Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought [1 ed.] 0415933013, 0415933021, 2002073983, 9780415933018

Table of contents :
Toleration and Identity Foundations in Early Modern Thought
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter 1 Introduction: Basic Reconceptions
Chapter 2 Language and Identity:Making Toleration a Norm
Chapter 3 Bodin and the State: Structuring a Political Self
Chapter 4 Montaigne and the Body: Self-Reflection in Time
Chapter 5 Locke and Society: Boundaries of Recognition
Chapter 6 Defoe and the Individual: Forms of Public Judgment
Chapter 7 Rebuilding Toleration
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Toleration and Identity Foundations in Early Modern Thought

This book is dedicated to Bob, Lillian, and Isaac.

Toleration and Identity Foundations in Early Modern Thought

INGRID CREPPELL

ROUTLEDGE New York & London

Published in 2003 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Transferred to Digital Printing 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Creppell, Ingrid. Toleration and identity : foundations in early modern thought /c Ingrid Creppell. p. cm. Introduction : basic reconceptions—Language and identity : making toleration a norm—Bodin and the state : structuring a political self—Montaigne and the body : self-reflection in time—Locke and society : boundaries of recognition— Defoe and the individual : forms of public judgment—Rebuilding toleration. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-93301-3—ISBN 0-415-93302-1 (pb.) 1. Toleration. 2. Group identity. 3. Social conflict. I. Title. HM1271 .C73 2003 179'.9—dc21

2002073983

Contents Acknowledgments

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Preface

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Basic Reconceptions

Chapter 2

Language and Identity: Making Toleration a Norm

19

Chapter 3

Bodin and the State: Structuring a Political Self

39

Chapter 4

Montaigne and the Body: Self-Reflection in Time

65

Chapter 5

Locke and Society: Boundaries of Recognition

91

Chapter 6

Defoe and the Individual: Forms of Public Judgment

125

Rebuilding Toleration

153

Chapter 7

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Notes

163

Selected Bibliography

193

Index

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Acknowledgments Many people and organizations have contributed generously as I pursued this project. I am very grateful for grants received from the George Washington University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. I would also like to thank in particular the Political Science Department at George Washington University for giving me vital support in the completion of this book. As a student of political theory, I had the great fortune to study with four thinkers whose passion for questions of politics and theory has been a continual inspiration: Jon Elster, Russell Hardin, and Stephen Holmes at the University of Chicago, and Sheldon Wolin at Princeton. Though pursued in remarkably different ways, their work testifies to the importance of ideas engaged with the world. Their hard-headedness, wit and care for humanity impressed me years ago, and still do. I thank them for reading various incarnations and portions of this book, and for showing faith in my work at critical points over the years. The following people provided excellent comments and support on various chapters of the text: Andrew Altman, Deborah Avant, Paula Backscheider, Robert Bartlett, Dario Castiglione, Richard Dees, John Ferejohn, Rainer Forst, Julian Franklin, Iain Hampsher-Monk, Don Herzog, Jack Knight, Alan Levine, Susan Liebell, Forrest Maltzman, Catriona McKinnon, Kimberly Stanton, Tracy Strong, Mark Warren, and Garrath Williams. I want to thank in particular Andy Altman, Richard Dees, and Alan Levine who read large chunks of the book and gave me extensive and invaluable feedback. Finally, I am greatly indebted to John Ferejohn for reading the entire manuscript with a fine blend of diligence and humor. The encouragement, generous support, and engagement of these and other extraordinary friends I have been blessed with wonderfully show how much we are all—in thinking and doing—dependent on each other.

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Acknowledgments

I also want to thank my editor Eric Nelson for his immediate enthusiasm and the care he gave to bringing this book out. His work was absolutely essential to getting this project produced in a timely manner and with the focus on detail it has received. He, as well as Ben McCanna graciously put up with my numerous intrusions, and Lucia Read assisted me greatly with her copyediting. Judith Shklar once asked me if toleration is love. The answer was no, but toleration does depend on a willingness to risk oneself that one first learns in the setting of a family. In some way, I have attempted to understand the issues of this book since I was a child, growing up in diverse cultures and in a highly conflictual but adoring family. Therefore, and for so many other reasons, profound acknowledgments go to my parents, Jacques and Claire Creppell, and my brothers and sisters for creating a world in which toleration was a constant experiment. I am grateful also to Lewis and Jean Mudge who have exemplified in their lives the virtues of toleration. Finally, I thank my husband, Bob Mudge, whose humor, calm, and love provide me and our family refuge from many storms, and our children, Lillian and Isaac, whose existence gives my life its deepest meaning.

Preface As I finished this book on toleration, the attacks of September 11th underscored the most striking question of politics since the collapse of the Soviet system: increased communal conflict coming from religious, ethnic, and cultural identities. In response to this reinvigorated politics of identity throughout the world, toleration is offered as the solution. It may not appear that we need to rethink toleration itself but to insist on it ever more strongly. I undertook the study of the history of toleration before these events, because toleration and its origins seemed much less clear, more complex and enigmatic than appears on the surface. What became clear in my study is that toleration was in its inception and must again be directly concerned with identity politics, not to accept such a politics as is or to make it disappear but to understand and shape it. Toleration has always been intimately connected to this phenomenon that we call identity. Conflict in some form seems inevitable to human existence. The most extreme problems that implicate toleration result from the fact that human beings continue to harm, dominate, and kill each other based on group attachments. To what extent can toleration be a response to these realities? The idea of toleration I explore and defend attempts to build accommodation in the clear recognition of the everpresence of conflict. The aim of this book is to understand how people have tried to make toleration work in the midst of deep conflicts. Historically, how did it emerge out of a politics and culture that would seem to have been antithetical to it? In looking at the first thinkers who struggled to create persuasive ideas of toleration, we learn about our own continuing attempts to do so. Political, social, psychological, and cultural forces always harbor within them antitoleration forces. These forces come from many directions: groups with too little or too much power, in combination with imposition of superiority or demands for recognition and empowerment. The task of

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toleration is not to resolve once and for all the calculus of these forces, because that is impossible—our collective existence is forever mutating into new configurations of order and power. Indeed, we have to see our human predicament as exactly that—a constant will and desire to balance and constrain the selfish, self-destructive, and domineering side of our natures. The work of toleration is continually to call our attention to what makes for mutuality and accommodation in the face of these larger forces, which we cannot often (usually) understand, much less control. Therefore, the work of toleration is never done. The suggestion that the need for it may one day disappear, that we will eventually achieve a measure of pluralism— the peaceful acceptance of all differences—which will make toleration superfluous, is basically mistaken. The invention of toleration did not, as history has shown, lead to the realization of the Whig, Enlightenment view of historical development, in which social and political forces become progressively more open, peaceful, and rational. A second, no less important lesson is that language matters fundamentally to the work of toleration. A language of toleration is a collection of ideas, terms, conceptions, reasons, examples, stories, theories, and linkages that have been elaborated to address problems of conflict, difference, and disagreement. The point of a language of toleration is to accomplish something, to attempt to change a reality. This language does this in one of two ways. Through argument and persuasion, it is a tool to bring about acts of accommodation. But it is also itself the embodiment of accommodation, that is, we use words rather than force to relate to one another. Constructing toleration, therefore, means that we create a vocabulary in which persons can talk across their differences rather than impose one version of the correct viewpoint upon the other. In this book, I seek to broaden and deepen the meaning of toleration, and so give it more purchase in today’s world, by examining the creative avenues that were originally used to make the idea possible. There is a tendency in the literature today to reduce toleration to generalized multiculturalism on the one hand, or freedom of belief/choice on the other. But this reduction leaves it incapable of addressing many confrontations. For example, the fundamentalist (whether in the Islamic or American variety) versus modernist divide is not bridged or even recognized for what it implies by arguments for religious freedom. The legal protection of individual rights to worship is a minimal requirement of toleration. Yet, a public political culture that prides itself on its openness cannot ignore claims of group distinctiveness and group harms. The demands themselves are at-

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tempts to be “heard” within a political arena. To counter that the principle of toleration is satisfied by insuring legal protections of individual freedom is to ignore the fact that what is being demanded is interaction. On the other hand, neither is multiculturalism the answer, insofar as it concedes too much to a monolithic, static communal conception of identity, and in that it makes identity the object of politics. No person is reducible to a single identity and any politics that privileges identity above all tends to harden the lines around the ones that have been politicized. If the nature of identity politics varies, as historical and anthropological studies make obvious they do, then a politics that takes given identities as privileged limits human potential. A broader language of toleration does not predetermine either a universalist or group-rights outcome to resolving confrontations. Rather, it demands of both or all sides that the objective in the confrontation be a grappling with the substance of the issues, a sincere and not a replica of engagement, and actual movement out of frozen positions from all involved toward a mutual accommodation. The objective of toleration is neither a privatizing nor privileging of identity; it is not an endpoint to reach but the active process of engagement.

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Introduction: Basic Reconceptions The current interest in toleration comes from negative reasons more than positive ones: rampant genocide in the twentieth century; religious fundamentalism around the world; continued Israeli–Palestinian, Catholic– Protestant, and Muslim–Hindu conflict; ethnic and religious wars in Eastern Europe; outbreaks of mass killing in Africa and other regions. In everyday life in developed countries, racism and intolerance of gays, Jews, and Muslims continue to be major issues. Yet, in Western societies, we take the idea of toleration to be self-evident. As a political principle, it lies at the core of our understanding of basic human and individual rights and the freedoms of belief, religion, and assembly. Here we confront a sharp contrast between what seems an intuitively obvious value and what looks like its continual inadequacy in the face of human conflict. The seeming conflict between toleration and identity appears inevitable to many people. One student naively asked, “Is it natural for people who are different to live together?” A sophisticated critic of identity notes, “It is never long before identity is reduced to loyalty” and “Identity is too eager to commemorate itself ” (Wieseltier, 1994, p. 26). The ideal of toleration would seem to be a paper-thin principle, then, one blown away in the face of deeper, more emotional human attachments to those “who are like us.” Conflict, violence, repression, distrust, and injustice between groups make toleration look like wishful thinking. However, if we look past the dramatic failures, there are also examples of successful accommodation: increasingly multicultural societies; extensions of minority and human rights; democratic transitions; the consolidation of a European Union; and movement in peace negotiations in war-torn areas like Northern Ireland. At a more personal level, we hear stories of individuals who, not despite but because of strong identities, display courageous acts to assist others. A 1

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physician working during the Bosnian war explains her attempt to help those who had been cast as enemies by nationalist factions: “I went because I refused to accept the indifference in Belgrade to what was happening in Bosnia, and because I could not accept that the Bosnians were another people. . . . The people in Bosnia-Herzegovina were my people, and I had to do something.” Later she continues: “Emotionally and psychologically the whole of the former territory of Yugoslavia is my country, and no one can take that away from me, however many borders they put up in between.”1 The power of identity commitments—the sense of belonging and membership with a specific set of persons—does not only lead to negative motivations toward those who are different. Strong identity is not equivalent to tribalism, but in the doctor’s case, the very opposite, providing a secure capacity to interact with others for a common benefit. The realities of modern political and cultural life raise issues of identity that any conception of toleration has to confront. In this book, I explore the relationship between toleration and identity to begin to clarify what aspects of the ideal of toleration and the force of identity are supportive of each other. To do this, I go back to an historical period in which group conflicts in some ways parallel to our own prevailed, the early modern, post–Reformation period in Western Europe. One notable feature of that time and the present is a measure of unsettledness and a lack of clarity regarding which collectivities one should support; different issues and pressures lead people in different directions.2 We witness fundamental changes in the movement from intolerance to toleration during that period, not to a full adoption of the primary good of toleration by the general population, but in the development of ethical ideas, sensibilities, and languages supportive of the new notion. Arguments for and defenses of toleration were constructed in tandem with basic revisions of views of the self. To perceive toleration as a good, or even as preferable to violence, required that people be able to see themselves in new terms. Thus, to explain the normative reception of toleration we have to attend to the simultaneous reconstructions of identity. Although the term identity may seem ill-suited to the discourse of the historical time on which I focus, it captures crucial aspects of the writers’ treatments of self-conception, attachment, and human motivation. I hope that its use also loosens the contemporary clichés (sometimes posed in absurd terms as “for” and “against” identity) that have stymied discussions about the self and political life. There is no magic key that changes once and for all attitudes of intolerance into toleration. The ethical transformation that brought about a language of toleration in the early modern period is a conceptual and cultural

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framework, a body of ideas and linkages, that we can make use of today in the face of new dilemmas. Is this framework adequate to the problems currently facing us, or are we continuing to use an idea and attendant notions of the self too limited in scope? I believe it greatly expands the resources for confronting issues of difference in contemporary society. This book is a study of the historical origins of an ethics of toleration from the point of view of the question of identity that emerged in sixteenthand seventeenth-century France and England, and it is a defense of a reworked version of toleration. This introduction sets out how I conceive the notions of toleration and of identity, and explains why I focus on history for illuminating both unresolved issues in liberal theory and the dynamics of conflict and commonality.

The Structure of Toleration The standard definition of toleration highlights two components as basic to its structure: (a) disapproval of or disagreement with practices, beliefs, or persons; and (b) restraint of oneself from imposing one’s reaction.3 According to this standard view, toleration is the positive act of not interfering with or coercing another despite one’s negative response. If one thinks about when and how we use the notion of toleration, however, this simple two-step depiction begins to look incomplete. I amend this definition of the basic structure as follows. First, the disapproval or disagreement in terms of which toleration is seen as a meaningful response should be broadened to include situations of conflict more generally in which important differences between groups, or between persons holding contrary beliefs or engaging in controversial practices obtain. The issue of toleration does not arise only where there is, as many moral philosophers hold, justifiable disagreement so that one’s disapproval is morally acceptable. Heyd for instance writes: “The homophobe’s restraint toward homosexual behavior cannot . . . be defined as a case of toleration, because there are no good reasons to object to the behavior in the first place. The same applies to restraint in interracial relations and attitudes” (1996, 5). This restriction makes toleration irrelevant to most political conflicts today and must be rejected. Indeed, the very point of toleration is that it addresses conflicts in which differences of moral perspective or identity attachment are so tenacious that the other’s point of view is not taken as valid at all. On the other hand, I will argue that we should call attitudes “toleration” even if there is no strong “disapproval” in the initial response one has to another who is different in some salient and significant way. The fact that significant

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differences are acknowledged tacitly or publicly testifies to the potential for conflict. Thus a peaceful and functioning society in which persons mark their differences (of belief, culture, race, etcetera) from each other and in which there is not threatening disapproval is not a society of indifference, a society beyond toleration, but a society that exhibits toleration in a habitual way.4 The most fundamental way in which I modify the depiction of the basic structure is to add a third component. One may disapprove and then restrain oneself but crucially (c) one stays in a relationship with the person or group with whom one is in conflict. We do not call an act toleration if disapproval and restraint are followed by a total retraction of contact, or by ignoring or making the other invisible. The restraint is only meaningful because the parties remain in the presence of one another in a nontrivial way. Toleration essentially implies a continued relationship of some significant level of accommodation. Because the literature on toleration is most often focused on the possibility and nature of the morality of constraining oneself, it ignores this essential feature of the conditions for toleration— the commonality of the ensuing relationship. Without this, there is no toleration.5 Toleration then is the capacity to hold both conflict and mutuality together at the same time. Questions therefore must be asked about the parameters of relationships that exemplify toleration: What is the nature of the relationship? What kind of “community” is upheld? What obligations and aspects of ourselves does it involve? How deep or strong is it? How and why would we want to maintain it? These are questions that will have to be negotiated and worked out for any particular set of groups or persons, and cannot be stipulated a priori. Nevertheless, the fact of meaningful interactions—of continued engagement—must exist. If we continue to define toleration as a unilateral act of one person toward another, the virtue or value of the act is all contained within the logic of the tolerator’s behavior and the mutuality of the relationship disappears. This view of toleration should be replaced by one that acknowledges the fundamental feature of the maintenance of relationship in the midst of conflict, disagreement, and difference. My revisions of the structure of toleration bring out a more positive interpretation of the type of association or community required for its realization. Critics of toleration have stressed two negative features in this regard. Communitarian critics focus on the thin quality of relationships entailed by liberal regimes of toleration. According to this view, liberal selves pick and choose who they are and what they value, and the type of relationships that result are secondary, and must always be at a distance from deeper, preexisting commitments and attachments. Such a depiction

