The relationship of Protestant religious movements to social and political changes in early modern Europe has long intrigued historians and sociologists. Did religious ideas have an independent influence on the course of social and political development, or were they rather dependent on deeper, underlying socioeconomic changes? Marx, Weber, Tawney, and many others have sought to interpret the complex interrelationships among elements of cultural, political and socioeconomic changes in a formative period for the modern world.

In the context of continuing historical and theoretical controversies, this book undertakes a systematic comparative-historical analysis of religion and politics in three carefully selected cases. In England, Württemberg, and Prussia, at the times when the rulers were attempting to introduce the apparatus of absolutist rule, there were very similar religious movements for the further reform of the Protestant state churches: the Puritan and Pietist movements. Yet, while sharing similar religious aims and ethos, Puritans and Pietists developed very different attitudes and activities in relation to would-be absolutist rule in each case. These ranged from the activism and anti-absolutism of English Puritans, through the passive anti-absolutism of Pietists in Württemberg, to the activism and support of absolutism of the Prussian Pietists. Such surprisingly different patterns of political contribution to the success or failure of absolutism – with its fundamental historical consequences – represent promising terrain for the generation and testing of a coherent explanation.

In the course of examining these three cases, it became clear that approaches focussing on inherent characteristics of a religious movement, whether idealist or materialist in emphasis, were essentially inadequate.