Harold Perkin

The tyranny of the moral majority: American religion and politics since the pilgrim fathers

Abstract Americans claim to be the most religious people in the Christian world. Religion has informed their politics ever since the Pilgrim Fathers, who began the tyranny of the majority which Tocqueville outlined in Democracy in America (1985), his version of Aristotles ‘ochlocracy’. In recent times this has taken the form of the ‘moral majority’ institutionalized by Jerry Falwell and the fundamentalists who set out to capture the Republican Party under Nixon and Reagan. In fact, it was never a majority: ‘born again’ Christians, not all of the right‐wing in politics, were less than one fifth of a national sample in 1980 ‐ a third of African Americans, who voted ten to one against Reagan. Nonetheless they influenced every President from Eisenhower to Bush, and they are the major force behind the move to impeach Clinton. Since they failed, they may now give way for a more moderate politics of Christian forgiveness.

Reviews : Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-44015-7, 1993; x + 826 pp.; £40.00 hardback, £16.95 paper back

While Marshall certainly surveys the material, he never gets round to producing a full and convincing argument. Part One-‘Anarchism in Theory’-characterizes anarchism as an assertion of society against the state. For anarchists, writes Marshall, ’while society is invariably a blessing, they all accept that the State is an artificial superstructure separate from society’ (18). At best, this is a simplification of the anarchist case, which should have been-but is not-further developed in the course of