Books, Arts & Manners: Marching Toward Zion

The Puritan Origins of the American Self By Sacvan Bercovitch Yale, 250 pp., $15 According to one construction, the difference between a traditional and a modern society is that the one conceives of itself in terms of its past, the other in terms of its future. As a people we are, of course, at present in the midst of a general and obligatory exercise in retrospection. But in this season of common piety, this interlude of memory, we should not forget that American popular mythology has usually identified the United States with a disposition to the contrary, with what Emerson called “the Party of Hope.”

We did not, to be sure, come to this commitment overnight. Nor did we all agree to it, either in the beginning or at any time since. Indeed, there is much evidence that the central struggle of our intellectual history has been over the propriety of this portentous decision. But from the time of their coming hither, the Puritans of New England— the people in covenant with tomorrow —had made up their minds on the question. And, sustained by the certainty of their authority from on high, they generated by stages a force sufficient to impose upon the rest of us their definition of the national enterprise. Of the consequences of their triumph, we have not yet begun to take the measure.

MB

About the Author

M. E. Bradford

Featured Tags

The Puritan Origins of the American Self By Sacvan Bercovitch Yale, 250 pp., $15 According to one construction, the difference between a traditional and a modern society is that the one conceives of itself in terms of its past, the other in terms of its future. As a people we are, of course, at present in the midst of a general and obligatory exercise in retrospection. But in this season of common piety, this interlude of memory, we should not forget that American popular mythology has usually identified the United States with a disposition to the contrary, with what Emerson called “the Party of Hope.”

We did not, to be sure, come to this commitment overnight. Nor did we all agree to it, either in the beginning or at any time since. Indeed, there is much evidence that the central struggle of our intellectual history has been over the propriety of this portentous decision. But from the time of their coming hither, the Puritans of New England— the people in covenant with tomorrow —had made up their minds on the question. And, sustained by the certainty of their authority from on high, they generated by stages a force sufficient to impose upon the rest of us their definition of the national enterprise. Of the consequences of their triumph, we have not yet begun to take the measure.