John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture

This book is a major intellectual and cultural history of intolerance and toleration in early modern and early Enlightenment Europe. John Marshall offers an extensive study of late seventeenth-century practices of religious intolerance and toleration in England, Ireland, France, Piedmont and the Netherlands and the arguments that John Locke and his associates made in defence of ‘universal religious toleration’. He analyses early modern and early Enlightenment discussions of toleration, debates over toleration for Jews and Muslims as well as for Christians, the limits of toleration for the intolerant, atheists, ‘libertines’ and ‘sodomites’, and the complex relationships between intolerance and resistance theories including Locke’s own Treatises. This study is a significant contribution to the history of the ‘republic of letters’ of the 1680s and the development of early Enlightenment culture and is essential reading for scholars of early modern European history, religion, political science and philosophy.