THE CHOICE OF PURITANISM, PERHAPS NOT SO DISTURBING AND STRANGE

Michael Walzer, The Revolution of The Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U. Press, 1965) ("I began this book hoping to write sympathetically about a human choice which I thought strange and disturbing: the decision to be a Puritan, to repress oneself and others, to act out a conception of holiness at once abstract and urgent. Calvinist saintliness, after all, has scarred us all, leaving its mark if not on our conscious then on our clandestine minds, and it is always worthwhile to go back and puzzle over the wounds. But in the course of my work, I decided that the choice of Puritanism is not really so different from other, later choices which I find neither strange nor disturbing. The Calvinist saint seems to me now the first of those self-disciplined agents of social and political reconstruction who have eared so frequently in modern history. He is the destroyer of an old order for which there is no need to feel nostalgic. He is the builder of a repressive system which may well have to be endured before it can be escaped or transcended. He is, above all, an extraordinarily bold, inventive, and ruthless politician, as a man should be who has 'great works' to perform, as a man, perhaps, must be for 'great works have great enemies." Id at vii. "The revival of Stoicism among the Catholic nobility at the same time that Protestantism was spreading rapidly through France suggests that the need for some new ideological brace was widely felt. Both Stoicism and Calvinism, it may be argued, were world views admirably suited to educated young aristocrats in the process becoming local officeholders, lawyers, and administrators." Id. at 61. "The myth of the good-days-gone-by is probably the most naive form of social criticism . . ." Id. at 205. This book is, I think, a lost gem.).