritanism.

Michael Walzer, in "Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology," 1

and more recently in The Revolution of the Saints,2 has found fault with Weber at each of these points.

i) Walzer contends that because Weber did not apprehend the obvious social-psychological conditions that stimulated the development of Puritanism, he seriously misunderstood the movement. For Walzer i 7th-century England, like any revolutionary period, was rocked by the disruption of established patterns of identity and security; it was the setting for widespread alienation. Puritanism constituted an ideological reaction to such a situation, similar in many ways to Jacobism and Bolshevism. As he explains it, Puritanism was "a response to disorder and fear, a way of organizing men to overcome the acute sense of chaos." 3

Or, as he states in Revolution of the Saints: "[T]he primary source of the saints' radical character lies in their response to the disorder of the transition period." ' The Puritan experience as a

* A revised version of a paper delivered to the Society for Scientific Study of Religion in New York City, October, 1965, at the behest of Professor B. N. Nelson.

1History and Theory, III, I (1963), 59-90. 2Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cam-

bridge, 1965). B "Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology," 77. '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



416 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

whole must be viewed as an instance of social-psychological reaction-formation, as an obsession with identity in an age of confusion.

2) So pictured, the content and character of the movement become clear. Weber is wrong in emphasizing the individualistic impulses of Calvinistic theology, for he neglects something much more primary: the place of repression and regimentation in Puritan life. "The study of the Puritans is best begun with the idea of discipline . .. . [They] lived always on the very brink of chaos, maintaining their position only through a constant vigilance and, indeed, a constant warfare . . . The goal of this warfare was repression and its apparent cause was an extraor- dinary anxiety." " Walzer concedes that there were voluntaristic aspects to Puritan discipline - that the Puritans sought to replace traditional ascriptive relations with contractual ones.6 "But voluntary or not, [the] keynote [of Puritan discipline] was repression." 7

Most importantly, Puritanism must be viewed as a political phenomenon: "The saint's personality was . .. marked above all by an uncompromising and sustained commitment to a political ideal . . . " s Although Weber had stressed the connections between Puritanism and economic life, "worldly asceticism" ac- tually had very little to do with nonpolitical attivity. Rather, "the new spirit of the Puritans can be defined as a kind of mili-

tary and political work-ethic . . ." 9

Weber, of course, saw in the Calvinist Puritan tradition theo-

logical grounds for inspiring private initiative. In this tradition action was shaped and directed by considerations that were as

independent of political as they were of traditional domination. Indeed, Weber found in Puritanism an impulse for undercutting 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. '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. "Ibid., 13.



MAX WEBER REVISITED 417

"politically oriented" religion as well as "politically oriented" capitalism.10 Calvinist theology developed a basis for "individual- ism" that prevented religious and eventually economic activity from being directly identified with political life.

Walzer, on the other hand, sees in the thought of Calvin and his descendants little more than political ideology.

Detached from the traditional forms of theological and philosoph- ical speculation, Calvin might be described most simply as a practical man of ideas . . . [He was] not primarily a theologian or a philosopher, but an ideologist.11

According to Walzer's novel interpretations, the starting point of Calvin's politics was "the permanent inescapable estrangement of man from God." 12 Everywhere Calvin found alienation, disruption, anxiety.

He did not believe reconciliation to be possible and sought rather to cope with the secondary effects of Adam's Fall . . . The struggle for a new human community, replacing the lost Eden, was made a matter of concrete political activity . . . The reintegration of the old Adam into a disciplinary association - church and state combined - would be the beginning at least of salvation.13

There is no doubt in Walzer's mind: Calvin must be understood as developing an ideology of political absolutism.

Calvinism brought conscience and coercion together - in much the same way as they were later brought together in Rousseau's Gen-

10See Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (New York, 1958), I79. n 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 ad- herents 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 sen- tences.) 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" ele- ments) does not make it any less theology. Walzer has not understood this fact; he has therefore reinterpreted Calvin in an incredible way.

' Ibid., 27. SIbid., 27-28, italics supplied.




eral Will. Indeed, the two views of political life which appear in Calvin's thought may be imagined as Christian anticipations of the two different authoritarianisms of Hobbes and Rousseau.14

It is this Hobbesian quest for arbitrary political power and a discipline of secular repression that ties Calvin's ideology to the Puritan version of radical politics."5 Walzer argues that the Puritan preoccupation with ecclesiastical and civil control pro- ceeds naturally from the concern for rigid political security.

