The Legitimacy of Popular Domination: Democracy and Puritan Political Theology in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630-1691

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the issue of the legitimacy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's social order between 1630 and 1691. Based on archival research, it analyzes the Massachusetts puritans' entangled ideational, institutional, and agentic modes of expression throughout their engagements in the colony. It argues that the Massachusetts puritans' analogous acknowledgement of the Scriptures and the 1629 Charter as the absolute and unalterable reference points of their church and civil government, respectively, and experiential belief in the need for popular participation constituted the political theological illusion of the legitimacy of the colony's social order. Upon these grounds, it demonstrates that the institutionalization of the social order occurred through the common people's active participation and domination over the elected, responsible, accountable, and revocable office-holders. Accordingly, it reveals puritan political theology's peculiar articulation of democracy as popular domination, which helps reimagine democratic governments in the contemporary global context of elite domination and reactionary populisms. The dissertation's interdisciplinary approach makes five interconnected interventions across social theory, historical sociology, political sociology, the history of political thought, and democratic theory. First, it reconceptualizes legitimacy as a particular combination of a specific set of reference points and experiential beliefs, denoting a bipartite illusion by which social individuals are captivated throughout their lives in a social order. Second, it explains State formation in colonial Massachusetts as a political theological process through active popular participation. Third, it interprets the social construction of the people as a participatory and multi-dimensional process of people-building in diverse domains of the social order. Fourth, it reconstructs a political theological articulation of democracy as popular domination and challenges the neo-republican theories' characterization of popular politics with the idea of freedom as non-domination in the early modern era. Finally, by historicizing, restoring, and reclaiming the concept of domination in democratic theory, it propounds a reimagination of democracy as popular domination to address the contemporary global challenges to democratic governments.