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The Puritan Ideology of Mobility: Corporatism, the Politics of Place, and the Founding of New England Towns before 1650 examines the ideology that English Puritans developed to justify migration: their migration from England to New England, migrations from one town to another within New England, and, often, their repatriation to the mother country. Puritan leaders believed firmly that nations, colonies, and towns were all “bodies politic,” that is, living and organic social bodies. However, if a social body became distempered because of scarce resources or political or religious discord, it became necessary to create a new social body from the old in order to restore balance and harmony. The new social body was articulated through the social ritual of land distribution according to Aristotelian “distributive justice.” The book will trace this process at work in the founding of Ipswich and its satellite town in Massachusetts.
The Puritan Ideology of Mobility eschews the economic and religious either/or for a more nuanced and subtle both/and. It does so with its focus on mobility—moving about within a country, migrating, creating colonial settlements—as a mindset informed by profoundly theological and practical concerns. Its central topics are crucial, and McDermott has done historians of early America a great service by showing their importance—Early American Literature
List of Figures; Preface: Protestant Scholasticism and Puritan Ideology; Acknowledgments; A Note on Dates; Chapter One Puritans and Society in the Stour Valley; Chapter Two The Puritan Ideology of Mobility; Chapter Three Land Distribution in Colonial Ipswich; Chapter Four Town-Founding in Essex County: The Communities around Ipswich; Epilogue: The Future of Corporatism and the Ideology of Mobility in America; Notes; Works Cited; Index.