3) What amounts to a religion of politics had no direct effects upon the development of rationalized, differentiated modern society, according to Walzer. The connection between Puritanism and the liberal world was "perhaps one of historical preparation, but not at all of theoretical contribution." " "To expect freedom from [Puritan] hands is to invite disappointment. Their greatest achievement is what is known in the sociology of revolution as the terror, the effort to create a holy commonwealth and to force men to be godly." 17

Unfortunately, we never get a very clear portrayal of what modern liberal society is supposed to consist of. Walzer appears to believe that while liberal principles like voluntarism, consen-

sualism, toleration and private initiative were part of the Puritan experience, they could become socially significant only after the essence of Puritanism had itself expired. Puritanism was "really" a theology of repression whose central concern was the coercive imposition of a rigid, domineering conception of moral and social order. Such a Hobbesian position is hardly compatible with the

patterns of an open society, which, presumably, make room for a high degree of flexibility and independence. To expect that a mentality so consumed with attaining political and moral subju- gation could lead directly towards any kind of freedom is, from Walzer's point of view, "to invite disappointment."

Whether or not one finally agrees with this interpretation of the Puritan experience, Walzer has succeeded in interjecting a few fresh insights into the discussion over The Protestant Ethic, in-

14 Ibid., 47. 15 See ibid., 225. 16 Ibid., 303. 17 "Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology," 88.




sights that suggest at least one modification of the "Weber thesis." The issue of repressive ecclesiastical and civil order is a real and central one, and it must be figured in direct relation to other aspects of Puritanism. Weber's own analysis can, I believe, be held wanting here, for at least in The Protestant Ethic s18 he con- sciously disregards "the very important Church discipline" of the Calvinistic tradition in preference for the "results which sub- jective adoption of an ascetic faith might have had in the conduct of the individual." 9 Weber could have averted a substantial amount of criticism had he not made this unfortunate method- ological decision. Indeed, if we take a cue from Walzer and in- terpret the fundamental concern of the Puritans to be the right ordering of individual, ecclesiastical and social relations, then it becomes impossible to leave the matter of church and political order out of account.

However, when we consider the matter of political, ecclesiastical and moral control, must we necessarily agree with Walzer's conclusions about the causes, content and implications of Puritan- ism? Must we concede that the issue of repression patently con- tradicts the positive association Weber found between the Puritan ethos and the rise of modern society? Need we rest content with Walzer's description of Calvinist Puritanism as little more than an absolutist political ideology? The answers are not hard to discover.

To begin with, Walzer has relied much too heavily upon social- psychological and political categories to define what Puritanism is. It is as misleading to ignore altogether the relevance of things like anxiety and alienation in understanding a religious movement as it is to see in them the key to complete knowledge. To argue, as Walzer does, that Calvinist and Puritan thought may be re- duced to an obsessive search for political security is to convey two erroneous notions: a) that only Calvin and the Puritans were frantically concerned about order; b) that the order they sought was exclusively political.

Even a cursory reading of men like Archbishop John Whitgift 1 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.

"Protestant Ethic, 152.




and Richard Hooker makes clear that Anglicans were in their own way as anxious about social stability and "tranquility" as were the Puritans. Whitgift, for example, was profoundly exercised about the Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright because he took Cartwright's proposals to be "the very highway to subversion and confusion." 20

As Allen remarks, Whitgift "was less concerned about religious questions than about the maintenance of social order. In this he was typical . . . of Elizabethan England." 21

What was important about the Puritans was the special character of their "passion for order," a passion that was focused not primarily on the state at all, but rather on the church. While politics played an important role in Puritan thought and action, it did so only in subtle relation to a conception of the church as the new community.22 In order to get Calvinist Puritan thought straight, we must come to understand why the church was so central.