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of the self and community, in the communitarian view, is mistaken about our preexisting involvements, and in addition itself creates an uninspiring ethical stance toward the world.6 One of the main objectives of this book is to show that a commitment to toleration entails a much more complex relationship to one’s attachments and obligations—that is, to one’s life both as an individual and as part of a collective—than the dichotomies of thin/thick or chosen/discovered captures. Indeed, the forging of toleration as a political value directly involves a re-creation of commonality, so that the attachments/obligations of this level of community are not just derivative of the primary value of freedom for the individual, as the typical story tells it. The type of commonality that must be forged will be very different from the preexisting, unreflective bonds of the communitarian imagination, but they will not therefore be less strong, compelling, or inspiring. A second indictment of toleration is that the association between parties that results from toleration will reinforce an asymmetry of power. The standard encapsulation of its character—rejection followed by restraint— looks very much like condescension: Only the powerful can tolerate, because only they can be conceived as having a choice in whether to restrain the imposition of beliefs, group interest, etc. The less powerful and minorities cannot really be described as restraining themselves, because for them the option to coerce the more powerful or the majority is not possible. Toleration, then, is a concession or a gift from one group of people who have what many desire to another group who seek what is desired. The permission or allowance from the former to the latter is a form of this asymmetry. As such, T. S. Eliot said, “The Christian does not wish to be tolerated”; Kant saw such a paternalistic noblesse oblige as haughty; Marcuse rejected it as repressive. Furthermore, the concession of “allowance” when applied to differentiation between persons because of ascriptive differences such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation may be perceived as deeply insulting or as just another power play (see Brown, 2001; McClure, 1990).7 This dimension of toleration is portrayed by Rainer Forst when he notes: “Toleration appears in the sense of a permissio negativa mali: not interfering with something that is wrong but not ‘intolerably’ harmful. It is this conception that Goethe had in mind when he said: ‘Tolerance should be a temporary attitude only: it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to insult’ ” (2000). This characterization of the relationship that emerges with toleration is often the case. The word toleration or tolerance had its origins in the Latin term tolerantia, meaning to endure or bear, and in the sixteenth century, the noun form of the word appeared, meaning the permission or concession allowing another religion to exist. But it would be

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purely rhetorical to claim that the essence of toleration today is reducible to its etymological roots. Furthermore, even in its inception, the granting of toleration to dissenters was often understood as a recognition of the power of those minorities. Thus, we should reject etymological reductionism, and those who disagree with toleration must attack it on more cogent grounds. My contention that toleration is more than the deployment and preservation of power by subtler means will be substantiated through the analysis in this book. I have redefined the underlying structure of toleration in such a way that both the role of conflict and the necessity of commonality/mutuality are made more explicit.8 We should go beyond the prevalent two-step, unilateral model. If toleration is about what connects persons to one another in a significant way despite differences and conflict, then toleration must pay attention to who we are. Thus, this reconception brings to the foreground that identity is essential to realizing the ideal of toleration. It also raises the question of the relationship between identity and community—two umbrella terms that are used pervasively in the discourse of political, ethical, and social theory. Analysis of the concepts of community and identity will not get us far enough, however, if our aim is to rethink processes through which a value or norm of toleration could become a more secure ideal. The processes of change that we would need to look at include argument, language, culture, and institutions, all within a context of relations of politics. In the substance of this book, I will not directly address all of these arenas of change, but the study of the thinkers I have chosen throws light on the relation between political-cultural patterns and changes in conceptions and language. What kinds of identifications or ways of thinking of the self make the normative reality of toleration feasible?9

The Concept of Identity What do we mean when we talk about identity? Many thinkers, among them Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, and Nietzsche have studied it from one angle or another in reflecting on the nature of human consciousness. A modern authority, Erik Erikson, observed: “The more one writes about this subject, the more the word becomes a term for something as unfathomable as it is all-pervasive” (1968, 9). The idea of identity has assumed a central place in contemporary life and political debates. Its explicit formulation accents the fact that identity is a problem, a source of psychological, social, and political questioning in a way that it was not self-consciously so before.10 I don’t pretend to take up here the

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deep problems and mysteries about human consciousness and identity, nor will I directly address the issue of which aspects of modern existence have made it a central concern. Rather, in this section I set out an approach to identity that can help us make sense of its relation to toleration. Before doing so, however, I want to consider, in the most schematic terms, two other ways in which contemporary political theory has generally confronted the question. Liberalism and post-modernism have handled the problem of identity in contrasting ways. Liberal theory, traditionally understood, attempts to circumvent the dangers of difference through building institutions and defending principles that transcend differences to reach a universal or neutral perspective. In the tradition of Enlightenment reason, we should abstract from concrete collective identities when thinking about the bases of political unity, and stress instead each person’s irreducible individuality or his universal nature. Hence, the dangers of identity are sidestepped by individualism or universalism.11 From a post-modern perspective, on the other hand, we overcome the potentially divisive forces within identity by recognizing the multiple identities inherent within each of us. As William Connolly writes: “to acknowledge a variety of contingent elements in the formation of identity is to take a significant step toward increasing tolerance for a range of antinomies in oneself, countering the demand to treat close internal unity as the model toward which all selves naturally tend when they are in touch with themselves” (1991, 178).12 Following from this, politics should be “agonistic”—a space and form of interaction in which solidified identities are continually contested and challenged. The contingency of identity is constantly recognized, and identity’s destructive power thereby disarmed.13 Both of these approaches leave significant problems unaddressed. The traditional liberal approach suffers from a failure to adequately acknowledge the realities of persistent identity issues. Does it makes sense to picture persons as being motivated in concrete political interactions by a view of the self as either purely individual or a member of universal humanity? If liberal principles must assume a normative motivation by which they can be realized, even if only in a modified form, then the question of identity cannot be avoided by appealing to individual interest or the universal good. Certainly the language of individual interest and universal good will be relevant perspectives that must be taken into account in political judgment and argument, but they are not successful in stifling the force of identity. The post-modern approach, on the other hand, although it recognizes the significance of identities and their linkage to political forces, seems to

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underestimate the persistence of singular identities in its emphasis on the multiple self. Moreover, politics cannot be based on or directed toward achieving the contingency of identity. Rather, the conception of identity for a politics that values toleration must be strengthened and given a weightedness, as it acknowledges the realities of multiplicity and contingency. In some sense, the liberal perspective overestimates the sufficiency of political institutions, whereas the post-modern overestimates our psychological and cultural satisfaction with multiplicity and ambiguity. The framework for approaching identity that I propose takes into account the best normative aims of liberal and post-modern perspectives, but attempts to formulate a conception of identity that can be used for both descriptive and normative purposes.14 Identity is not just a politicized construct, nor is it a sacred right. It is rather a reality15 that is shaped by and gives shape to political and cultural existence. As such, we need to use all the resources we have—explanatory, normative, and causal—to make sense of it and guide it. Unlike the concept of toleration, there is no standard formulation within political philosophy that we can take as the consensus starting point, around which paradoxes or debates have become typical.16 Charles Taylor gives this definition: “It is who we are, ‘where we’re coming from.’ As such it is the background against which our tastes and desires and opinions and aspirations make sense” (1994, 33–34). If identification is the process of locating oneself, then I define identity as the relatively persistent but always permeable formation of the self that provides a basic orientation for human agency in acting collectively and individually within a social-political world. I shall set out what I believe to be the three most important purposes of identity: differentiation, membership, and agency. We situate ourselves first of all through a process of differentiation—identity is formed in contrast to those (persons, groups) and that (ideas, religions, practices) which it is not.17 The friction created through otherness seems necessary to life, and when there is none, persons create it.18 Next, the word membership indicates that identity takes a definite form that can be seen by others and is demonstrated to others. Identity works by casting persons as collective beings in each other’s understanding, that is, people initially perceive one another through “outer” identifications and categories, and thereby have a tendency to align themselves with those “like” them.19 Even when individuals are not always conscious of it, the cues they use for interaction are in the first instance based on encapsulations of identities. The purposes of membership and differentiation blend into one another but it is useful to distinguish them initially. Finally, identity exists as an internalized perspective or

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gyroscope: One maintains an image or sense of what makes one’s existence intelligible and meaningful. This last element captures the feature Erikson stresses: Identity is the self-as-subject. This sense of the self falls somewhere along a spectrum ranging from vague and experiential to well-defined and unchanging. The purpose of identity here is to serve as a guide for agency. We would be ciphers with no independent will if there were no identity by which to orient our actions. The work of identity is in giving both a cognitive and motivational orientation for action and for understanding oneself and others in terms of difference and sameness. Identity then is tied to the core of what it means to be a person. I have thus far described the most significant drives—or purposes—of identity. Humans, as social creatures, are driven to conceive and locate themselves in ways that make sense within a collective world. Exactly how a self will coalesce cannot be predicted. But societies into which persons are born already contain collective forms of the self—already shaped identities to which persons are pushed or drawn to conform (or the opposite). Substantive identities as collective groups are what the term identity is usually equated with. The obvious collective forms are nation, race, religion, ethnicity, language, gender, and sexuality. These have served as the most persistent collectively recognized categories of membership. All of these have also explicitly served as categories for claiming, extending, or denying political power.20 The second main form of public identity is a role-based orientation of the self: mother/father, teacher, artist, athlete, businessman, etcetera. In contrast to communal membership, role differentiation links all those who occupy similar roles and differentiates them from others occupying other roles, person by person, via their performance of specific activities. The collective identity formed in this way is always premised on and filtered through actions the individual undertakes, and the genesis of the collective identity is secondary.21

The Effect of Identity on Politics Identity and identification are the raw material of social life and its reproduction. We care about identities because they are repositories of knowledge, expectations, commitments, obligations, and aesthetic experience. If circumstances change such that previously formed ways of aligning and understanding the self no longer give coherence and meaning, then new identities will be formed. Part of the work of culture is the creation of identities. But this work is not reducible solely to enforcing a particular combination of differentiation and membership, an assumption that most approaches to

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identity make. In this view, otherness and we-ness somehow mystically explain the purpose of identity, and also thereby the difficulty of overcoming animosity. A major point of this book is to show that particularism and difference do not have to be overcome or left behind for peaceful accommodation to exist, and the main historical chapters are dedicated to demonstrating the sources of toleration in the reworkings of identity that writers undertook in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet, we have to address the inevitable question that arises as to the extent and way in which identity serves as a source of conflict and human self-destructiveness. Intolerance have always taken place between groups defining themselves—using various criteria—in contrast to their enemies. These conflicts display an intensity not found in conflicts in the marketplace for instance, and seem to point to some inexhaustible human need to dominate because of differentiation. It appears that the emphasis on difference and membership/sameness inherent in identity is necessarily an insurmountable obstacle to toleration, or a constant potential source of intolerance. In this view, identity drives politics and it does so inherently to repress the other.22 In fact, when we begin to look at the typical examples, it appears that the conditions of politics always play a major role in the activation of identity. Humans need some form of collective identification. Where vacuums of power or vacuums of order develop, recourse to the most powerful alternative commonality closest at hand will take place. This may in part explain events in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communist rule. Furthermore, the vying between types or levels of identification is a major source of insecurity and retrenchment. Michael Ignatieff has explored intolerance motivated by a fear of loss of self: Globalism scours away distinctiveness at the surface of our identities and forces us back into ever more assertive defense of the inner differences—language, mentality, myth, and fantasy—that escape the surface scouring. As it brings us closer together, makes us all neighbors, destroys the old boundaries of identity marked out by national or regional consumption styles, we react by clinging to the margins of difference that remain. (Ignatieff, 1997, 58)

From a different angle, others have explained the persistence of communal conflict through leaders who mobilize a population in pursuit of the leader’s interests and power. One must then ask why persons will see their interests in these oppositional (nonnegotiable, zero-sum) ways, or be willing to follow leaders to their deaths in the name of a particular group membership.23 This question underlines the independent force of identity

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while locating its effect within a larger context of relations of power. Even if we accept the possibility that there is a natural impulse by a collectivity to stamp itself as a dominant group, we have to ask when and why that drive will be rewarded, aside from its monopoly on sheer physical force. In answering this question, we must consider how the nature of political life largely determines the outcome. In coming to this conclusion, I in no way deny the fundamental role culture plays in politics. Indeed, the entire study undertaken here is a measure of the power of culture in politics. It is rather to deny that there is some built-in logic to the idea of “religion” or “race,” for example, that will lead persons to kill or repress for the sake of it.

The Effect of Politics on Identity If the construction of politics or indeed the collapse of politics can produce intolerant, repressive identities that become systematic, then alternative political constructions can pull persons and groups in more tolerant and open directions. The language of politics is a major source for asserting, clarifying, and solidifying the boundaries and purposes of identity, as well for violence as for mutuality. Identities are not simply pre-formed givens, which explode on the political scene, nor are they an infinitely malleable clay to be exploited by power-seeking leaders. They occupy an intermediate zone of form, permeability, and potential mobilization, shaped by internal, psychological impulses and external political/cultural forces. Thus, we have to consider how it is that identities are solidified by a public language, political events, and public institutions.24 How ought we to approach identity if our aim is a politics of toleration? First, we should keep in mind the distinction between the purposes and forms of identity. We begin by accepting the forms that exist, recognizing their embeddedness and the important purposes they serve—meaning and agency. These differences do not need to collapse into alienating and static categories. In order for them not to do so, politics must not be directed toward enforcing membership in these forms. Indeed, the claim that such forms—Christian, Croatian, black, Jewish, gay, and so forth—are “preexistent” is part of the political attempt to motivate them and depends upon a view of political community. The political focus should be on their role as providing political agency, which particular persons seek to pursue. For example, one’s identity as a devout Muslim or Catholic can be taken as a protected, rigid designation (by outsiders and the believer himself), or it can be seen as a source of political, cultural, and social activity, a perspective from which to act not for the circular purpose of maintaining the membership

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category itself but in a larger collective context to solve collective problems. For it “to be taken” in this way requires that political institutions, culture, and attitudes are accepting of the political nature of the substantive identity without the form itself becoming the objective of political action. Thus, a politics of toleration accepts identity as a starting point but not as an endpoint; it stresses the active, problem-solving role of identities rather than their self-maintenance. This reorientation of politics also shows why the role version of identity, which comes primarily out of work and family life, can serve as a basis for rethinking public identity. Each person occupies role and communal identity spaces. The aims of political activity driven by roles seem inherently more oriented toward problem solving, that is, agency rather than simply membership. Toleration establishes a principle of politics that is ultimately based not on membership in a community but in the activity of living together confronting the issues and problems of collective life. Politics must take the lead in articulating those common and pressing problems and in building the common will to confront them together. Toleration as an ideal recognizes the meaning and energy of community membership while providing an alternative and superceding political vision—not of belonging but of common, purposive activity for problems that affect all persons. The fact is that political problems are often centered on injustices, inequities, or inefficiencies driven by membership. So again, we come back to and cannot ignore the facts of intolerance caused by this identification. This is why it will never be sufficient for persons only to act from within their own particular communities, even if they focus on collective problem solving rather than group maintenance. To overcome injustice and create mutuality always requires a view of the self as implicated in one another. (I also believe a recognition of oneself as bound to different “others” is cultivated more readily once one becomes active in jointly addressing problems.) In the studies undertaken in this book, I present four conceptualizations of the self that are more directly supportive of toleration and that seek specifically to implicate the self with others. We might call these bridging identities: They are political identity, the body in time, social identity, and individuality. We should understand these as categories of identity— or ways of focusing attention on the self—that can be as weighted as the more typical collective markers (race, ethnicity, religion, etc.): Without that, they would not provide a counterweight necessary to bridge these latter communal attachments without erasing them. Bridging identities serve as another resource for determining how we can motivate persons in a public realm, what languages ought to be used as legitimate references by which to build a collective point of view.

