Puritanism and Social Authoritarianism: Authoritarian Mastery of Civil Society

Abstract

Puritanism is essentially a religious doctrine and institutional system of social- cultural, just as political, authoritarianism. Its social authoritarianism or totalitarianism is primarily expressed and grounded in its attempt at the total “mastery of the world” of civil society and/or culture. By analogy to its political rule, Puritanism achieved or purported total mastery of civil society aims to render Puritans factual or likely totalitarian “masters of the world,” both of domestic and global culture, and all others their servants or tools. Puritanism does not confine its authoritarian mastery or domination to polity, as well as nature, technology, and economy, but seeks to extend it beyond these realms into civil society or cultural life in an effort to attain or approach its absolute, total, or maximal mastery of the world as a whole. Puritanism treats civil society, like polity and economy, as an element of the world to be mastered or dominated and thus subjected to its sectarian mastery or religiously factional domination, resulting in social, notably moral-religious, authoritarianism, including theocracy. In sociological terms, mastering or dominating civil society or culture is the integral part of the Puritan tendency toward the “mastery” or domination of the total social system. As Tawney (1962:198) notes evoking Weber, Puritanism in England and America “determined, not only conceptions of theology and church government, but political aspirations, business relations, family life and the minutia of personal behavior.” Consequently, the Puritan “remakes not only his own character and habits and way of life, but family and church, industry and city, political institutions and social order” (Tawney 1962:199).