In a classic passage the late Perry Miller succeeded in captur- ing the fundamental characteristics of the Puritan experience of order:

[The Puritans] were endeavoring to mark off an area of human behavior from the general realm of nature, and within it to substitute for the rule of necessity a rule of freedom. They were striving to push as far into the background as possible the order of things that exists by inevitable equilibrium, that is fulfilled by unconscious and aimless motions, that is determined by inertia and inexorable law, and in its place to set up an order founded upon voluntary choice, upon the deliberate assumption of obligation, upon unconstrained

"Whitgift's Works (London, 1851-53), II, 270-71. 'J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (Lon-

don, 1957), 173. 2 I do not find convincing Walzer's general assumption that the primary con-

cern of the Puritans was politics. Obviously, political events bore enormous significance for them, but always in relation to ecclesiological affairs. Many of Wil- liam 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), io6.




pacts, upon sovereign determinations of free wills. They were strug- gling to extricate man from the relentless primordial mechanism, from the chains of instinct and fear, to set him upon his own feet, to endow him with a knowledge of utility and purpose, with the faculties to implement his knowledge, so that he might rationally choose and not be driven from pillar to post by fate or circumstance . . . Obedience was no longer to be wrung from subjects by might, but accepted as a spontaneous token.23

We shall suggest, I) that the sources for this conception lie at the heart of Calvin's constructive theological (rather than "political ideological") efforts; 2) that the theological, ecclesiological and ethical formulations of Puritanism are consistently shaped with reference to this conception; and 3) that the social implications of this conception involve two things: a) they illustrate the dialectical, rather than the contradictory, connections between voluntarism or social flexibility and discipline or repression, and b) they favor - although not unambiguously - a differentiated social order containing the principles of voluntarism, consensualism, private initiative and toleration.

i) According to Weber, all theological systems make certain assumptions about the character of the ultimate, the destiny of life, etc., and these assumptions entail logical conclusions regarding the conduct and organization of life.24 So far as Calvinism is concerned, the assumption of a "supramundane God," of one who is "above" or independent of nature and history, is the crucial foundation from which the Calvinistic way of life logically de- rives. Weber prematurely fastened upon selected aspects of Cal- vin's thought,25 so that he never systematically filled out this in-

*Perry Miller, The Seventeenth Century (Boston, 1961). 398-99. Though Miller is here describing the "federalist theologians" with Puritanism, I am in- clined 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.

' 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 "predestina- tion," "calling," etc. and traced their respective fortunes. This was suggestive,




sight. However, my own research has convinced me that a whole range of systematic connections can be traced between Calvin's concept of God and his understanding of churchly, political and moral order, a range of connections that lays the groundwork for Puritanism.

As Weber's judgment indicates, the heart and soul of Calvin's theology is the clear differentiation he strives to make between a sovereign, independent, self-determining (or voluntary) God and the created world of man and nature. Above all, Calvin sought in matters divine to substitute "for the rule of necessity a rule of freedom." This proposition has two decisive consequences: it means that God is distinct from the necessities of the created order; it also means that these necessities are created to serve, or to be directed or oriented towards, the sovereign, free rule of God. In other words, Calvin's God is independent of, yet sovereign over, the created order. He is free of creation, but at the same time, he "bends" creation to honor his freedom.

Now man, according to Calvin, is created with the capacity to reflect (or "image") in himself this same sort of differentiation between voluntary determination and natural necessity. The true fulfillment of man, as Calvin reiterates over and again, is voluntary, wholehearted obedience to the true God.26 What man ac- tually manifests, of course, is willful obedience to everything short of God, causing disruption and disorder not only in man himself, but also in the natural and social world. Consequently, sinful man must be externally driven by the necessities of nature, or the "natural law," as well as by political coercion, in the direction of the genuine obedience he ought to will to do of his own accord. In his fallen state, man is driven back to the point of voluntary devotion toward God. However, the very fact that he must be driven from outside is the hallmark of his depravity.

On Calvin's scheme Christ alone is the one who is voluntarily

but detracted from understanding the broader theological-ethical framework of Calvin's thought.

