Making of an American Thinking Class, The: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (Electronic book text)

This interpretation of the political and intellectual history of Puritan Massachusetts, envisions the Bay colony as a 17th-century one-party state, where congregations served as ideological "cells" and authority was restricted to an educated elite of ministers and magistrates. From there the author offers a broadened conception of the interstices of political, social, and intellectual authority in Puritan Massachusetts and beyond, arguing that ideologies, as well as ideological politics, are produced by self-conscious, and often class-conscious, thinkers.