consensus. Thomas Bender's lively, intelligent little book Community and Social Change in America illustrates the difficulty of breaking with firmly established patterns of thought. It also illustrates the moral ambivalence that has always been associated with the concepts of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, together with the hope that "community" can somehow be combined with industrial "progress." Bender points out that historians have taken over the old dichotomies without attempting to "test" them with "historical materials"; instead they have "mechanically inserted historical data into the framework supplied by the essentially ahistorical logic of change offered by modernization theory." Like other revisionists, he rejects the assumption that modernization "involves the same sequence of events in different countries" and "produces a progressive convergence of forms." His book attempts to lay out a "more useful narrative structure," one that "assumes the coexistence of communal and noncommunal ways."

After exposing the inadequacies of modernization theory, Bender nevertheless proceeds to tell the same old story. In seventeenth-century New England, "the 'whole of life' was framed by a 'circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects.' " The quotation comes from Peter Laslett's study of English village life, The World We Have Lost—a nostalgic treatment of "traditional society," as its title indicates. "Men and women did not have the compartmentalized lives that characterize modern society," Bender writes. They experienced a "convergence of roles," whereas "modern society multiplies and separates social roles." The New England village was "undifferentiated" and "essentially homogeneous." Bender endorses Kenneth Lockridge's description of the seventeenth‐ century village as a "self-contained social unit, almost hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world."

The political and religious history of New England, which made this community so intensely aware of its special place in a larger scheme of things, thus recedes into the fog of historical sociology. New England saw itself—no doubt with an absurdly inflated sense of its own importance—as the decisive battleground in the global struggle between Protestantism and the papal Antichrist. For this reason, differences of opinion that might have seemed trivial to outsiders took on world-historical importance. Religious controversy repeatedly shook the colony to its foundations. Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were only the first in a

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