"They only obey God whose deeds fulfill the demands of the rule of the law, who, therefore, submit themselves willingly to its authority," Calvin: Commen- taries, 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, II.




obedient to God, and, therefore, his "Body" (the church) is the incarnation of the "new order," an order where men organize their lives according to God's will with "alacrity and promptitude." Theologically and, to an important degree, practically, the church is a special community diferentiated from the "old order" of natural necessity and political coercion.27 It is a community where vigorous self-conscious participation in the moral and ecclesiastical affairs becomes the model of the Christian life. As a distinctive community, whose discipline is constructed in relation to these considerations, the Calvinist church institutionalizes an independent style of life in which self-initiated, achievement- oriented and consensual conduct is the ideal.28 As Lord Acton put it: "the distinctive marks of Calvin's influence are that . . . it checked the reigning idea that nothing limits the power of the State." 29

Just as God is distinct from the created order, but at the same time is the one who ultimately directs all things, so the church is both distinct from and also the ultimate "model" for social life. Accordingly, the church defines the guidelines for directing political and moral conduct, and is thus "assisted" by the state in implementing aspects of its discipline and program. The Geneva experiment makes clear that Calvin was in no way opposed to a

"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 com- bating 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 inter- ference 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, Lec- tures on Modern History (New York, 1961), 134, 6.

' 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, I5). See for example, Institutes IV, 3, 14-15; IV, 4 I, i, o-I; IV, 5, 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 re- quired 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. ' Lord Acton, op. cit., 136.




high degree of regimentation in religious, moral and civic matters.30 Still, the ideal was always a voluntary, noncoercive order in which men responded to God "of their own accord," a fact manifested, as we say, by the institutional independence of a relatively consensual church. The dilemma of Calvinism at the theological, ecclesiological and social levels, then, is the dilemma of driving men towards a sphere of self-initiated action, of compelling them to become free, in Rousseau's phrase.31

2) That this is a genuine dilemma involving simultaneously both an inclination towards regimentation and towards voluntary self-determination is, I believe, made plain by the development of Puritanism in England and America. It is significant that though Walzer summarily dismisses A. D. Lindsay's thesis regarding the Puritan contribution to democracy,32 he fails to ex- amine the obvious and persistent consensual characteristics of Puritan ecclesiology. These characteristics emerge most unmis- takably in the Left-wing Puritan groups, such as the Levellers, but they are just as essential to Puritanism as a whole. Eliza- bethan Presbyterians like Thomas Cartwright and William Travers enunciated firm doctrines of consensuality, doctrines that set them at odds with the Anglican establishment. As Travers put it, "Election made by the people where everyman giveth his voice is compared by some to a banquet, where everyman bringeth his dish: which is so much the dantier the more there be that come unto it." 33

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

"1 . 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 un- avoidably 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), I7. Cf. 174-79. Cf. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints (Ithaca, 1965), 13, 25, for a confirmation of the same point. " Full and Plaine Declaration, 30. The point is there is a tremendous positive




It would be hard to read the extended debates between the Puritans and the Anglicans without taking note of this radical emphasis. Nor was the matter limited to church organization. The entire theological and ethical conception of a new order in Puritan literature is rooted in the Calvinistic doctrine of a voluntary God who demands above all voluntary human obedience. Under God's sovereign authority, the new order requires a distinctive style of life that is set apart from the world of natural necessity and coercive political domination. "We must be a law to ourselves: we must be voluntaries, without constraint, yielding subjection to the will of God." 34 In the 17th century the pattern of voluntary, consensual behavior that flows from these sentiments became an explicit model for reform in the direction of toleration and pluralism at the hands of the Levellers - and to some degree of the Independents.35

Of course, the dilemma of Puritanism - and the source of so much of its internal division - was exactly the dilemma of Cal- vinism: the problem of determining to what degree action that by definition transcended natural necessity and political control could be imposed upon the disinclined by coercive means; to what extent might the discipline of the new order be enforced by the old order, might liberty be the fruit of repression. It is clear enough that though Puritanism is a variegated phenomenon, its constituent parts - Presbyterian, Independent and Sectarian -

represent but different responses to this central perplexity. In other words, Puritanism may be ranged along a spectrum

theological and ecclesiological investment in consensuality. One even finds state- ments 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.

"4William Perkins, Works (Cambridge, 1612), II, 276; cf. II, 252. A firmly voluntaristic theology is evident throughout the works of the i6th-century Puri- tans like Cartwright, Perkins and Travers.

