By Richard Vernon
John Locke's "Letter referring to toleration" is without doubt one of the canonical English-language texts within the heritage of the assumption of toleration. Its ebook in 1689 sparked a heated debate with Anglican cleric Jonas Proast. this article provides an exam of John Locke's arguments in defence of "A letter referring to toleration" and in their importance for contemporary political idea. the writer considers the Locke-Proast controversy from the viewpoint of political concept, analyzing Locke's and Proast's texts and tracing their dating to later discussions of toleration. He reconstructs the grounds of the dispute, drawing awareness to the long term value of the arguments and comparing their relative power. He then examines problems with toleration in later contexts, particularly James Fitzjames Stephen's critique of John Stuart Mill, the perfectionist replacement to contractualist liberalism, and the view that the normal attachment to toleration needs to, by way of the strength of its personal arguments, movement from liberalism to a defence of a far better kind of democracy. Arguing that the trade among Locke and Proast marks a turning element within the highbrow heritage that has helped to constitution the phrases of recent political debate, this paintings offers a case for considering that the trade among Locke and Proast is as vital for the 20 th century because it used to be for the seventeenth.
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Extra info for The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After
Example text
Proast's "moderate penalties" have the avowed aim of making unreflective people "consider," but what supports the claim that the vice of inconsiderateness occurs only among the dissenters on whom the penalties fall and not among Anglicans, who escape the penalties? Given the incentive structure established by the penalties themselves, Locke argues, it is more likely that conformity is opportunistic and unconsidered than nonconformity. " To the extent that Locke's concern is to protect reflective dissenters from 40.
393. 19. , 10. 20. , 10-12. 22 The Career of Toleration things that can go wrong when you try it? 21 The matter is more complex than that. It is a contingent event that one does or does not die in playing Russian roulette, but it is more than a contingent fact that Russian roulette is risky: it is inherently risky. Can it be said that it is an inherently risky matter that states should be invested with religious authority? Perhaps, but the analogy is defective. Russian roulette has to be defined in a way that entails risk: one cannot play a health-conscious version of it with a revolver that is empty, or a pessimist's version with all six chambers loaded, for it would no longer be Russian roulette (or indeed a game).
8. Kant, Political Writings, 59. 9. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 99— i o i. " The second would be consistent only in some more highly developed future political order wherein civil affairs would be regulated by public reason—in present society, as we have seen, the public use of reason is contrasted with its civil use. The first feature imposes a condition that Kant does not. Kant does not partition the view-as-citizen from another view that may be held under some other status—a distinction that is quite fundamental to what Rawls attempts to do.