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A politics of toleration must directly construct forms of mutuality. Toleration is this will toward accommodation for the purpose of a just and full existence for all persons. The work of toleration is not by itself sufficient to insure the realization of these larger goals. If we pose the question—How can people who see themselves in radically different ways build relations of peace and justice, and avoid violence and communal resentment?—toleration is the necessary starting point that sets up the point of view of a collective interest. From there, we have to go on to the work of institutionbuilding and law making to insure that mutuality will be consistently and securely pursued. Nevertheless, without the commitment to the type of toleration the roots of which I elaborate in this book, a commitment to a common justice cannot begin in the first place. That there is an internal connection between political life and the nature of the self is an idea as old as the ancient Greeks. Because both political life and the self change, (interdependently and independently of one another), we must change the assumptions that may no longer work in a transformed world. In this book I focus on how specific constructions of the self contributed to advancing a politics of toleration or perhaps a better way to put it is—How the objective of toleration led thinkers to write about the self in new ways. What they wrote supported a politics of toleration first through the different images—ways of paying attention to ourselves and others—that they develop. Their images are like new roles or clothes that we can put on and use to guide the self ’s interactions in a political world requiring that persons who are different on certain crucial dimensions are also similar in the new roles they adopt. Hence such images serve as a tool. These writers support toleration not only through the images they project, but perhaps more importantly, through the languages of the self they elaborate. If toleration is the day-to-day process of accommodation, then that accommodation comes about, not mutely or silently, but in large part through our dialogues and verbal argument with one another. A language of the justice of the political realm; the body; public and private; and of transformative individuality is a language that can guide institutional design, leadership, and cultural means of focusing attention toward commonality rather than fear and danger. Thus, bridging identities gives us images of the self and languages of mutuality.

The Use of History History is important for a contemporary understanding of toleration for a number of reasons. To build images and language we need conceptual material and history is a rich source of replenishing these. But we use history

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not only as a source: Its effects have a direct impact on contemporary possibilities. Because toleration is at the foundation of modern liberal democratic societies, the conditions for its emergence ought to be studied more carefully from a broad historical perspective.25 The prominent contemporary philosopher John Rawls claims that the transformation of toleration from its status as a practical necessity—a modus vivendi—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into the toleration we today consider central to political and constitutional beliefs is a model of how a conception of justice might be adopted in a similar “movement of thought” (1993, 154). If this original change is a model for principles that are now in the process of development, we should pay greater attention to the nature of this change. Finally, if toleration as mutual accommodation is to be more widely adopted, it will take refocusing politics and identity. The history of toleration can be interpreted as bringing about an original type of refocusing. I attempt in this work to understand certain features of a major ethical transformation. The phenomenon of toleration traced here is not reducible to a principle of moral theory or a virtue of character. Neither is it explicable solely as a modus vivendi nor as an individual psychological aptitude. Yet, an ideal, an aspiration, toward toleration came into being during the early modern period, and the question will be how was life breathed into it, how was this ideal made understandable to people at the time. Some may argue that this is an intolerably vague object—ethical change—like trying to track the change in the direction of the wind without modern meteorological equipment. Nevertheless, the amorphous but definable trajectories that ideas and values take seems to me one of the most important features of human existence. Any effort to get a handle on a phenomenon at this level will necessarily be incomplete, and in many eyes bound to fail. Still, I believe we should, through various avenues, attempt to understand currents of change of this sort. If we take the ideal of toleration as what we seek to understand and explain, an initial question must be what will count as evidence of the transformation. As evidence (I discuss this at greater length in Chapter 2), we have the great surge of debate and vocabulary surrounding the idea. I examine four, more and less, canonical figures in the history of Western thought whose work encapsulates distinct attempts to develop justifications for the idea. Some may object that these are “only” texts—justifications and not transformations of the idea more generally. Why not look instead at the popular pamphlet literature, or more concretely at how the idea was tested in conscious social practices, legal regimes, and state responses to war? As brute facts—that there is a popular debate and that toleration is being consciously

Introduction

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implemented in edicts and laws at that time—these are essential pieces of evidence that a change is taking place. But for this change to be consciously adopted and made more deeply a part of a social and political ideal, we need to look to where and how that ethical change is made coherent and that work will be done in the domain of originators of political and social-cultural thought. Another important point to remember is that we do not have concrete “evidence” of toleration only when we “see” it in social practices, legal regimes, and resolution of war. These, especially in the early period, will always fail to live up to standards of toleration: How could they not, given that they are part of the vehicles to test the new way of imagining human interaction? Indeed, human action, whether individually or collectively as public policy, continues to fail to live up to ideals. If the purpose of ideals is precisely to continue to pressure the failures of implementation, that purpose can be pursued only to the extent that those ideas have power. What is it then that explains the emergence of toleration? Again, I discuss this more fully in the next chapter, but for the moment I want to establish the type of explanation on offer. This broad movement in thought results from changes taking place in conceptions of society, knowledge, and human nature as well as in institutions and cultural patterns of interaction that would establish what we call modern life. A general social explanation would include analyses of the Renaissance, scientific revolution, technological developments such as the printing press, economic expansion, and the opening up of the known geography of the planet through exploration of newly discovered lands and peoples. The assumption behind this project, however, is that the human mind must always respond to such background changes through articulating a conscious response. We cannot explain the emergence of an ideal of toleration without looking at the content of ideas themselves. Thus, for instance, we cannot be satisfied that we grasp how capitalist markets might have “brought about” toleration if we do not find the content of justification of openness based on an idea of the good of free trade, and selling this idea itself had major obstacles in an age of mercantilism. We must take the content of the ideas and attempt to explicate what about them made them so persuasive to people at the time. The importance of the historical texts studied here is not that they can be reduced to an argument for toleration that we might today use as a blueprint. Rather, they are important as exemplars of attempts to solve political, social, and cultural problems; thus, I begin by showing the significance of the act of writing by locating the work within each particular context. When we read their words we are studying what those in the midst of conflict and seeking to effect change did to accomplish this. They do not begin

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by taking an explicit value of toleration for granted but are instrumental in the work of establishing that ethical norm. In the close textual analysis, I open up the texts to find a trove of conceptual linkages and invention. The core feature of the four writers is their attempt to reformulate identity or self-conception. I examine how principles of politics and views of the self were refocused to make toleration compelling to people who did not previously believe in it. The movement of thought that brought on an ethical transformation toward toleration is not a shift from one world of belief/tradition to another one, but from a world that upholds an ideal of unity of commitment to a world in which persons are able to live with many different commitments around them.26 This requires a capacity of the person to live with politicized difference itself without resolution. That capacity depends on the power of a political point of view—how persons conceive themselves as integrated into a distinctly political realm—and on views of the values of the self. The writers I examine—Bodin, Montaigne, Locke, and Defoe—did not use the term identity, but invoke concepts parallel to it. Their work challenged inherited assumptions about political community and the boundaries of the self ’s existence in a concrete world. Their efforts to bring about change were carried out through the medium of words to be elaborated, scrutinized, and propagated by participants in the struggles. In this way, their work is a certain kind of tool, one inherently involving protagonists in ethical persuasion. The words they used were not all in the same register or form of appeal, yet each work attempts to motivate attitudes and action through the power of the mind—in both its thinking and feeling capacity. Importantly, they demonstrate that the engagement of people’s minds is not just a matter of reason. Given the circumstances of deep conflict, the light of reason that might move people to a different viewpoint is even more cloudy. As Wittgenstein remarked: “At the end of reason comes persuasion,”27 but the works of these writers also show that before reason comes persuasion. Furthermore, in the very act of writing—of elaborating a body of words as an injection into the conflicts in which they were caught—these writers attempt to increase the power of words, as opposed to force, to change the interaction. Their written products are embodiments of toleration, not just external tools. In the following chapter, I set out a framework for understanding important conceptual, ethical, and historical features of toleration’s emergence as an explicit language, including some aspects of the preexisting conditions that posed the problem of intolerance. The distinctive nature of the project of toleration resides in its efforts to pursue unity and diversity at the same

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time. It self-consciously takes up the issue of what type of binding together is possible when we accommodate real differences. This distinguishes it from principles of freedom on the one hand, and less self-conscious means of living with diversity on the other. In Chapters 3 through 6, I turn to the four thinkers who demonstrate possible responses to intense conflict in early modern Europe. A key distinction I introduce is between “threshold” and “negotiation” conditions. Bodin and Montaigne, writing during the French wars of religion, more typically demonstrate forms of language that attempt to construct community out of a void of war. Locke and Defoe, on the other hand, writing during political conflicts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, developed terms more applicable in a situation of ongoing, low-level animosity that must be continually negotiated in public language. Why these thinkers in these countries? The French religious wars and the establishment of the French state represent in sharpest outline a type of extreme internecine conflict and a means of responding. The English, conversely and characteristically, represent another type of persistent conflict and the development of languages of public/private and the individual. Certainly, the English experienced threshold conflict and the French negotiation conflict at various times in the history of each nation. Yet, for heuristic purposes, I believe it is justified to take each as typical and distinctive in the way I have done. Each writer, in his attempt to build up concepts, principles, and a vocabulary for levels of thinking of the self, develops a broad and rich language to overcome immediate problems of conflict. Bodin accomplishes this through constructing a political sovereign who wields supreme power and who is justified in doing so by protecting justice. The political sphere—the state—comes to embody juridical and moral authority. Identification with the political sovereign overarches but does not obliterate identification with divisive groups. Montaigne, writing like Bodin in conditions of extremity, takes a more subjective, cultural, psychological approach to reconceiving identity, emphasizing the universal condition that humans are all bodies living in time. Montaigne forces the reader to reinterpret who the self is who feels threatened by but also propagates conditions of violence. With Locke, institutional assumptions allowed but also forced continuous reconsiderations of who belonged to whom and what powers persons could have over one another. With Locke we see a classic defense of toleration in his focus on membership in plural societies—specifically religious and political societies. What is unique and innovative about his approach (among many things) is his capacity to make intelligible and appealing the idea of a society of spheres of recognition. His defense is

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a hologram that looks now religious and now political, but that is in fact the creation of that amalgam of alliances. Finally, Defoe confronts the issue of the individual head on—How can a culture be developed so that the danger of the fragmentation of moral perspective does not destroy the possibility of personal integrity? In a preexisting world based on honor, one’s moral integrity rested on upholding that code of honor, but with the changes brought by economic and political developments, this code could no longer be maintained in the same terms. Where did personal integrity come from? The novels that he writes are both evidence of the cultural discovery of interest in the minutia of the self and help to stabilize a society in which the disintegration and reinvention of the self are constant processes. This study of the original construction of toleration demonstrates the alternative possibilities embedded within the liberal tradition, which I believe can make it more than a Western ideal. We do not need to be stymied between concepts of universality/neutrality versus community/difference. Insisting on individual rights has missed the point in situations when those involved do not share the premises of the argument(s), and more precise conceptual analysis does not do the work of creating the predispositions to finding those moral arguments convincing. This historical study reveals how others have grappled with similar entrenched conflicts in the past— how they have attempted to alter the values and conceptions of their readers—and the knowledge they give is relevant for us.

CHAPTER

2

Language and Identity: Making Toleration a Norm Toleration exists today both as a language and a norm. The terms we use to specify what it means include freedom of religion and belief, individual rights, respect, and the separation of the public and private spheres. Many living in plural, democratic societies deeply believe in and feel bound to uphold the liberal values of toleration understood in this way. Yet, the terms on which we articulate the norm have become too restricted and settled.1 The systematic violence of the twentieth century, current debates about the relation between Islam and the West, as well as persistent conflicts over recognition, group status, and cultural harms are only some examples of deep-seated problems that push this language to its limits and indicate the need to re-examine the sources of toleration. Furthermore, there are more positive reasons to do this: The talk of rights and individual freedom can be made much stronger if we elaborate the nature of the motivations behind them. This chapter sets the stage for the historical chapters that follow. In it, I develop a number of key distinctions that help clarify the nature of toleration. Beginning with a review of the informal use of a language of toleration, I show the productive tension between its moral and pragmatic features, and the essentially reflective character of modern toleration. These features existed from its inception and continue to be characteristic of it. I then turn to how language was shaped by thinkers in the original early modern period to create specific ways of understanding the self. Bodin and Locke construct more public terms for a normative commitment to toleration, whereas Montaigne and Defoe develop more cultural, psychological grounds. 19

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A language is not enough to bring about ethical change. Given that the norm of toleration comes to be exhibited in patterns of action, it must be grounded as well in institutions and incentives that make it feasible. But understanding the nature of it is crucial both because it does serve instrumental purposes in facilitating changes in behavior and because that ethical transformation exists in ways of conceiving the self, conceptions we find evidence of in linguistically constituted forms of identity. We live in an historically specific intellectual, moral, and political context, and this makes the securing of toleration now dependent upon the languages and identities that I outline here. In this chapter, I trace how this context came about.

The Web of Language Language shapes how we think, feel, and act.2 It does this through the force of argument and reason; in the evocation of emotion through imagery, metaphors, and focusing attention; and through the power of command and charismatic persuasion and manipulation. We live in a world where there is an explicit language of toleration that we find embedded in liberal democratic societies. We can draw up a list of its various uses in contemporary Western speech. Most prominently and regularly, it appears in attempts to explain or prescribe issues surrounding conflicts of belief, religion, speech, identity, race, etc. In America, tolerance has for many generations been firmly established both as law—being grounded in the First Amendment to the Constitution—and as morality—as part of the political creed that almost everyone professes (without necessarily always following). (Tinder, 1995, 5)

Toleration also refers to a moral virtue3—the individual disposition to be nonrepressive for moral reasons—and, quite differently, as Walzer (1997) emphasizes, to the condition of peaceful interaction or practice between persons who differ in a variety of ways. The term is used as well to describe a psychological type or character, the “tolerant personality” in contrast to an “authoritarian” one,4 being nurtured in some families, social structures, and political or belief systems more consistently than in others. Historians mark a distinction between toleration as a “high principle” of individual rights and toleration as pragmatic political norm.5 Similarly, philosophers focus on toleration as a moral principle of individual rights.6 Here then are eight uses of the term; these are forms in which we talk about toleration existing in the world:

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1. Social/cultural practices of interaction 2. Characteristics of a personality type 3. Cluster of attitudes of nonviolence, open-mindedness, appreciation for diversity 4. Pragmatic compromise between groups—modus vivendi 5. Legal structure 6. Political creed 7. Principle of individual right 8. Individual moral virtue This list displays the complex status of toleration in the world and in modern vocabulary. We use the term to cover such a wide range of phenomena that one might be inclined to conclude that there is no core here, just a loose grouping of applications made by the person on the street, on the one hand, and the professional philosopher or historian on the other.7 Yet, there are two principal ways in which I will divide the list in order to help clarify what I believe are misunderstandings in our use of the idea, and that will enable me to explain the notion of a language in this regard.

