James Holstun - A Rational Millennium, Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth Century England & America
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James Holstun - A Rational Millennium, Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth Century England & America
[Oxford University Press 1987] buy used at abebooks.co.uk If you use this link to purchase this item breviary stuff will receive 5% commission Taking a new approach to the history of utopia, A Rational Millennium integrates the political analysis of literary form with the literary study of political rhetoric. Professor Holstun begins with a discussion of early modern utopias in general, both literary and non-literary, Old World and New, arguing that these utopias all share a desire to submit displaced populations to a program of rational domination. Writings and practices ranging from Utopia and Machiavelli's Discourses to Protestant church and military discipline appropriate the displaced populations of Europe and North America as an imaginative raw material — a tabula rasa on which they must write. Turning to Puritan utopia in particular, Holstun reconstructs its transatlantic language by concentrating on two utopian projects of the mid-17th century: the political platforms and Algonquian "praying towns" of John Eliot in colonial Massachusetts and the republican political writing of James Harrington in Protectorate England. Moving between these primary texts and modern analyses of rationalization by Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Foucault, he shows that Puritan utopia shares the modern Western longing for universal discipline and domination. Analyzing Puritan utopia's theocratic rhetoric, he shows that it envisions this discipline as the rational means to the Millennium. Contents
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