 Once different, too, was the mode of society constituted by and in turn constitutive of this type of moral agency. Weber’s social imagination revealed its keenest sense of irony when he traced the root of the cohesive integration, intense socialization, and severe communal discipline of sect-like associations to the isolated and introspective subjectivity of the Puritan person of vocation. The irony was that the self-absorbed, anxiety-ridden and even antisocial virtues of the person of vocation could be sustained only in the thick disciplinary milieu of small-scale associational life. Membership in exclusive voluntary associational life is open, and it is such membership, or “achieved quality,” that guarantees the ethical qualities of the individuals with whom one interacts. “The old ‘sect spirit’ holds sway with relentless effect in the intrinsic nature of such associations,” Weber observed, for the sect was the first mass organization to combine individual agency and social discipline in such a systematic way. Weber thus claimed that “the ascetic conventicles and sects … formed one of the most important foundations of modern individualism” [Weber 1920/1946, 321]. It seems clear that what Weber was trying to outline here is an archetypical form of social organization that can empower individual moral agency by sustaining group disciplinary dynamism, a kind of pluralistically organized social life we would now call a “civil society” [Kim 2007, 57–94].