Moral and Political Appeals of Toleration The first distinction drawn is between toleration as a moral versus political idea. Much of contemporary academic literature is focused on the moral nature of toleration, the features that do or do not make it a true virtue or principle, and types of reasons that can or should be given in its defense.8 The most fundamental moral argument for toleration as a virtue continues to be the ideal of individual autonomy. Toleration is defended as a moral principle or good because it protects an individual’s capacity to pursue his or her own beliefs, desires, and choices. One may not like or approve of another’s beliefs, lifestyle, or group membership but we must respect them because they are presumed to be what the individual wants and has chosen. Because we respect the other person as a source of autonomy, we refrain from forcing our own views upon him or her. This logic also justifies the public value of the neutrality of the liberal state. The liberal state must not itself take a particular stand for fear of compromising the possibility of persons and groups pursuing their own objectives and beliefs. There arises from this position the very large issue of where to draw the line: Not everything can be pursued because some things are beyond acceptability. Con-

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temporary liberal theories therefore focus on which specific practices and beliefs ought to be tolerated and for what reasons. What are the boundaries and limits of toleration? Is female circumcision beyond the pale or not? Does toleration protect prayer in school or the opposite? Should Muslim girls be allowed to wear head scarves in French public schools or does toleration justify the French state’s forbidding this? A basic problem is that this deeply persuasive argument from the point of view of some is not persuasive for others who have not been convinced of the trumping value of individual autonomy. And arguing for or asserting the value of individual autonomy is not enough to persuade those who have not already made it part of their moral or ethical perspective. As Bernard Williams has put it: Others may not share the liberal view of these various goods; in particular, the people whom the liberal is particularly required to tolerate are precisely those who are unlikely to share the liberal’s view of the good of autonomy, which is the basis of the toleration, to the extent that this expresses a value. The liberal has not, in this representation of toleration, given them a reason to value toleration if they do not share his or her other values. (Williams, 1996b, 25)

Many liberals are willing to admit that insisting upon individual rights makes liberalism another comprehensive doctrine or fighting creed.9 As such it does not occupy an impartial point of view but a particular one. The particularity may be less dogmatic or exclusionary than others, but for those who reject it, the imposition is still a real constraint. The painstaking conceptual work on the moral foundations of toleration has yielded interesting and important questions about the nature of moral reasoning and the relationship between public and private morality.10 While I support and rely on this type of analysis, I believe there are limitations to its usefulness in thinking about what toleration consists of as a human reality and experience and how better to secure it. The limitations do not only derive from those inherent in conceptual analysis, but more to the point, from the content of the moral principle of autonomy justifying toleration, which too often falls flat when applied in the world of conflict between groups. But we should avoid the opposite problem too. If we simply concluded that moral language has nothing to do with political conflict and appealed instead to purely political/strategic considerations of order, what sort of interaction would transpire between persons aligned in uncomprehending and mutually alienated groups? We cannot respond to this problem by saying that those who do not hold the value of autonomy can-

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not be interlocutors in the exchange of public life. This impasse demonstrates the need to formulate a different language of toleration, which would not insist on the sharp dichotomy between moral and political reasoning. To see what such a language not based on a sharp dichotomy might look like, it is instructive to turn to Williams’ discussion of this issue, in which argues that we must be satisfied with a political idea of toleration: [I]f we approach toleration as a political rather than in the first place a moral issue, we shall find hard to discover any one attitude that underlies liberal practice. . . . [T]oleration will be supported by a variety of attitudes, and none of them is very specifically directed to a value of toleration as such— still less to the moral belief in toleration based on the value of autonomy. . . . [T]he attitudes which are needed include such social virtues such as the desire to cooperate and to get on peaceably with one’s fellow citizens and a capacity for seeing how things look to them. They also include understandings that belong to a more specifically political good sense, of the costs and limitations of using coercive power. (1996a, 47)11

He also presents a justification for toleration from another political vantage point: the liberal state’s need to meet the Basic Legitimation Demand— it must be able to justify its use of power to: (a) the majority; (b) minority groups; and (c) any specific groups who, though not attempting to impose their beliefs, offend core liberal values (e.g., groups where enforcement of traditional gender roles would offend ideas of equality). To be able to do this, the state must use a language of toleration with its explicit call for individual freedom and rights for minorities. For the liberal state to succeed in justifying its existence, it must make clear to the various segments of the population that their being is best realized in a political world in which none of them as such dominates the means of coercion. But why would the majority not impose its own beliefs? One kind of reason may come out of skepticism; perhaps those in the majority do not consider their beliefs worth imposing because there is no guarantee that they are true. But Williams goes on: “Another, different reason may be that the people in the majority recognize that the minorities who disagree with them . . . will feel coerced if this belief is imposed, and they do not think that in this matter the price is worth paying in terms of the loyalty, cooperation, and amicable relations of those peoples” (46). Notice, however, that the terms in which Williams presents the political appeal are in themselves not devoid of moral reasons and argument. They are not moral in universalistic terms, but by linking toleration to attitudes such as “the desire to cooperate and to

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get on peaceably with one’s fellow citizens and a capacity for seeing how things look to them” and by describing toleration as preserving loyalty, cooperation, and political and social amity he clearly implicates appeals beyond simple self-interest and considerations of security. The persuasiveness of these political terms already assumes that there is a level of commitment to a common life, or that one is in the process of attempting to create that level of commitment. Even when Williams modifies the one-sided moral depiction, his alternative political version of toleration cannot divest itself of all moral appeals. There is no such thing as political reasoning that is purely strategic. For political reasoning to stick, it must already be able to appeal to a group of persons for whom a political point of view is valuable. What look like reasons of order and self-interest already presume a minimum communal obligation and mutual involvement: One desires order with these people and the self of self-interest is already involved in a specific collectivity. That self must be capable of taking at least some other point of view into account. Moreover, once the minimum community is established it brings about moral adjustment—we do not remain the same (even if the adjustment is temporary) once entering any collective arena. This fact about political reasoning for toleration—that it inherently involves a moral element, the assumption of a desire to adjust oneself to a specified community of persons beyond the self—accords with the reinterpretation of the basic structure I outlined in the Introduction. One restrains oneself not strictly because of an abstract belief in everyone’s rights to freedom but also because one wants to continue to live together with a specific set of persons who hold beliefs or ways of life that one cannot or does not accept as being one’s own. Thus, toleration demands a political ethics—a commitment to others— that is not derivative or deduced from a single moral philosophy. How do we articulate this political ethics, one that might stand a chance of speaking across boundaries between groups and persons who do not already share full-fledged principles or communal norms (of religion, race, etc.)? I address this in the final chapter of this book. What I have wanted to clarify in this section is that the phenomenon of toleration we are attempting to understand “is” never purely either a moral or political relationship but both in varying degrees—in some situations more one than the other. Toleration as a norm always makes both types of appeal. It can never be a purely functional norm like driving on the right side of the road, nor does it do its most important work as a purely moral ideal—because its essential pur-

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pose is to make possible life between persons who disagree about morality and who often find one another incomprehensible on many levels.

Language and Reflection Returning to the original list I laid out, there is another distinction that can provide us with a deeper understanding of how a language can help establish a norm of toleration. This distinction begins from the observation that we use a language of toleration in the first place. This language is itself a self-conscious, reflective endeavor. The importance of reflection in the constitution of a modern norm of toleration is brought out by considering the contrast with unreflective tolerance and reflective intolerance. Practical accommodation between diverse persons and groups is not an invention of Western liberalism.12 Forms of tolerating—that is, the peaceful interaction and living alongside one another of persons who see themselves as different—has always existed in human society. Yet, what we might describe from the outside as tolerance13 is not interpreted by individuals living in those worlds as pursued for the sake of political or moral toleration or even within a rubric of a concept of toleration. The first three forms in the preceding list—social/political practices of interaction, characteristics of personality, cluster of attitudes—do not require that a concept of toleration be present in the minds of the people whom we describe as supporting it. We can describe practices of social/cultural interaction that embody toleration. Likewise, if we talk about certain personality types as being more tolerant than others, we would not say that these persons are consciously attempting to uphold toleration: They simply tend to behave in less repressive, violent, or intolerant ways. There is, for these individuals and societies, no language of toleration and yet, they exemplify tolerance in their actions and attitudes. As an example of a society in which tolerance existed as a practice but not as an articulated value, we might look at the ancient Romans. There is a consensus that for a significant period of time, pagan Rome could be described as a tolerant regime.14 North refers to the Romans’ “habitual noninterference” and claims they “were willing at almost all stages of their history to accept foreign cults and practices” (North, 1979, 86). Garnsey (1984) believes that this openness itself precludes an application of the idea of toleration, but this seems wrongheaded: The modern American state might be similarly seen to be habitually noninterfering and presumptively open rather than closed. Is it then that the Romans lacked a notion of indi-

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vidual rights as the grounds for their openness that prevents their policies from being described as toleration? This may be true but does not go far enough. I think rather what we can observe from studying the Roman case is the absence of a distinctive element of reflection on the nature of communal interaction. Granting freedom of belief for foreign cults did not involve principles about or an understanding of the nature of collective life. “We certainly do not know at any period of any theoretical principle of allowing plurality of worship or belief. The toleration, if that is what it was, was a function of situation not theory” observes North (1979, 86) 15 The allowance of diversity in the presence of one another was not remarked upon in a literature of toleration nor in a general public discussion of the rights and wrongs of incorporating other religious groups within the Roman pantheon. Hence, the conceptual issues raised about the nature of the community’s identity and normative issues implicating mutuality as a result of that diversity are missing in this case. When Romans conquered other nations and gave them freedom to worship, Romans did not pause to reflect on the good of relations established this way. The distinctive work of reflection for toleration is also brought out in a reading of Michael Walzer’s study of the issue. Walzer writes: “My subject is toleration—or, perhaps better, the peaceful coexistence of groups of people with different histories, cultures, and identities, which is what toleration makes possible” (Walzer, 1997, 2). He examines five “regimes” of toleration at a macro level: multinational empires, international society, consociations, nation-states, and immigrant societies. How are these regimes related to attitudes—forms of consciousness about accommodation between differences? Early in the book, he maintains that toleration also can be understood as an attitude or state of mind, delineating five possible forms that these attitudes can take, ranging from resigned acceptance at one end of the spectrum to enthusiastic endorsement of difference on the other (10–11). And he concludes that, “it is a feature of any successful regime of toleration that it does not depend on a particular form of this virtue” (12). But, by defining toleration as coexistence and maintaining that no specific type of attitude can be linked with a regime type, Walzer submerges its distinctive nature when consciously developed within a discourse. Even if he were not interested in the history of toleration and its emergence in these terms, it would still be important to explore what it is that people have to think about themselves, what they are doing, and their capacity to achieve it for various types of coexistence to be feasible. Indeed, because Walzer does want to understand present-day coexistence, near the end of the book he admits: “My earlier claim that toleration works as well with any attitude on the continuum of

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resignation, indifference, stoicism, curiosity, and enthusiasm may have been falsified in our own time. It is only if groups are self-sustaining that resignation, indifference or stoic acceptance will suffice for coexistence” (92).16 We live in a world in which a language of toleration shapes and constrains how we think, feel, and judge issues of difference. Our highly conscious articulation of toleration functions in a number of ways. As a political and moral principle it establishes a burden of proof, a penumbra in which persons move in their relationships with one another, especially when confronted with issues of conflict. The expectations it sets up pressure those living in liberal regimes from the inside and outside, in how they think of themselves and how they justify themselves in a larger collective realm. Individuals and the state cannot transgress it with impunity. Because there continue to be contrary impulses toward intolerance, and also simply because the issue of conflict over group or communal identities will never go away, this public language acts as a fundamental guide. It is not a parchment barrier when it is developed culturally and institutionalized in the Bill of Rights, among other locations.17 Nevertheless, there has come to be an element of roteness to its presentation. This fact should lead us back to examine the nature of its original coming into consciousness. What did reflectiveness about toleration originally consist of in the early modern period? The possibility of toleration as articulated in a self-conscious way was something new in conceptualizing human association. Toleration emerged as a particular kind of coexistence that is not equivalent to any and all nonwar situations of coexistence. Part and parcel of that unique coexistence is the reflective recognition of the negotiability of relationships engendered by conflict and community. That is, being able to live within tolerant communities (balancing both conflict and mutuality) was effected in part through a reflective language that grappled with it in words/ideas. The language of any explicit norm like toleration (or equality, freedom, etcetera) is embodied in words spoken and transmitted with a recognizable, although contestable meaning over a significant period of time. The words that make up this language can be found in speeches, newspapers, philosophical texts, literature, sermons, pamphlets, histories, plays, etc. I define a reflective or conscious language of this sort as existing when the issues have come to be debated and examined in a prolonged and socially significant manner. The significant period may be no more than a burst of intense examination, but a solitary text—involved in no dialogue with another—is not an indication of the existence of a language or norm. The principle of toleration that begins to be developed in the early modern period is essentially connected to reflection and conscious articu-

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lation more than other norms. Unlike freedom, for example, toleration can be causally brought closer to realization through repeated efforts to construct commonality through changes in consciousness.18 Surely this is not enough; toleration is more than a state of mind. But to reflect on toleration is to acknowledge that the sovereign power, groups or individuals— whichever levels between which toleration is to obtain—must modify themselves in relation to one another.19 It forces out into plain view not only issues about how differences between people and groups are managed—that is, the mechanisms of adjustment between given groups—but more directly, the nature of those “given” differences and how and why they matter to a common life. It forces reflection on the sources of conflict and on the nature of the commonality/mutuality that toleration is meant to maintain. People’s concrete particularities—their attachments to various communities (racial, religious, linguistic, etc.)––are objects to think about and not to be taken as unmodifiable givens. The capacity to articulate the problem of conflict/mutuality gives a group of people a tool for achieving and readjusting mutuality in the face of conflict. In the early modern period, a language of toleration was only beginning to be constructed,20 and we can decipher it in terms of the central problem of communal identification at this time. Although I address this at greater length in the final part of this chapter, for now I simply want to emphasize that a conscious coming to terms with differences creates uniquely political identities and identifications with moral implications.21 In effecting this, such a language can potentially create a notion of the common good that gives the realm of politics a normative focus. It is not and cannot be the only means, nor should a society in which it is necessary pride itself on superiority. Such a society is both fortunate and unfortunate. It is unfortunate insofar as it needs an explicit language to bind together persons who tend to fall into practices of domination and coercion: If it had been shaped by a Buddhist heritage, for example, it might not need a language of this sort. But it is fortunate insofar as it has found a means of directly raising the issue of commonality and mutuality while allowing for conflict and diversity. The good of the political community transcends—but does not wash out—the conflicts of groups and beliefs incorporated within it. The distinction between a reflective language of toleration and tolerance as a practice enables us to think about which strategies we can or should use to secure a world in which, however we want to describe it, toleration is more likely. With unreflective tolerant action, the allowance that creates peaceful interaction is not an act done intentionally for the sake of allowing differences, but is a result of other causes. Understanding those

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causes is vital to constructing a world in which tolerant interactions will be more prevalent than a world in which they will not. We, using a language of toleration and intentionally working to secure it in some form, must take account of historical, psychological, and social scientific knowledge that gives information about which factors best contribute to it in whatever form. Factors such as economic opportunity and institutional safeguards are cases in point. However, we must do more than pursue such strategies behind the back, as it were, to increase the chances of tolerance. At this historical point in the discourse about human rights and conflict, we must, as I have stressed, use an explicit language of toleration to do this. Language does not only name and reflect a world out there: It creates a world. The development of such a language is part of the causal process that brings about the possibility of a more tolerant reality. By emphasizing reflectiveness, we can bring to the foreground in our own use its generative capacities. Some languages of toleration do this better than others. I earlier faulted a strictly autonomy-based vocabulary and my aim is to show how much more creative languages of toleration have been. Despite appearances, toleration as a norm is not only secured in a stable way by superimposing arguments for toleration on top of conflicting groups. Rather, the terms of articulating what toleration means must also—and primarily— function on a deeper level by addressing identification between persons in groups themselves. The language of toleration is a multipronged tool and must be used to build up levels of common identity and create a web of connection out of diversity. It can weave a disparate, rancorous set of persons into forms of mutuality and commonality that are not based on sameness and uniformity but on purposiveness, cultural themes, and institutions as well as argument and agreement.

Patterns of Identity An explicit public language of toleration aims at modifying the terms of relations between persons or groups who differ in important ways but who want to live in conditions of mutual accommodation. The norm requires that, for the sake of a common life, the self not impose its particular position. In an abstract way then, we can say that toleration demands a capacity of the self to move from the particular to the nonparticular. How is this possible? One answer has been that if the moral or the political reasons are strong enough, then people will do so. Yet, this cannot be a fully adequate response, because from any person’s particular position, moral, and political reasons already exist to keep him bound to that place. The problem is that

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toleration cannot be picked up and put down in a provisional way. Its accessibility, even as a tool, depends upon aspects of the self being transformed.

