John Locke and Toleration

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Toleration is a matter of abiding historical and theoretical interest and of pressing practical importance. The difficulties involved in understanding and in managing culturally and religiously diverse societies make it so. The recent furore surrounding Dr. Rowan Williams' passing remarks about Sharia Law only testifies to the delicacy of these difficulties and the confusions of thought they evoke. The role of theory is not to resolve those difficulties but to clear them of misunderstandings which make their solution impossible; because these misunderstandings have developed over time, in step with the difficulties, theory must be supplemented by history. History shows that the difficulties confronting diverse modern societies - of religiously-inspired dissatisfaction, dissent and mistrust - are strikingly similar to, and in some respects owe their special character to, the difficulties that confronted the divided societies of 17th century Europe. If we wish to understand the difficulties of the present, we must re-learn what it means to think about the problems of religious toleration and dissent with the combination of imagination, breadth and seriousness that characterised the greatest minds of the 17th century. This is the central intellectual objective of my proposed research project, 'John Locke and toleration'.Locke's reputation at the present time is in some respects a curious one. On the one hand he is by common consent acknowledged to have exercised a dominant influence on the development of the idea of toleration in subsequent liberal thought. Thus he is regarded as a key figure in the history of the idea of toleration and of liberalism generally, because he put into currency certain persuasive conceptions which contributed centrally to the emergence and spread of liberal ways of thinking about toleration which continue to ramify in the present. On the other hand, it is noticeable that detailed consideration of his work in its own terms has not figured prominently in recent writing about toleration. In works of political philosophy his name is often invoked but his work, if it is read at any length, is interpreted with an eye to present-day categories and with the matching tendency to silently edit those parts of it which do not accord so well with present-day interests and assumptions. Emphasis is laid on particular passages in Locke's texts but his argument as a whole, and the assumptions that supported it, recede from view. In historical works his views are explained and explicated with reference to the different schools of thought which allegedly exerted an influence upon his thinking. Either way, the special character of Locke's arguments, the comprehensiveness and particularity of his vision, and the originality of his position is systematically obscured.The project therefore has three interpretative aims: to identify the fundamental points in Locke's mature position about toleration, to distinguish this position from the positions formulated by Locke's predecessors, contemporaries and opponents and to show how Locke's position connects to wider views of politics, God and the human understanding. The pursuit of these aims will generate three thematically connected publications, (i) a critical edition of an as yet unpublished Locke manuscript on toleration (ii) an article in a refereed journal about the context and composition of this manuscript and (iii) a commissioned chapter on the development of Locke's position about toleration. Together, these aims embrace a single purpose: to understand Locke's idea of toleration in its own terms and in doing so to shed new light on the possibilities for thinking about toleration today.