The Coerced Conscience examines liberty of conscience, the freedom to live one's life in accordance with the dictates of conscience, especially in religion. It offers a new perspective on the politics of conscience through the eyes of some of its most influential advocates and critics in Western history, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle. By tracing how these four philosophers, revolutionaries, and heretics envisioned, defended, and condemned this crucial freedom, Amy Gais argues that liberty of conscience has a more controversial history than we often acknowledge today. Rather than defend or condemn a static, monolithic view of liberty conscience, these figures disagreed profoundly on what protecting this fundamental principle entails in practice, as well as the threat of hypocrisy and conformity to freedom. This revisionist account of liberty of conscience challenges our intuitions about what it means to be free today.

‘The Coerced Conscience is a formidable and incisive book, one offering fresh ideas for cultivating and protecting conscience against anxieties of conformity, insincerity, hypocrisy, and torment. Gais supplies inspired analyses of long-standing concerns in modern and contemporary political theory, generating a powerful treatment for conscience and its demands.’

Lucas Swaine - Professor of Government, Dartmouth College

‘Freedom of conscience is a malleable, contested, and often misunderstood concept. By recovering the ideas of its most ardent defenders and most vocal critics of the early modern period, Amy Gais' beautiful new book powerfully reminds us of how central freedom of conscience is for the capacities of citizenship, civic trust, and individual authenticity.’

Glory M. Liu - Assistant Research Professor, Johns Hopkins University