Historical Preconditions I have highlighted that toleration as a normative language was a historically specific phenomenon. Its construction in the post–Reformation years in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was a result of a complex set of institutional and ideological factors. I will not attempt to provide the explanation that this question deserves, but I want to consider certain features of the structure of the problem as they are related to the focus on identity. The history of toleration is essentially tied to the preceding justification of a policy of intolerance or coercion. This story begins with the Christianization of the Roman Empire. “The creation of a non-political society based on faith which does not recognize the values of ordinary political society is new in itself,” Momigliano (1978, 190) writes about early Christianity as it implicitly challenged Roman rule. The social innovation introduced by Christianity was the idea of a community premised upon the right beliefs shared by all. In the words of Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians—one of the originating texts of this ideal—“I beg you, brothers, through the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfected together in the same mind and in the same judgment” (I Corinthians 1:10). Given this ideal, heresy (derived from hairesis, a Greek word for “choice”) was the wrong choice that would lead to damnation. The crucial feature about heresy and the society of faith damaged by it was that the unity of persons and beliefs was essential.22 As Momigliano goes on to explain: “The notion of heresy . . . shaped Christian society as an orthodox corporation permanently aiming at converting the outsider and at excluding the dissenting insider” (ibid.). This principle of protecting a pure community of faith became a source for a policy of intolerance when it was annexed to sovereign political power. That is, political power could not beat the logic of divine inspiration on its own terms, so it joined forces with it for its own purposes.23 The justification of intolerance and coercion was made possible by the power of religious identification adopted as the primary moral language of a political community. St. Augustine elaborated the first explicit defense of coercion by arguing that physical measures applied by political authorities should if necessary be used to insure adherence to the universal moral

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truth embodied in the Church. Linking politics to moral community in this way in turn legitimated the normative authority of the political realm. The institutional structure of medieval Western society consisted in the mutual dependence as well as tension between church and state. Historian Richard Southern wrote about the nature of medieval “unity” in this way: “Church and society were one, and neither could be changed without the other undergoing similar transformation. . . . The identification of the church with the whole of organized society is the fundamental feature which distinguishes the Middle Ages from earlier and later periods of history . . . only orthodox and obedient believers could enjoy the full rights of citizenship” (Southern, 1970, 16). Underlying this institutional structure was a corresponding set of ideas in which moral identity (how one conceives oneself as related to God or the nature of existence) was explicitly bound to political-communal identity. Hence, political order appears to depend on a singular moral consensus. Thus, one lived in a situation in which self-understanding and who one was acknowledged to be as a moral being by others were premised upon belief in the tenets of the orthodox Church.24 However, it was not only the interdependence but also the rifts and competition between these two sources of authority that had great effect on the history of the possibility of toleration. Brian Tierney writes: “The very existence of two power structures competing for men’s allegiance instead of only one compelling obedience greatly enhanced the possibilities for human freedom” (1988, 2). This observation would require a lengthy treatment to address adequately; perhaps a useful simple extrapolation of it is that because both sources of authority sought to gain loyalty we need to ask what generates that loyalty. Having to compete with the church forced the political sovereign to represent itself in alternative terms but still necessarily ethically persuasive ones. A language of toleration developed in the wake of fundamental challenges to this unified church/state orthodoxy. Catalysts for change arose from two directions, themselves related to one another: the Reformation’s rejection of Catholic theology and the consequent proliferation of religious beliefs and sects, and war within and between countries.25 These two factors have been the standard “explanations” of toleration. On the one hand, diversity of beliefs leads to skepticism and then to toleration;26 on the other hand, war, and specifically war between religious groups necessitates calling a truce that eventually leads to toleration. Thus, Horton and Mendus note that “Early formulations and defences of the idea of toleration were often developed to cope with the fierce religious differences which

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were a continuing threat to civil order and personal security” (Horton and Mendus, 1985, 1–2; see also Tinder, 1975, 8). This would also appear to be Skinner’s position in Tully’s description of it. Writing about Skinner’s work on the early modern period, Tully notes: The predominant form of practical activity that destabilizes, realigns and codifies shifting political relations in this period is warfare. . . . Effectual changes in European political thought and action in this period are the consequences of wars and practical struggles and, secondarily, the outcome of the ideological response to the legitimation crises engendered by the shifting power relations that give way to battle. (Tully, 1988, 23–24)

Rawls encapsulates this picture in the origins of liberal theory: Suppose that at a certain time, because of various historical events and contingencies, certain liberal principles of justice are accepted as a mere modus vivendi, and are incorporated into existing political institutions. This acceptance has come about, let us say, in much the same way as the acceptance of the principle of toleration came about as a modus vivendi following the Reformation: at first reluctantly, but nevertheless as providing the only workable alternative to endless and destructive civil strife. (1993, 159)

Although it is doubtless true that toleration would not have arisen as it did without the immediate problems raised by intense and seemingly irresolvable conflict, it is also true that this explanation does not really help us understand the origins of the specific nature of a language of toleration. There has always been war, and even war between religious groups, and such a language did not arise. The crucial feature that we should examine is the concrete need not just to end conflict, but to explicitly formulate on what terms and what reasons there could be to continue to be a unity once the basis of that unity had fallen apart. Why should there be any accommodation at all between religious groups and between these groups and the political sovereign? When fighting the heathen, Jews, or Muslims in the Crusades, or when Romans conquered alien nations protected by their own gods, there was no need to morally justify the political terms of accommodation. However, because the nature and unity of the Christian community was based on dogmatic, doctrinal truths, and the political authorities served to protect them, the collapse of this doctrinal unity raised in an unanswerable way—at least in the terms available to them—the basis of political and moral-religious obligation. The ideologically salient and theoretically elaborated aspect of one’s communal moral identity was not land, language, race, or ethnicity

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but words—doctrines, a logos—that embodied a set of true beliefs. This does not mean that there did not exist traditions of obligation to one’s land, ethnic or linguistic group, or “national” heritage. It means that these were not articulated with the same moral status as the language of religious membership. The explicit assertion of the normative validity of toleration, therefore, must depend upon calling out into public awareness other sources of obligation, community, and membership—alternative grounds on which one’s identity and identification could be based. At one level, a language of toleration is fundamentally an attempt to express in ethical terms the independent validity of the political realm. If we recognize that toleration involves in its very inception normative thinking (though not yet strictly moral) because it makes demands of communal membership and identity, we can see how certain contemporary debates about toleration’s history need to be supplemented. Again, the assumption of a sharp dichotomy between the moral and political status of toleration limits understanding of its origins in identity transformation. The simplest and most canonical story attached to the distinction is the one basically laid out by Rawls—a pragmatic policy becomes over time (primarily through the Enlightenment) a moral virtue. Tuck, for example, writes the following: None of the ideas about toleration or uniformity we have been considering, all of which grew out of a more or less sceptical attitude towards traditional dogmas, present the issue as one of high principle. All the writers I have discussed would have agreed that there are not, and could not be, grounds for enforcing one’s own beliefs upon another simply because of the nature of those beliefs; but beliefs could be enforced upon unwilling subjects for pragmatic or political reasons. Equally, they could be left alone to practise their own religion for the same reasons. (Tuck, 1988, 35; italics in original)27

The distinction between toleration as a “mere modus vivendi” and toleration as “high principle” draws a line between forms that appeal to reasons of order and strategic self-interest versus forms that appeal to moral reasons like freedom of conscience and belief and individual autonomy. If we see that the task set before persons attempting to build up the normative force of toleration must be to reconstruct identity and commitment, then we must recognize that they will appeal to something other than moral identity when this was radically destabilized and obscured. As Michel de L’Hôpital remarked in 1560: “We . . . see that a Frenchman and an Englishman of the same religion are more friendly towards each other than two citizens of one town, but of different religions, so far does the relationship

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of religion surpass that of nationality” (Lecler, II, 45). It is these relationships themselves that are being fundamentally rethought. Paying attention to the normative, ideological substructure of the origins of a language of toleration also throws a different light on two revisionist perspectives. These perspectives emphasize the inadequacy of the liberal, Whig version of history, which located the roots of toleration in the birth of Protestantism’s emphasis upon the individual, or in the progressive forces of capitalism. Grell et al. (1991, 1996) have argued that toleration has always been a practical political reality, which must be continually worked for, and certainly not an automatic development from the Reformation through the English Toleration Act, culminating in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Another revisionist line contends that the toleration we locate as born in the post–Reformation era was actually an idea others had already defended long before Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. Nederman and Laursen make these points in a series of books in which they examine doctrines of religious liberty and “subjective rights theories” (Nederman and Laursen, 1996, 6; see also 1998, 1999) that existed in the Middle Ages and the early early-modern period.28 Both lines of revisionist historical studies have been invaluable in extending our knowledge of the range of ideas and conditions that feed into toleration. Yet, from the perspective I am adopting, there are problems as well. Neither answers the question of why the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular brought forth a great explosion of debate about the question of toleration. I take this timing as a sign of an important change in political and moral thinking. The ideal of toleration that comes to be reflected upon at that time may look like “a paper-thin veneer” but then the question must be which social and political conditions are relevant to fostering it—immediate, day-to-day, or more long-term? The Nederman/Laursen corrective in the other direction— stressing progenitors of toleration in earlier times—is also necessary but it obscures the differences between toleration and other related, correlative values. Toleration is not the same thing as religious liberty or theories of subjective rights, though many writers make this equation.29 If, as I have argued before, we must understand toleration as allowing differences to exist in the presence of one another, then freedom is one value or attitude that will justify or underscore this allowance but it is not the same thing. Freedom demands space for self-expression or choice. It is not inherent to the value of freedom per se that the nature of the collective or of the relation engendered by one’s act is an issue. These considerations are constraints on the extent of freedom but they do not define what freedom is.

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Toleration in contrast is defined by the nature of the collective and of the relation engendered between persons. I began this section with an observation from Momigliano about the innovative nature of communal identity that creates preconditions for intolerance. I now end it with a reformulation of that statement to capture the innovative nature of political identity that protects toleration: The creation of a political society not based on faith that recognizes the values of religious society is new in itself.30 John Figgis wrote: “We cannot overestimate the change in men’s minds required to produce the ideal of heterogeneity in religion within one State” (Figgis, 1907, 18). This change in minds could not result from a single idea being grafted on to a preexisting worldview but required a shift in the way people conceived of themselves, and this had to be made an object of theoretical elaboration.

Constituting Identity I have presented in highly schematic outline some of the key historical considerations that are vital to understanding the development of a conscious norm of toleration. In doing so, I accentuated how the integration between a specific type of religious-moral identity and political identity created conditions for intolerance as well as conditions for articulating a norm of toleration. The question then becomes—How is identity reoriented to be supportive of toleration? The factors contributing to toleration’s becoming a norm in a community today and the factors that originally led to its being formed and articulated as a positive norm will be different. Nevertheless, there is an overlap and history gives us knowledge that can still apply to our issues. I described the normative demands of toleration in two ways: One stresses the capacity to live in the presence of another with whom one is potentially in conflict. The other formulation demands of the person a capacity to maintain one’s particularity while also being able to transcend that particularity and to be moved by nonparticularist considerations. Toleration sets up as an ideal an ability to be particular and nonparticular, to be unified while also in conflict. How are people able to do this? One solution is that persons become liberals in a primary way: One’s basic identity is as a person who upholds the virtues and principles of difference and open-mindedness.31 This I take as one ultimate endpoint, a person—whatever we wish to label him or her—who can value diverse ways of life and being. But I want to question whether this is the best way to think about

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what happens to identity. First, a liberal political system does not depend on persons becoming liberal selves in their most important self-understanding. All persons must be able to live within and value in a basic way a society of pluralism, but this capacity does not require that their fundamental identity be embodied in this. (What indeed does it mean to have a fundamental identity?) Second, if we are trying to determine how people can come to value living in a society of toleration, then we can’t begin by putting the cart before the horse. The writers I examine were faced with the problem of making the appeals of various types of self supporting toleration persuasive in the context of the pulls of particularity and conflict. Each one uses a different means for redrawing a balance within persons. There are two situational logics in which toleration is appealed to, or we might say, there are two conditions of identity in which the language of toleration is used in an attempt to make sense of and guide the situation. The most difficult situation is a threshold condition when groups are at such a divide that there seem to be absolutely no points of contact but rather threatened or active hostility and coercion between the two. France during the wars of religion exemplifies this condition. The Middle East, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and other extreme situations of this sort have been or are also cases. How do we build bridges to create an identity or identities above the divisive ones? Toleration is not only used in these extreme conditions, however, but more commonly in less extreme ones. We also employ it to adjudicate conflicts and disputes between persons who already share a great deal and who live together on relatively peaceful terms. In the early modern period, we can take England in the late seventeenth century as a case in point. Today, most Western countries presume a significant measure of commonality but continue to argue over freedoms of speech, beliefs, and religion, as well as group rights and where to draw the line between church and state. Here the very conditions of peaceful life do not have to be invented from scratch and debates about the nature and extent of toleration take place between groups who tacitly agree to at least a common citizenship and political obligations. In these situations of negotiation, the danger of reciprocal annihilation is past and the struggles are of a different sort. Granted the boundaries of mutual expectation and imposition are constantly called into question, this is a normal feature of all systems of political and social pluralism. The writers I examine attempt to confront the problems of identity in both threshold and negotiation situations, which we ought to see as two points on a continuum rather than complete alternatives. In both condi-

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tions, the balancing act toleration requires of persons is to hold specific identities and a common perspective or identity together simultaneously. Bodin and Montaigne wrote during the French religious wars, and Locke and Defoe wrote during the relatively more stable conditions of late seventeenth-century England. Each displayed a unique gift in confronting the problems before them in a distinctive voice, but I believe we can distinguish two main levels of approach. Bodin and Locke attack a more politicalinstitutional level of the problem of identity. Montaigne and Defoe approach the problem at a more cultural level of self-understanding. All by the sheer force of their writing attempt to draw compelling pictures of alternative visions of politics and the self. For simplicity’s sake, I have constructed a matrix to show the relations between the writers and the conditions and levels in which they work. Threshold

Negotiation

Institutional/ political

Bodin

Locke

Cultural/ personal

Montaigne

Defoe

Their modes of articulating the goodness or rightness of toleration are not primarily through a positive didactic argument in its favor. Locke comes closest to this style but even he is much looser than one might expect given his canonical status in the history of toleration. Thus, actual direct arguments for toleration will only be one piece of what I examine. These writers use words to shape how their readers think, feel, and act. Their objective is to bring about a change, to show persons why they should want and how they can live together in terms of peace and acknowledgment. They build bridges to create and they negotiate boundaries to reshape political and moral identification. A plethora of techniques is necessary for this task: juridical language, poetic metaphors and images, appeals to fears and suppressed attachments, fictional and real stories of other lives, and straightforward political and moral argument. The case for toleration had to be made using all these methods because it required showing the multiple forms in which persons can identify across conflicts and particularisms. In concluding this chapter, I want to emphasize that what these writers have accomplished is not reducible to the idea of individualism or to a dichotomy between a public and private self.32 The notion of the individual

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and of the public/private help to name some basic dimensions of change that followed in the wake of religious wars and the development of the legitimacy of an independent political realm of obligation. But how persons actually identify with one another and are motivated to peaceful commonality or to divisive particularism is incomprehensible if reduced to those concepts. The lenses of the authors I examine give us a way to see potential identifications that do not replace our deeply held religious or other attachments, but that allow diverse perspectives to be visible and effective alongside them. The very existence of other perspectives in one’s field of vision changes the person watching, observing, experiencing the world, and therefore in fact changes that world. The objective must be to make viewing a different perspective more than a passive activity so that it becomes part of the potential identification of the persons in conflict. We are left with the question of the extent to which the larger point of view33 must itself be just a different particularity for it to be motivational. Ultimately, a language of toleration will not get off the ground without two things: an agreement not to pursue conflict to the death, and enough of an expectation by both sides in the conflict to deploy a language of resolution and peace. If those conditions are present, then toleration must begin to stabilize relations by building up forms of common identification, and these will vary according to history, culture, politics, and institutional resources. The rule of law, beliefs, and dispositions toward toleration will all be necessary to keep it going, or to reinvent it through time.

CHAPTER

3

Bodin and the State: Structuring a Political Self ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all Relation. —John Donne

Jean Bodin (1530–1596) is categorized in the history of political thought as the first major theorist of sovereignty and absolutism. He is also remembered, though less well, for having defended religious toleration both in his most famous book, the Six livres de la république, published in 1576, and more strikingly in his Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis, completed in 15931 but not published until 1857. Bodin was the first writer to attempt to establish a secure ground for a different kind of legitimate political order given the intractability of the conflict he witnessed during the French wars of religion (1562–1598).2 His solution depended upon toleration. Toleration for Bodin is necessary for peace and the flourishing of the state. But this claim in itself is remarkable: For toleration to be the prudent policy, people have to be able to imagine themselves as functioning in a political sphere in which they refrain from asserting religious cohesion. The creation of this prudential world required strategies of the self that were new, and are therefore misnamed as “merely” instrumental, as if easily undertaken and discarded practicalities. Thus, the policy of toleration Bodin urged, while pursued in the name of stability, depends upon and extends changes in identification. The main focus of my discussion of Bodin revolves around three main norms of toleration extracted from his analysis: nonviolence, neutrality, 39

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and nondiscussion. I show how each of these is linked with identity issues and political power. However, in order to situate his accomplishment, I begin with a discussion of the nature of the conflict at the time of his writing. The threshold accommodation took half a century to achieve and Bodin’s work is emblematic of the way power had to be reconstituted to reach a resolution.

