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MILTON, LOCKE AND THE NEW HISTORY OF TOLERATION

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MarshallJohn, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
AchinsteinSharon and SauerElizabeth, eds., Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2008

JOHN COFFEY
JOHN COFFEY*
Affiliation:
School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester
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Extract

For three centuries now, John Milton and John Locke have been hailed as heroic advocates of religious freedom. Securely ensconced in the pantheon of liberal icons, they continue to be enlisted in the cause of liberty. In the wake of 9/11, a number of writers have retold the tale of how enlightened progressives rescued the West from the forces of theocratic repression. Milton and Locke loom large in that story. They have starring roles in Perez Zagorin's study of How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (2003), and they feature prominently as “two champions of liberty” in the philosopher A. C. Grayling's book Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West (2007). Whig history is not dead yet. Indeed, Grayling is refreshingly honest about his old-fashioned liberalism—in the British edition, his book's dust jacket is laid out like the title page of a nineteenth-century pamphlet: “By Mr. A. C. Grayling. London. Printed in the Year 2007”.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , November 2008 , pp. 619 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Zagorin, Perez, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 213–24 (Milton), 245–67 (Locke)Google Scholar; Grayling, A. C., Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007), 63–79, 63Google Scholar.

2 Walsham, Alexandra, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Kaplan, Benjamin, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 ‘Citizen Milton’, curated by Sharon Achinstein. See http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/citizenmilton/.

4 For this debate see Labriola, Albert and Lieb, Michael, eds., Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text and Terrorism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

5 Dzelzainis's argument is considered by Blair Worden in his important new book Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 240 n.

6 Marshall, John, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Israel, Jonathan, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

8 Among the significant works omitted from the bibliography are Remer, Gary, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Murphy, Andrew, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Hillberbrand, Hans, Sebastian Castellio, 1515–1563: Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confessional Age (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003)Google Scholar. Some of these omissions are explained by the fact that the book was drafted in 2000 and 2001.

9 For example, Origen was a Father of the third century, not the second (200); Milton's Latin defences of the republic did receive widespread European circulation, but this was not true of the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, written for a British audience (226); Roger Williams is perhaps best described as a “Seeker” rather than a Baptist by the time he published The Bloody Tenent, and that book appeared in 1644, not 1646 (327).

10 The quotation is from Bayle, Pierre, A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, “Compel them to Come In, That My House May be Full”, ed. Kilcullen, John and Kukathas, Chandran (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 554Google Scholar.

11 For which see Walsham, Charitable Hatred; and Kaplan, Divided by Faith.

12 Israel, Jonathan, “Review of John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture”, English Historical Review 122 (2007), 1043–4Google Scholar.

13 See Sutcliffe, Adam, “Spinoza, Bayle, and the Enlightenment Politics of Philosophical Certainty”, History of European Ideas 34 (2008), 66–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Israel, “Review”, 1044.

15 Such developments were explored at a conference held at the British Academy in April 2007 entitled Natural Law and Toleration in Early Enlightenment Europe. Alongside papers on Locke, there were presentations on Hobbes, Pufendorf, Thomasius, Leibniz, Barbeyrac and Francis Hutcheson. See also Detlef Döring, “Samuel von Pufendorf and toleration”, in Laursen, John Christian and Nederman, Cary J., eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 178–96Google Scholar; Zurbuchen, Simone, “Samuel Pufendorf's concept of toleration”, in Nederman, Cary J. and Laursen, John Christian, eds., Difference and Dissent: Theories of Tolerance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 163–84Google Scholar; Seidler, Michael, “The Politics of Self-Preservation: Toleration and Identity in Pufendorf and Locke”, in Hochstrasser, Tim and Schröder, Peter, eds., Early Modern Natural Law Theories: Contexts and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 227–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hunter, Ian, The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See, for example, Scott, Jonathan, England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chap. 2, “Taking Contemporary Belief Seriously”.

17 See, for example, the classic work by the Jesuit scholar Lecler, Joseph, Toleration and the Reformation, trans. Westow, T. L., 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1960)Google Scholar.

18 Pollman, Judith, “Getting along”, History Workshop Journal 64 (2007), 423CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 See, for example, Goldie, Mark, ed., The Reception of Locke's Politics, 6 vols., vol. 5, The Church, Dissent and Religious Toleration, 1689–1773 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999)Google Scholar; Sell, Alan, John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Theologians (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), esp. chap. 5Google Scholar.