New England as Idea and Society Revisited

Abstract

Y YOUNG Rutman! How oddly George Selement's phrase rings! But on reflection, how apt. It was, after all, twenty-five years agoa quarter of a century!-that I sat atop Blue Ridge overlooking Charlottesville and Virginia's university deciding what to do next. The dissertation was done; I would have nothing more to do with it. It would be published as was, or not at all!1 Instead, I would do a monumental life of John Winthrop, multivolume, and, of course, its first six chapters would paint, a la Henry Adams, a word picture of social milieu in which Winthrop was so prominent. How facilely, even naively, we make what later prove to be cardinal decisions of life. In time six chapters became ten, a book by themselves.2 The monumental biography was usurped by its prelude. And I found myself a social historian combatively attacking the work of intellectual historians (Selement's words), or laboring mightily . .. to bring down intellectual history edifice.3 The invitation to contribute to a dialogue centered on Selement's article wrenches me from present concerns and returns me to one that did, indeed, preoccupy a young Rutman. That concern is very simply stated: what precisely is interrelationship between idea, publicly expressed, and life-styles within society in which idea is enunciated. I did not then (and do not now) intend to raise a philosophical or even very recondite issue or to enter arcade where positivists and idealists play tedious games. I asked a blunt, pragmatic question as a working historian. Cast in terms of early New England it conjured up a particular scene: The minister rises in his pulpit to speak. What does his audience hear and how does what they hear affect their behavior? And how does their response affect form of idea