The Nature of Early Modern Conflict The conflicts in which toleration developed were not simply a matter of clashes of beliefs but were conflicts between communities of believers. Indeed, the self-conscious nature of the arguments for toleration derived in part from the problem that the emergence of new identities posed.

Conflict of Beliefs Versus Conflict of Identities The common description of the Reformation is as a clash of religious beliefs. Were these wars of truth, wars between different sets of beliefs about God? In some sense, it is obviously true that beliefs provoked the wars, but in another sense this is to greatly misunderstand the conflict. If we examine the conflict first from the point of view of beliefs and then from that of identity, we see that beliefs and identity were closely wrapped together, and that this linkage in the new context of the Reformation and following was part of the source of conflict. In broad terms, theological differences between Catholics and Protestants (whether Lutheran or Calvinist) created grounds for deep distrust; thus, the substance of doctrinal arguments must play a role in understanding these wars. Barbara Diefendorf describes how The first procession against heresy in the capital [i.e., Paris] occurred in 1528 to expiate a sacrilege committed against a statue of the Virgin affixed to a wall in the rue aux Juifs. . . . In January 1535, a much more elaborate procession took place against the heretics, who were accused of having “blasphemed God of the Blessed Sacrament of the altar” by the posting of placards against the mass. Ordered by the king as a measure to combat Protestant proselytizing, this seems to have been the first procession outside of Corpus Christi in which the Blessed Sacrament was carried. (Diefendorf, 1991, 45–46)

This passage points to an ambiguity in the notion of religious belief itself. Was it the role of the Virgin or the observance of the mass that was at issue, or was it Protestant proselytizing? The content of religious beliefs is not all

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of the same type. There are beliefs about Christian dogma—the nature of divinity and Christ’s message—and there are beliefs about how these truths must be realized in a concrete world of human beings.3 Various religious groups (churches or sects) developed divergent positions in regard to issues like the Virgin birth or the nature of the Holy Trinity, but many of them shared the “religious” belief that one must convert as many sinners as possible, or that heresy must be stamped out, or that divine truth must be true for all persons. These latter types of religious beliefs are concerned with the role of the church or community of believers itself rather than the dogma of the divine message. During the early modern period, the two types of belief were inextricably entwined: The relation of the church to social reality around it was seen to be integral to the substance of the Christian message. But this assumption about one’s communal and political membership now became a precarious metabelief in the desirability of living in a single moral community when the possibility of that happening was much less likely, if not impossible. Historically, the development of toleration did not depend upon resolving the nuances of a Presbyterian as opposed to a Lutheran or Quaker interpretation of a theological point. At the individual level, it may have been easier for those with more familiar doctrines to tolerate one another (though the problem of the narcissism of small differences might appear as well), but, on a larger scale, theological religious beliefs did not have to change significantly and certainly not converge on fundamentals for persons to be able to see toleration in a positive way. On the other hand, beliefs about prosecuting crimes of heresy, converting sinners, and enforcing religious uniformity within a community—beliefs about the nature of religious community—did have to change. Changing these beliefs required a revision of the political and social world and a corresponding reformulation of identities.

Religious Identity There are positive and negative focal points that confer identity. Having an identity, and from an objective point of view ascribing an identity to a person, implies a corresponding set of motivations. When we say that we belong to or identify with something or we positively do not, this implies consequences for how one acts—obligations, commitments, and motivations that result from the attachment and differentiation. The problem of identity in post–Reformation Europe was that people were called upon to act but the traditional ways of identifying and ranking commitments were

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contradictory in the new circumstances of religious diversity. To whom or what was one obligated? According to which identifications ought one to act? Religious conflict engendered heightened religious identification and violent assertions of religious attachments while undermining the terms on which a total religious commitment could be based. In the sixteenth century, assumptions about the way one located oneself persisted in some form from the medieval framework. At the high point of medieval unity, religious beliefs were authoritatively sanctioned and served to orient one as a member of a single moral community distinguished from heathens, heretics, Jews, and Muslims. The most unquestioned identification was one’s membership in Christendom, and other collective markers were derivative or secondary to this. This understanding of oneself meant that one’s identity obligated one to the Church and to one’s fellow Christians. In the early modern period, the unquestioned nature of the framework linking religious beliefs and communal political identity was destroyed. First, the scope of religion contracted insofar as it was no longer the unqualified point for identification and moral clarity. Its authority could not now be taken for granted when there were ten or more absolute truths vying for supremacy in Europe. This opened up a large space in which the role of a nonreligious political sovereign might assert is own logic and normative authority. Second, the fact that beliefs were in a state of flux and that the terms of the debate led to polarization and fragmentation point to religion’s becoming a matter of choice. The content of the dogmas themselves was subject to controversy and many people tried out different versions of truth. Conversions to Calvinism and of some back to Catholicism were prevalent events. Families and even relations between husbands and wives were frequently marked by confessional differences. The medieval framework had intermeshed collective identity and truth. Early modern conflict broke this connection apart. Nevertheless, the idea that religion was and ought to be the basis of community did not disappear; religion did not immediately recede to fit within a person’s head as a tractable set of beliefs. This radically destabilized one’s conception of to whom primary allegiance was due.

Resolution of Conflict: Recreating the Self and Public World Picture the decades-long river of violence and intolerance as fed by two tributaries. One was the persistent attachment to the model of truth embodied in community, of the individual’s identity linked to a public repre-

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sentation of universal truth. The other tributary was the insecurity in authority caused by instability in understanding the terms of human association, collective identity, and obligation, that is, global uncertainty about the rules of the game and the authority of the rules. What led to the dissipation of this torrent? An answer that is often immediately given here is skepticism. The fact of competing absolute truths can be taken as a sign of an impending tide of radical doubt. And indeed many have noted the kinship, or even causal relation, between toleration and skepticism (see Levine, 1999, and Tuck, 1988, for discussion). There clearly is a link between skepticism as a doctrine of doubt about the truth of beliefs and many early modern arguments for toleration. The dissolution of religious certainty brought about by the Reformation unleashed modern philosophy: Spinoza, Descartes, Bayle, Montaigne, and Voltaire are writers motivated by a skeptical perspective who supported the cause of toleration. But it is also equally apparent that skepticism is not a necessary condition for toleration.4 One can be a great religious believer and be tolerant, and one may be the most committed atheist and skeptic and be highly intolerant and supportive of repressive public policy. In what way, then, can we see the influence of doubts about knowledge as supportive, in the long run, of an ideal of toleration? We would have to look at skepticism as a social force to be able to answer this question adequately, and I shall just make one small observation here. To say that skepticism exists as a social force does not mean that the prevalent state of belief among most people is one of fundamental doubt about any or all truths. What the rise of skepticism gradually brought about is a culture of questioning. The source and nature of one’s beliefs become an acceptable object of reflective debate. I believe the most significant way in which a destabilization of truth and toleration are bound together, then, is indirectly through how skepticism fostered an opening for practices of reflection on the nature of knowledge, authority, etc. This cultural innovation began during and grew after the Reformation. It was not however a resource for Bodin. Another indirect means by which we might link skepticism and toleration makes more sense of what Bodin attempted. If the status of truth cannot be proven or is no longer accepted as sacred because of ineradicable differences, its power to authorize social uniformity is undermined, making it incumbent upon those seeking to make that authorization to ground it in other ways (as Hobbes did). Bodin chose to ground it in toleration-producing ways. It is not skepticism per se, but another kind of innovation in religious belief that more directly affects the chances of reducing the violence of

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confessional wars. In order not to force everyone into a single truth, one does not have to believe that there is no truth that can be verified. People did not cease to believe in truth; rather, the social status of the beliefs that constituted truth changed. Recalling the distinction I made earlier between truths about theological dogma and truths about the nature of the Christian community, the question should be—How were these two types of beliefs uncoupled to allow for a bracketing of strictly religious beliefs? How to protect the truth-value of truth but not demand communal uniformity for its realization? If truth can no longer be publicly shared and verified by the total community, then its protection and source of authority must be relocated to another grounding. That ground had been set for the transformation by the radical message of the Reformation in opposition to Catholic orthodoxy: this was its emphasis upon inner faith and the individual’s relationship to God. Verification of truth moved from an outer consensus to an inner acceptance or illumination. This is not to say that by the late sixteenth century, religious beliefs had become subjective; the church remained a necessary mediating body in the individual’s relationship to God. Moreover, the causal relation is not direct: Lutheranism and Calvinism were not inherently tolerant religions. Nevertheless, the notion of conscience already indicated a more individuated belief and an interiorization of religion. The fact of religious choice and the idea of conscience pointed in the direction of individual truth. By considering that religious truths can be true for me, a person built up an inner sense of identification that did not require total outward collective acknowledgment. This element of religious innovation filtered out and helped to create a new culture with an emphasis on what Taylor (1989) calls “inwardness.” The change not only affected the status of truth itself but the entire experience of living in the world. It brought out in an explicit way a distinction between an inner and outer sense of reality. That psychological experience was one of the results of changes brought about in the early modern period and the beginnings of modern life. A culture that came to emphasize the experience of inner deepening was a culture that eventually could provide more secure grounds for toleration. The possibility of inwardness was both a condition for and a consequence of toleration. One vital role played by Bodin’s work is the public protection of this space of inwardness, which depends on a public commitment to exist. The possibility of an inward self is made more real through boundaries that value its existence and publicly acknowledge its necessity. Here we can see how changes in identity facilitated or called forward changes in politics. The capacity to bracket one’s beliefs fundamentally depended upon political conditions. Changes in religion and changes in the political world helped persons to con-

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ceive of themselves as being more complex than a single identity coterminous with the bounds of religious community. The political growth of the early modern state and its ability to attain a normative authority were integral to this transformation, a process I shall examine more fully in the following. Violence in the name of religion did not disappear because of skepticism. It lost energy because of another view of collective identity. I turn now to the other tributary: the changes in the basis of human association and the conception of authority underlying it. If we see the violence as one of identity conflict rather than wars of truth, we get another side of the picture, neither complete but a necessary corrective. In pure identity conflict, the individual is driven by oneness with the group or cause; he becomes externalized, flattened out to represent that one identity. Although identity conflicts may be pursued with a rational goal as the purported object (e.g., powersharing), what is at issue in the conflict is often the very being of the other for each group. The existence of the other group is a primary motivation for conflict and prevents resolution of the pretexts for conflict. As such, these conflicts are zero-sum. There are two typical ways in which a unitary identity reacts to that which it is not: domination and purification.5 A paradigm case of domination in the construction and conflict of identities is the confrontation of Western white civilization with the nonwestern non–white Other of America, Asia, or the African continent. The other main process of identity construction in negative terms is purification or obliteration of the thing that one is not. One rids oneself of that which limits who one is by eliminating it from one’s presence, through destroying it physically, destroying its distinctiveness via conversion, or by situating it at such a distance that no meaningful human interaction is possible. We have recently seen examples of this in attempts to establish ethnically pure nations. Seeing early modern conflicts over religion as conflict of identities rather than a simple conflict of beliefs helps us take account of the totalizing commitment with which people acted. It also brings out the difficulty of resolving these conflicts. Domination and purification were the initial responses. The German Peace of Augsburg of 1555 was a treaty that set up purified religious zones for different confessions: cujus regio, ejus religio.6 The general relation between the Catholics and Huguenots in France could be described as that of domination, though the Catholic League attempted measures of purification as well. It appears as if the cessation of war could only result from a pure balance of power between enemies, a precarious and normatively unjustifiable result. However, another route was attempted in the form of accommodation between conflicting groups. What would dislodge the logic of pure identity

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conflict? On the one hand, sovereigns attempted to implement toleration and thereby make real their alternative power to the warring groups. On the other hand, independent grounds existed on which the sovereign might base a loosening of the individual’s total commitment to his or her religious community. The fact was that the groups in conflict were not strangers to one another, nor were they thrown at each other as brute forces of nature. Both sides were comprised of persons who understood themselves to be historically intimately connected to their enemies, and yet they stood as far apart as possible insofar as they were willing to kill each other to defend their opposing religions. The closeness enhanced the virulence of the conflict but also provided grounds for spanning the gulf. The acuity of differentiation in the wars of religion was activated; it was not a permanent state of relations between persons but took place in the context of an ancient history and in a highly complex and developing social system. The nature of external conditions in part led persons to commit themselves so completely to the cause of their collective group that it prevented them from seeing themselves as individuals and from being able to act on countervailing desires or commitments. Toleration required recognition of the other’s existence and a space for each to maintain itself with some measure of self-assertion and expression. If each side believed itself to be fundamentally threatened by the other, how would respect and recognition be generated? Toleration had to offer an alternative strong enough to counter these conflicts. The response was not to deny the role of identity (an impossibility in any case) nor to offer another totalizing identity to take the place of religion, but rather to redraw the self ’s commitments. A conception of being a member of a polity counterbalanced one’s identity as member of a religious group—a version of political identity tied to nonreligious norms and sources of meaning—and persons saw the value of protecting both types of membership. The forces that would compel persons to give credence and the beginnings of commitment to this alternative focus of self and membership are presented by Bodin in three forms. He constructs three avenues along which this transformation might take place: through means of political power (nonviolence), political morality (neutrality), and political culture (nondiscussion). Persons would be more open to seeing the value of protecting multiple memberships when they were able to conceive of truth as being for oneself and when they could conceive of political authority as a guarantor of peace and coexistence. Normative weight had to be transferred to a distinct political sphere and part of its drawing power depended on its construction of order and justice. If, as Bodin believed, violent reim-

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plementation of a lost unity was not possible, wise or just, then one would implicitly have to offer an alternative picture of the political bond and depict selves who could live under such a regime. This constituted a fundamental change in the status of the political power. The analysis of sovereignty in the République is precisely about the nature of an authority that ought to provide grounds—a protected area—in which reconnection could take place. Authority was not just about the status of the central power in and of itself, but, as importantly, about how this central power bound together conflicting groups, with itself and among each other. In the Colloquium, Bodin links toleration and identity formation with the question of what creates the conditions for mutual acceptance, openness, and the interiorization of religious truth. Although Bodin is primarily concerned with the recreation of the public world that is necessary for resolving religious wars, both the Colloquium and the République demonstrate his attention to the human psychological conditions that make a transformed public possible.