SI 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 Democ- racy), but I believe there is still something to it. On the matter of toleration and religious diversity, see Sanders, op. cit., 268.




that moves from the Presbyterian emphasis upon regimentation and uniformity on one side to the sectarian inclination for liberty and pluralism on the other. The independents stand rather un- stably somewhere in between the two poles. But what is funda- mentally important is that all groups on the spectrum engendered the principles of voluntary choice, self-initiated behavior and consensuality, while all took arms against the old order that the rule of freedom might replace the rule of necessity."3

3) The social implications of Calvinist Puritanism suggest that the sort of experience in which voluntarism and consensuality are ambiguously combined with regimentation and repression is not at all contradictory sociologically. It is fairly clear that the Cal- vinist Puritan experience of order approximates what we might call the "paradox of modernization," a condition aptly described by Lucian W. Pye.37 Modern social systems, Pye believes,

require a degree of social control and self-discipline which place restraints on all participants . . . Along with the sense of being liberated, the need to accept new disciplines lies at the heart of both the accultrative process for the individual and the nation-building process for the society.

In other words, the liberation of the individual and the society from the traditionalistic patterns of authority necessarily de- pends on the successful imposition of a new set of disciplines. As Weber argued, the flexibility of a modern, differentiated society

" 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.

"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.




entails a high degree of internalized self-discipline (voluntary self-initiative) which does not by any means "come easily." These disciplines, which encourage individual activity and consensual participation,38 constitute a new order that appears in several respects to be very repressive.

These "participant" patterns of modern society usually are externally and sometimes coercively imposed by "modernizing elites." 39 Indeed, as James Coleman has written, "the pressures for rapid modernization perpetuate and strengthen the tendency toward [political] centralism." 40 That means that the very same "dilemma" which characterizes Calvinistic Puritanism also at- tends the process of modernization, namely, the problem of em- ploying coercive means to achieve voluntary modes of behavior. As we have said, this is the problem of compelling men to be free.

Furthermore, the social implications of Puritanism involve a good deal more than simply Hobbesian absolutism. Walzer's assertions that the Puritans made no positive theoretical contribution to Lockean liberalism (and, consequently, to the rise of modern society) cannot be taken seriously. Professor Winthrop Hudson has convincingly argued that Locke was, in fact, the "heir of Puritan political theorists." 41

Where did Locke derive his political ideas? With regard to his general political principles one need not look far. They were being shouted from the housetops during the years he was at Westminster and Oxford, and they had been explicated again and again by the sons of Geneva with whom he was in contact throughout his life.42

According to Hudson, two of Locke's key assumptions - the

"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.

~ 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.

'Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, i960), ed. by G. A. Almond and James S. Coleman, 559.

"1"Locke: Heir of Puritan Political Theorists," Calvinism and the Political Order (Philadelphia, 1965), Io8-30. "

Ibid., 113.




principle of segregation (of church from state) and the principle of consent - were firmly embedded in the Independent and Left- wing conceptions of order. Both these principles, along with their corollaries, voluntarism and private initiative, are essential in- gredients in a modern pluralistic society. Indeed, such a society is not conceivable unless vigorous voluntary associations are free to exist independent of direct governmental intervention. "Liberty is possible only in a society where there are centers of organization other than the political." 43

It would be hard to study either Calvinism or Puritanism without attending to the emphasis upon an independent "new order" that is set apart from the realms of natural necessity and political coercion. Both Calvin and the Puritans were passionately concerned with the church, and all would have agreed with Milton's dictum: "The necessary first step toward reform of both state and church was the liberation of the church." Unless one understands the centrality of these sentiments, it is doubtful he shall understand adequately either the sources, the content or the implications of the Puritan experience of order.

In examining Calvinism, Max Weber remains one of the few interpreters who enables us to make good sense of an experience that leaves most people bewildered: How could a sovereign, all- determining God conspire with a rigorously disciplined church to produce an independent, self-initiating individual? As Weber understood, the mystery can be solved, in large part, only by examining the theological sources and content of Calvinistic Puri- tanism. When that is done, the Puritan experience emerges as a twofold commitment: as a commitment to "an order founded on voluntary choice," in Miller's words, and as a commitment to the use of involuntary means to extend this order. If these two things are difficult to harmonize in specific historical situations, if it is easy to become impaled either on the horn of rigidity and regimentation, or on the horn of "openness," dissent and contention, these are the very perplexities in which the Calvinist and the Puri- tan lived his life. They are perplexities born of a special percep- tion of order, and they are perplexities that continue to disturb the souls of men in today's world.

* A. D. Lindsay, Essentials of Democracy (London, 1951), 37.



Documents

Max Weber Revisited: The "Protestant Ethic" and the Puritan Experience of Order