This a singular book. On one hand, it another installment in longrunning series, initiated by Perry Miller in 1930s, focused on Puritanism in America. Based in an extensive reading of New England's political development, from Cambridge Agreement of 1629, which granted charter for projected colony to planters themselves, to that document's revocation in 1684 as King Charles II contemplated a Dominion of New England, this study offers hearty intellectual fare. On other hand, for those whose latest read in field is, say, Janice Knight's Orthodoxies in Massachusetts (1994), a fairly recondite theological tour, Darren Staloff's The Making of an American Thinking Class not what one might expect.' Indeed, as he puts it, some students of American Puritanism may feel bemused by his interpretation of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, for in one sense his book is not about Puritans at all-not about, that is, intricate set of religious beliefs that underlay so many emigrants' decisions to cross Atlantic (p. 192). Staloff hunts a different beast. He wishes to interrogate the social and political features of early Massachusetts history that gave technical theological doctrines such powerful efficacy (p. xiv). Because Staloff's undisguised shibboleth power, readers might fear that they have in store yet another exhilarating, if finally enervating, New Historicist ride. But not so, for presiding genii are not Michel Foucault and his acolytes but rather Alvin Gouldner and George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, whose works on sociology of intellectuals initially provoked Staloff to consider how ministers and magistrates in Puritan Massachusetts comprised a collective interest who created a new form of political authority which author calls cultural domination (p. xv). But this, too, might bemuse readers, for it hardly a radical proposition. Half a century ago Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker wrote an entire book called The Puritan Oligarchy, and in our own time Sacvan Bercovitch has expended much ink on Puritans' supposedly hegemonic discourse.2 Less ideologically driven,