Norms for Constructing a New Politics Bodin’s most renowned works—the Six livres de la république,7 and Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis,8—are usually contrasted as completely different approaches to toleration, typically described as the pragmatic politique position versus a principled, idealist defense. They are really two sides of the same coin, and I shall use both of these works to make the connection between Bodin’s toleration9 and his idea of sovereignty as he attempts to establish new grounds for politics. Bodin, as did other Politique party adherents, advocated toleration as a means to achieve peace among the religious combatants within France: From the politique point of view, the integrity of the French nation was at stake. And yet, Bodin’s descriptions of other tolerant regimes are indicative of a much more positive attitude. Here is a key passage from the République that shows his defense to be more than merely expedient: The great emperor of the Turks doth with as great devotion as any prince in the world honor and observe the religion by him received from his ancestors, and yet detesteth he not the strange religions of others; but to the contrary permitteth every man to live according to his conscience, yea and that more is, near unto his palace at Pera, suffereth four diverse religions, viz., that of the Jews, that of the Christians, that of the Grecians, and that of the Mahometans . . . the people of ancient time were persuaded, as were the Turks, all sorts of religions which proceed from a pure mind, to be acceptable unto the gods. (IV, 7, 537–538)

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So in the midst of his pragmatic analysis of sovereign power there are indications of a deeper commitment to toleration.10 Conversely, in his principled defense in the Colloquium,11 Bodin ends on a surprisingly pragmatic note. The Colloquium is a dialogue among seven discussants each representing a different religious point of view: a Catholic, a Calvinist, a Lutheran, a Muslim, a Jew, a skeptic, and a believer in natural religion. The conclusion of their discussions, which range widely over questions of philosophy and theology, is that since not one of them could move any other to change his views they should cease conversations about religion and live together in peace, allowing each to believe and practice as his religion directed him. He writes: Coronaeus bade me to summon the boys to whom he offered the song: “Lo, how good and pleasing it is for brothers to live in unity, arranged not in common diatonics or chromatics, but in enharmonics with a certain, more divine modulation.” All were most sweetly delighted with this song, and they withdrew, having embraced each other in mutual love. Hence forth, they nourished their piety in remarkable harmony and their integrity of life in common pursuits and intimacy. However, afterwards they held no other conversation about religions, although each one defended his own religion with the supreme sanctity of his life. (Kuntz, 1975, 471)

What should strike us in reading the final passage of the Colloquium is its similarity to the passage from the République about the Turkish emperor. Both positively describe a social-political situation in which diverse religious believers live together peacefully. The two discussions converge from different directions: After an extensive consideration of religious and metaphysical questions in the Colloquium, the speakers reach a consensus that is fundamentally political. In the République, consideration of power relations moves Bodin to emphasize the basis of power in ideals and ideas. His main objective in both defenses is the creation of a minimal set of ground rules for communicating across the divides that separate persons. It is a realm of communication that we can call a “public space” in which groups in conflict find some area that is shared. The overlap involves identity in its requirement of an acknowledgment of minimal obligation to one another. In the République, Bodin emphasized the necessary public structure of power—the institutional and juridical conditions that created a sovereign state—and the political psychology that would enable this development of identity. In the Colloquium, he indicated the individual and interpersonal mechanisms that would enable those potentially in conflict to overcome their differences for the purpose of living together. In both cases, Bodin’s

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toleration points to the idea of a community that bound its members together on the basis of a supervening identity, one that was to some extent made authoritative by securing grounds for a plurality of identities. Historically, the creation of this linking identity is partially a result of repeated attempts at getting tolerant policies to stick. Bodin’s work was part of that constructive process. Bodin argued for toleration by connecting it to three norms: nonviolence, neutrality, and nondiscussion. These norms were directed to both the sovereign and the people. For the sovereign, it underscored a different type of power and status. For the people, the act and practice of tolerating one’s opponent could change one self-conception and the understanding of one’s connections to others.

Nonviolence In its first and most simple form, toleration epitomizes nonviolence. It demands that in situations of conflict persons not repress or kill, but this recommendation is most directly addressed to the ruler. He wrote: “A prince favoring one sect or religion, and disliking another, may if he will without force or constraint, or any violence at all, suppress that which he liketh not” (III, 7, 382), and I will not here in so great variety of people so much differing among themselves in religion, take upon me to determine which of them is the best (howbeit that there can be but one such, one truth, and one divine law, by the mouth of God published) but if the prince well assured of the truth of his religion, would draw his subjects thereunto, divided into sects and factions, he must not therein (in my opinion) use force. (IV, 7, 537)

This may look like a nongenerous policy of toleration—the most minimal attempt at “accommodation” being a cessation of killing the other side, but consider how the suggestion might have read in context. It is not all that Bodin uses to defend toleration, just the initial wedge and the necessary condition for the other two norms. Bodin is arguing against Machiavelli’s “economy of violence.”12 He had written in the preface to the République that there were “two sorts of men who, while writing from completely contrary points of view, conspire together for the ruin of Commonweals” (Bodin, 1962, A70). One sort was the Huguenot resistance theorist but the others were the followers of Machiavelli, and the République was in large part written to dispel both their dangerous “ignorance of affairs of state.” One of Bodin’s primary objectives was

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to present an understanding of political power diametrically opposed to that of Machiavelli: Impiety and injustice did not have to be the twin foundations of the republic. Machiavelli, in Bodin’s interpretation, had counseled princes to use self-interested, often back-handed, violent methods to consolidate power. Bodin believed this behavior reprehensible for reasons of justice but also dangerous because it destroyed the fabric of a cohesive state. To Bodin, the sovereign’s goal is not his own aggrandizement but the good of his state: A peaceful and flourishing commonwealth is the objective of a just sovereign. Peace is an end then, a primary aim for the nontyrannical prince, and nonviolence is a means toward this end. Note, nonviolence and peace are not the same thing. On the whole, nonviolence is better than violence for achieving the prince’s goals, because if the subjects know that the sovereign will do anything to maintain power, then they will not trust that sovereign. Bodin’s elaborate analysis of social-psychology and the way in which the sovereign ought to respect the boundaries of action, including a policy of toleration,13 derived from his assumption that a state was not just a collection of persons ruled over by a rigid application of sovereign lawgiving, but that it was a bond of trust between the people and the sovereign. Machiavelli is not only immoral but also imprudent according to Bodin because he sows seeds of distrust and hence disorder at the center of sovereignty. To see why nonviolence is powerful we must first see why violence is dangerous and counterproductive. Given his experiences during the religious wars, Bodin witnessed that mutual killing and hatred inexorably descended into increasing levels of carnage.14 We should think of the effect of violence on identity-formation in this way. Some conditions make it more likely that persons will conflate themselves with one embodiment and therefore risk their lives to defend and kill in its name. Violence radically increases the likelihood of more violence, driven by identification in which an outer and inner identity are collapsed. One experiences and sees oneself only in the outer terms by which others see you. If there is an inner voice objecting to the engulfment of the self into the outer group and conflict, it is simply overwhelmed in this situation. External conditions can lead to this type of all-or-nothing identification making an externalization of the self inexorable and thus the need to defend who one is with one’s life. Warring groups too locked into the demonization of the other side, cannot bootstrap themselves into a peace without an outside power to change the terms of the conflict. In such a potential situation, therefore, violence far from changing the dynamics only serves to lock it in.

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Thus, force is a dangerous tool that should be used only sparingly and when a prince could be as certain as possible of the results. Because Bodin saw that violence often only escalated with more violence, control had to be grounded on something other than brute force. For Bodin, toleration as nonviolence was an act of state that engaged its subjects through their minds rather than through suppressing (slaughtering) their bodies. It appealed to persons as thinking and calculating beings, with capacities for attention and reconstructions of identity and interest. Through policies of toleration, the situation of combat is altered and a context is created in which peace and accommodation might be extended. The nonviolent nature of it rendered it a specific type of power that a crude use of force could not match on its own terms. Strikingly, Bodin gives a more positive, even Lockean reason for rejecting violence: It does not work on men’s minds when it comes to religious faith. [A]lbeit that tyrants had before exercised incredible cruelties upon their subjects, yet never thought they it lawfull for them to rule over men’s minds before the time of Antiochus. . . . Which was the cause that Theodoricus king of the Goths (though favoring the Arrians) would not yet enforce the conscience of his subjects, nor have them tormented for their religion; lest under the pretence of impiety he should have seemed to have taken the spoil of their goods, or bind their minds, which could by no threats or commands be constrained or bound. For so he writing unto the Senate at Rome, useth these words, Religion (saith he) we cannot command, for that no man is compelled against his will to believe. (IV, 7, 539)

Finally, he reasons, forced suppression of a person’s religion may lead to atheism—the worst of all possible outcomes. Atheists, having lost the fear of God, “tread also underfoot both the laws and magistrates, and so inure themselves to all kinds of impieties and villainies, such as is impossible by man’s laws to be redressed” (IV, 7, 539).15 Nonviolence affects identity by creating conditions for interaction and expression among potential enemies. When a sovereign can silence the extremity of war, it creates an impression of its own power. Moreover, toleration served to emphasize the purely political connections between members of a community. For those who sought the peace of the republic above all, a form of “community” overarching confessional allegiances had to be a fundamental value. Toleration guaranteed a certain vision of the state, and given the realities of religious diversity, only through this policy could that view be protected.

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Neutrality The second main feature of Bodin’s toleration is captured in the idea of neutrality. This concept has become the most common description of modern government’s role vis-à-vis various religious groups or conceptions of the good. The ideal is that in a liberal society power must not be wielded in order to uphold one substantive view over another. In contemporary debates, those emphasizing identity criticize the purported neutrality of liberalism, arguing that neutrality is impossible because all procedures, systems, and ideals stand for and institute one way of life and one set of ideals rather than another. Toleration itself forces certain ideas and identities to conform to a pervasive liberal logic, which can never overarch all ideas and identities without constraining them to be something different from what they authentically would be, and which a genuinely free political community would have to recognize. Bodin’s depiction of the sovereign’s role given the conflict of religions set the groundwork for the modern notion of neutrality. In a number of key passages, Bodin advocated a norm of neutrality as toleration on the part of the sovereign. He wrote: “But in ending such controversies, the prince above all things must beware that he show not himself more affected unto the one part than to the other, which hath been the cause of the ruin and overthrow of many princes and estates” (IV, 7, 526). Later he warns, “Howbeit, that sometime it happeneth the sovereign prince to make himself a party, instead of holding the place of a sovereign judge” (IV, 7, 535). Depersonalizing Power In this argument for toleration, Bodin asserts that the sovereign ought not to show preference for one group over another in its relation to religious groups under its authority. By advising the prince to be above any religious faction, Bodin emphasized a sharp difference between the prince as secular sovereign ruler over a people and the prince as leader based upon a religious foundation. It is no longer as the “police-arm of the church” (Figgis’ phrase) that the prince rules. Bodin’s explicit answer to why this must be so is that this would reduce his power and majesty, hence in effect reducing his sovereignty in the minds of the people. Implicit here is Bodin’s attempt to redescribe rulership in a new way. Basically, he sought to move away from a view of power as personalized to power as depersonalized. While toleration potentially helped the sovereign solidify his particular power, it also advanced a distinction between the sovereign as an individual ruler and the state that constituted him a sovereign and through which he held power. There is a difference between conceptualizing toleration as a strate-

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gic move made by a sovereign in his personal interest, and toleration as a means to insure the strength of the state. What does Bodin mean when he demands neutrality and what drives his idea? The prince must act neutrally to demonstrate his commitment to a standard of action that is above faction and presumably above the vicissitudes of change. One of the fundamental problems of the time was that the traditional standards had lost their power to order the world. The prince had to create or plant in people’s minds a new standpoint from which to view political power. Bodin demanded that the sovereign appeal to a language other than the traditional litany of religious beliefs in order to command attention and obligation; Bodin himself sought to create such a language. He is instructing the sovereign to assert a standard of political community and order, not religious unity, as the grounds for asserting its justified rule. But, without religion, politics looks like pure power and the trick becomes how to manage and allocate it in one’s best interest. Thus, Bodin further stipulates that political order cannot consist in the sovereign’s own aggrandizement. Religiously sanctioned politics and pure power politics are both personalized rule and Bodin argued against them for different reasons. As discussed earlier, in the late sixteenth century, religion had lost its status as an indisputable standard of knowledge and could no longer serve as the omnipresent background faith that shaped people’s basic assumptions about the nature of the world and the glue of social unity. Religion came to be both highlighted in its saliency but also contracted in its reach. In such a context, if the prince’s legitimacy as ruler were too closely tied to religious grounds, the ruler subjected himself to a logic of rule that was personal, divisive, and therefore politically untenable. Bodin still maintained the essential role of religion in public life. It would be anachronistic to claim that he thought political power could be completely divorced from a religious base; the sovereign was still seen to be representative of God’s power on earth. Nevertheless, what Bodin does to some extent is to psychologize the power of religion, in a way Tocqueville would do several centuries later. Pure power politics constitutes personalized power in another way. It is personalized crudely in that its end is the ruler’s own aggrandizement and self-interest. But it is also personalized because the relation between ruler and ruled is not filtered through objective norms of justice or legitimacy but based on the sheer act of acceding to the power of the prince, a power fundamentally based on physical force or charisma. When the relation between ruler and ruled is one of pure domination, people have no alterna-

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tive but to accept the outcome, therefore rendering the relation between sovereign and subject to that between master and slave, or lord and vassal. Despite the judgment of posterity that Bodin’s absolute sovereign ruled on the basis of arbitrary and unchallengable personal power, Bodin went to great lengths to contrast a rightful ruler and a tyrant. He defined sovereignty in Chapter 8 of Book I of the République as “the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth,” and a “commonwealth is a just government, with sovereign power, of several households and of that which they have in common” (emphasis added, Franklin, 1992, 1). At least in his own mind, justice was integral to political power. Thus, Bodin’s support for toleration rests on its being more than a magnanimous act of a paternalistic, absolutist sovereign; rather, it implied a new institution that would become the modern state. Bodin’s juridical definition of sovereignty, his emphasis on justice, and his appeal to the people’s response to their sovereign are all evidence of an argument for a depersonalized conception of power. In Blandine Kriegel’s analysis of Bodin and other jurists in The State and the Rule of Law, she observes: “Sovereign power, in their view, was the antithesis of feudal power. In what respect? In the sense that it was neither imperium nor dominium. It was not an imperium, because it was not based on military power, and it was not a dominium, because it did not institute a relation of subjection, in the manner of the relation between a master and a slave” (1995, 21). She goes on to describe the early modern roots of the notion of the rule of law as the foundation for the legitimacy of the modern state: “The principle of public morality is not love, which is proper to familial morality and to faith. It is law. But is law merely subjection of the individual? The ethical life can exist only for a community of human beings—or, as Bodin put it, ‘free subjects’” (1995, 51). Quentin Skinner concludes The Foundations of Modern Political Thought with a similar point: “By the end of the sixteenth century, in a work such as Bodin’s Six Books, we not only find the term ‘State’ being employed in a recognisably modern sense, but also find the rights and powers of the State beginning to be analysed in a distinctively modern style” (Skinner, II, 358). By “modern” Skinner means that Bodin directly understood the difference between allegiance to a ruler and allegiance to an “omnipotent yet impersonal power” (ibid.) grounded in its law-making capacity. Toleration as neutrality was an essential part of Bodin’s attempt to redescribe power in terms of depersonalized rule, an objective he held given his concern to secure a standpoint for the people as a whole to find common ground.

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Persuading the People A vision of sovereignty is only as powerful as its persuasiveness is for those over whom it rules and in whose interests it rules (see Allen, 1967, 52). To make a sovereign, a specific definition of law and a delineation of its scope and function are not enough. The necessity of neutrality grew out of Bodin’s perception that power had to convince the people of its legitimacy in a situation where “the people” were tearing one another apart. Sovereign power could not be an implementation of force by the sovereign for long because the people would not accept it as such. How then to create order out of chaos and to engage obedience and justified obligation to a ruler? Order would come when the people had accepted the ruler and transferred their self-defense to his jurisdiction. What would lead them to do this, an act that tacitly recognized their combatants as fellow citizens? Most directly, Bodin addressed his answer to sovereign rulers and the elite who managed the institutions of power. Here we have a useful reminder of the essential role of leadership in times of crisis and transition. An image he used repeatedly throughout the book was that of the ship of state needing wise and flexible maneuvering. Yet, as I have emphasized, Bodin was acutely aware of the dialectical nature of power and order. For the latter to emerge, the consciousness of the population had to be incorporated. The change in people’s minds must take place in two directions: vis-à-vis the prince and vis-à-vis the other groups in society. When Bodin emphasized neutrality he was focusing on what the state could do to lead to a more ordered and tolerant society. The state must be neutral as a way of changing the dynamics between itself and the groups in conflict and between the combatants themselves. As such it was part of causing a shift in how people viewed political and social relationships. The interesting questions then turn out to be what kind of identification is it that develops between groups vis-à-vis the state; and following this, what kind of ethical obligation comes from an “abstract” identification with the state, which toleration facilitates. Bodin was no democrat, and his theory of absolute sovereignty denies the right of the people to participate in the making of laws for themselves. Nevertheless, throughout his work he acknowledges the capacity of persons to make decisions about their own good, to take stands and to react in the realm of public life. The minds of the people were of paramount concern to him in his analysis of power, as we can see in various discussions— of religion, class, slavery, the idea of “contract” as opposed to law, and most to the point, the fact that justice and the common good are central to

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Bodin’s République. In many passages he stressed the interaction between subject/citizen and leader: “no fortresses are to princes more assured, no castles stronger, than is the love and fidelity of their subjects towards them” (IV, 7, 525; see also IV, 7, 534). This was no isolated observation. “[H]is subjects’ minds should not so be alienated from him” (III, 7, 378) was one of the most persistent pieces of advice in Bodin’s directives to rulers about the nature and maintenance of their supremacy. The question is—How are the minds of people engaged in assent to a sovereign? What could the sovereign do to generate political obligation? For a state to be sovereign, it must not only claim to be stronger than all other subunits or to be the law-making power in the land. It must be seen to be and accepted as having these two statuses. Neutrality helps to bring this conceptual change about in two senses: First, it creates a new point of view from which people can conceive of themselves and their interests; and second, it offers a pact to the people, a proto-social contract. The structure of this relationship was not codified into an explicit contract as it would be with Hobbes, nevertheless the psychic foundations for it were present in Bodin’s analysis. In terms of the first potential change, the status of being above the fray, of maintaining a disinterested stance, provided the sovereign with a moral vantage point and a basis for being credible not tied to religion. By staking out a position above the various groups, the sovereign was able to take on the role of the mediator or adjudicator, and thereby exhibit rules of interaction that persons might respond to even if they did not share the same religious beliefs. This move asserted a new standard of action. Its logic worked even if one were in the majority faction and wished the sovereign to act on its interests: If he were to do so, it would demonstrate that should the winds change, the rules of whose interests prevailed would change too. Therefore, although it might not seem to be in the interests of the majority that the sovereign act neutrally, if those comprising the majority could see themselves as potential members of a minority, they might wish the sovereign to act on an abstract, neutral basis rather than the confessional, religious one. The proto-social contract that neutrality sets up can be read as follows. At the beginning of the experiment, the state is just seeking to direct attention onto itself and away from the hatred people have for one another. The sovereign offers the following pact: You give me your trust to protect each of you from the other. Then, by not demanding control over religious beliefs, the sovereign demonstrates a commitment to all simultaneously. It is an offer on his part that can only succeed if the antagonists believe that the sovereign is capable of protecting them from each other and that he will do so.

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The empirical veracity of this belief is made more likely the more the people actually accept the belief, and they accept it the more he proves it to be true: The sovereign will be more powerful if you put your trust in him. In return, the sovereign asks that religious issues not be openly disputed, and that religious groups not demand that their beliefs about salvation and truth be publicly ratified by the whole political community. It may seem impossible that even a minimal level of trust could ever have been reached (see Dees, 1998). On such a reading, the state’s neutrality would appear only to benefit the minority and it is hard to imagine why either side would have been persuaded by it, the minority being protected by a Catholic sovereign who could at any moment rescind its toleration, and a majority violently objecting to the leniency shown the despised minority. How could this be grounds for trust by either side? Yet, tentative trials at tolerant accommodations were tried out. In France, edicts of toleration were promulgated on at least seven occasions during the latter half of the sixteenth century. The ultimate issue was whether the people would accept the state as neutral. Could they be persuaded to imagine the sovereign as a neutral power and thereby give up demands for religious unity or, alternatively, to trust it to protect them as a minority? The traditional view had been that the sovereign must maintain a unity of religion in the land under his control, in part because, it was assumed, people could not be expected to live among other subjects who held and practiced totally different things in the most important realm of life—religion. On what basis would they be able to think of themselves as connected? In fact the conditions that might ground a common identity or identities already existed in their shared historical roots in a unified Christendom, as well as in a territorial unit called the French realm. By being neutral the state is demanding a shift in thinking about the terms of this commonality: They are all subjects of the same sovereign, and therefore all potentially political compatriots. What could make this identity work? Again, this is in part what pragmatically drives Bodin toward a view of sovereignty in functional law-making terms: Subjection to a personalized power, to a prince as father, would not tie together a mass of conflicting parties. But allegiance to a country represented by royal monarchy and a set of institutions that maintained historical continuity with one’s past identity might provide a grounding for a newly configured collective identity. The linking of toleration and the state would seem to cut out the normative roots of toleration. If we believe Locke to be the first principled defender, then it appears that toleration based on individual rights is a bulwark against state power that inherently seeks to control the actions of

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groups and persons within its realm. If we interpret toleration in the early modern period to have been part of the state’s attempt to solidify its power, then it appears that this toleration could only be a provisional policy implemented for the state’s aggrandizement. It would therefore be rescindable and unstable, a policy premised upon the interests of the sovereign and not on a normative commitment that served to constrain the sovereign. It is not then toleration as a value at all that Bodin could have been recommending. But what does it mean for a thing to acquire the status of a value? A value can be interpreted as an ethical imperative that holds this structure: I ought to do X because (a) I believe in Z, and X is part of what makes Z possible. We assume that for something to acquire a stable imperativeness or normativity among many people it has to be attached to another already accepted value. Along the lines of possibility (a), when toleration (X) is tied to a principle that we hold for its own sake, we describe it as a value: We believe in individual rights or diversity (Z) and toleration is an integral part of securing these. Bodin did not have the benefit of linking a policy of toleration to a preexisting background value like individual rights or public diversity. The space that we call “privacy” and its protection, which Locke would in part defend in his Letter Concerning Toleration, was not available to Bodin in the same political sense. The struggles through which he lived were part of what forged it; Montaigne on his estate was giving it literary and conceptual form. Yet, the creation of value can derive from another source of imperativeness. An alternative normative imperative works as follows: I ought to do X because (b) I am a person with certain characteristics and part of being who I am involves doing X.16 Bodin grasped that toleration had to be more than provisional: His means of securing this were to tie it to a sense of self that was in part stabilized through its attachment to a legitimate public sphere. This public sphere itself was made compelling by its ability and purpose to protect both an inward and outward identity, to which I now turn.

Nondiscussion The third major feature of Bodin’s depiction of toleration is nondiscussion. Both the République and the Colloquium place a strong emphasis on a policy of nondiscussion as central to the possibility of toleration. Bodin clearly sets out a directive not to discuss religion. Two dangerous consequences followed from religious debates—one was the destruction of religion, the

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other factionalism. As he portrayed it, the sovereign as well as groups and individuals must not engage in religious debates, especially within the public realm: “But religion by common consent once received and settled, is not again to be called into question and dispute, that so all the ways and entrances unto sedition and faction may be stopped, and the assurances of unity and peace strengthened” (IV, 7, 535). Debate undermined the positive function of religion, which was to provide a firm grounding for moral life and obligation. Bodin believed, as did nearly everyone else at the time, that faith in God was necessary or total anarchy would result. He writes: Nothing is so firm and stable, nothing so manifest and clear . . . which may not by disputation and force of arguments be obscured or made doubtful; and especially where that which is called into question, or dispute, resteth not so much upon demonstration or reason, as upon the assurance of faith and belief only: which they which seek by demonstrations and publishing of books to perform, they are not only mad with reason, but weaken also the foundations and grounds of all sorts of religions (République, IV, 7, 535).

This assertion in the République was underlined as well in the Colloquium.17 A policy of toleration as nondiscussion prevents the asking of questions that are ultimately self-defeating for the cause of religion. The problem of factionalism is more directly relevant for the relation between toleration and identity. Religion naturally generated factions; therefore, repression of speech was one means to prevent this. The importance of this stipulation in the République comes out clearly when we consider what Bodin says about it in the Colloquium. In Book IV of the Colloquium, Bodin draws a lengthy and subtle picture of the consequences of discussing religion. Coronaeus, the Catholic whose home serves as the setting for the book’s dialogue remarks: “Before we stray too far in our discussion about religions, we must consider the question that was presented yesterday; namely, is it proper for a good man to discuss religions?” (163). Toralba responds to this question by noting that Plato believed it was dangerous “to speak rashly about the holiest matters” and Salomon the Jew concurs in this. He states that not only is it an offense against God to speak about Him in such terms, but it also leads to bad consequences. When one attempts to “uproot anyone’s opinion of piety, of whatever sort it may be,” chances are you will not succeed in bringing that person over to your opinion. This would lead to the worst of all possible outcomes: The person who remains committed to his views feels compelled to respond

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to your challenge to his sacred beliefs. He personalizes your challenge and sees it as an implicit affront that he has no alternative but to counter. Salomon tells the story of Florus, governor of Judea, whom the high priest attempted to convert. “When the high priest of our race tried in friendship to draw Florus to the worship of one eternal God and turn him from the worship of empty idols, he was unsuccessful, and he caused deadly hostilities with a powerful enemy. As a result, our race began to be afflicted with so many and so great wars that we lost our freedom and ancestral homes and became slaves to the Romans.” (164–165) Fridericus the Lutheran suggests that perhaps the problem of religious discussion resulting in violence pertains to the masses or common people; such debate among educated men in private would not lead to negative results. He goads Salomon to discuss the tenets of the Jewish religion but Salomon remains silent. Could this group of educated men, united in a common enterprise to explore the “secrets of the sublime” in a nonconfrontational setting plunge into debating the details of each other’s beliefs without its leading to personal affront? Toralba interprets Salomon’s silence: “It is quite reasonable that Salomon shies away from discussion about religions both for the reasons he gave, lest he seem to abandon the religion of his ancestors if he does not defend it, or to cause offense to anyone if he defends it too strongly” (165). The linkage between religious beliefs and the defense of one’s identity is clearly made here. But Coronaeus, in much more encouraging, warm tones prods Salomon: “In such a harmonious gathering of wills and spirits as we have here, who can give or receive offense in this discussion? . . . nothing will be more gratifying to me than for each among us to enjoy the greatest freedom in speaking about religion” (165–166). Salomon points to the bind Fridericus and Coronaeus have put him in: Either he looks ungrateful in the face of their openness and kindness or he looks as if he were averse to change when confronted with challenges to his beliefs. Salomon’s holding out finally leads to Senamus the skeptic’s observation that the Senate at Siena had permitted academies as long as they did not discuss divine matters and the pope’s decrees. Octavius the Muslim chimes in that the Persians, Turks, kings of the Moscovites, and princes of Germany at Augsburg had also all warned against discussion of religion. Curtius the Calvinist then adds that Mohammed himself saw that “the foundations of his religion would easily be disturbed by discussion, if it were attacked by arguments as though by machines of war” (167). This leads to a passage that we find almost verbatim in the Colloquium and in the République. In the Colloquium it reads as follows:

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Senamus: I remember a certain crafty chief of Lyons who wished the bickering Lutherans would tear themselves to pieces. Consequently, he used to pit one group against the other as though gladiators, so they could kill each other by their own sword. Similarly, the ancient priests of Mars after execrations used to give the signal for battle by tossing flaming fire-brands between each battle line. Yet those same priests, who were called ‘fire-bearers,’ suddenly withdrew because of the dangers of war. Thus many fires of war were stirred up from those discussions for the enjoyment of the spectacle (168).18

The function of the fire-bearers was to stir up the battle that was set to begin. Bodin transposed this priestly function to the wars of religion and compared it to that of the inflammatory men who purposely begin discussions they know will lead to violence, doing so in order to profit from the anarchy. In this context, discussion is essentially seen as a provocation to conflict and war. The main thrust of the dialogues and of his remarks in the République is that debates on religious issues almost automatically escalate into a challenge to the other person’s “self ” or identity because there is no separation between commitment to a belief and a conception of who one is. Thus, to raise these divisive issues constitutes a challenge to the other person(s) as a member of a group holding those beliefs. Each may have begun by “talking” but felt forced to end by taking sides. Members of the groups would then be compelled to defend those beliefs by risking their lives, the ultimate display of commitment. If one were to accept the opponent’s arguments, one would in effect change the core of one’s identity; one would accept a new definition of who one was by accepting the new religious ideas. Bodin’s solution to steer away from dangerous discussion may not look much like a policy of toleration. If we see the marketplace of ideas and freedom of speech as being essential to it, a policy of nondiscussion appears to institutionalize repression—the very opposite of toleration.19 Yet, as Holmes (1988a) has argued, “freedom of speech” is everywhere limited by various “gag rules”—either self-imposed or imposed by others. No social communication, whether it be at the level of individual private interaction or at the level of the political system, could function without limitations on what can be said.20 Still we would not necessarily claim that gag-rules constitute toleration. In what way would nondiscussion do so? We can draw a number of conclusions about toleration and nondiscussion from the Colloquium. First, that the endorsement of human diversity in sixteenth-century France required nondiscussion rather than a complete openness to discussion. Second, that some sort of additional or alternative commitment to one another was necessary to link persons in a community.

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The men in Bodin’s dialogue continued to live together on the basis of brotherhood and mutual love, but such sentiments were precisely what were lacking in the wars of religion to which Bodin was responding. If toleration required a form of community, what kind was possible given early modern conflicts? The logic underlying Bodin’s depiction of toleration and nondiscussion is this: Conflicts over religious beliefs inevitably ratchet up into conflicts of identity. If one silences the discussion, the escalation process has a more difficult time gathering momentum. In conditions of nondiscussion, alternative connections between persons can be “heard” or seen and therefore perhaps built upon without being overwhelmed by the more fundamentally divisive issues. Another type of identity connected to the national community can be set out that overlays the inherently conflictual ones. It also requires that what is not fulfilled by outward unity turn inward and this causes a world of reference and layers to grow within a person. How is a common identity created? The development of a stable political bond between parties requires that some common ground be found or constructed to link them. Bodin is in a manner saying that to be a “Frenchman” under current circumstances, not in an historical sense but in a literal sense, one had to be tolerant because the realm of France inextinguishably included within it both Catholics and Huguenots. But this is a normative claim as much as it is a descriptive one and it is an assertion that Bodin had to make cogent. To make such a claim persuasive—that a person’s own good was wrapped up with the good of others whom they believed themselves to despise—seems nearly impossible. How to begin? The norm of nondiscussion stood as an initial version of toleration because by being silent and noncoercive about specific issues it consciously allowed the differences between combatants to persist. This was not a toleration that insisted on positively embracing what was different from oneself, but it was a circumscribed openness. If we situate this policy in the sixteenth-century context, it is apparent that to forbid the discussion of ideas concerning God and religion was in effect to allow the differences that did exist between Catholics and Huguenots to remain as they were, without the expectation of aggressive conversion or repression. It did not ask the impossible and thereby refrained from pushing the parties to the brink. But non-discussion did more than open up a provisional cold space as the most minimal association. Its basic social mechanism was to put space between you and your opponent. Where there had previously been a presumption toward consensus and unity on ultimate values and beliefs, there now had to be distance and separation. This distancing, as I have discussed, potentially opens up a sphere of communication in which persons can in-

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teract without worrying about defending themselves on a range of issues. This led to two possibilities for constructing new conceptions of the self. By setting up an agreement to respect the distance between you and other persons or groups, the distancing served as a necessary condition for the recognition of already existing bonds. Enforced silences about certain topics pushes other topics to the foreground; thus, through the prosaic fact of having to get along day to day without pitched battles over ultimate questions, people can see lines that do connect them and that are otherwise drowned out or unrecognizable. Furthermore, distancing through nondiscussion builds up a common membership on less emotional grounds. It makes room for the establishment of an incipient national awareness that would overlap or counter the zero-sum identities into which persons feel themselves locked during times of war. Bodin’s description of this commonality in the Colloquium was that all were joined in a common humanity, a people of “piety, uprightness, and mutual love.” In the République, all persons no matter to what beliefs they ascribed were members of the same French state, an enterprise that it was part of his purpose to describe in terms worthy of commitment and obligation (via neutrality). Nondiscussion forbids certain kinds of interaction—the give-and-take of hammering out differences via language, concepts, ideas, and logic. It sets up barriers that cannot be crossed because everyone knows that these forbidden areas, even when walked across through the medium of words, are filled with minefields. To grasp the positive value of nondiscussion, we have to see what was created by setting up barriers. A new way of seeing oneself on the outside and correspondingly from the inside was one possible outcome.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have traced some of the earliest changes that would set the stage for toleration eventually to become a more stable social norm. At one level, toleration was a means of representing a neutral state, a source of normative political (nonreligious) authority. But for it to become more than that people would have to have a capacity to bracket fundamental questions. This could only come about through an alternative experience of and then reconception of identity. Being able to see oneself as constituted by an inner and outer self, with multiple sources of attachment and obligation, enabled a person not to feel destroyed or desperately unmoored and hence needing to reassert through violence a unitary identity. Respect for the person as having layers in a private and public self must be politi-

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cally and socially guaranteed. Who we are as persons individually is (in part) dependent upon the political institutions and norms that secure and protect a vision of the self. Therefore, I have argued, early attempts at toleration (via sovereign nonviolence and neutrality and nondiscussion among combatants) helped to establish the necessary groundwork for a more robust, longer-term toleration that would be based on and underscore a new image of the person. Bodin’s work demonstrates the concrete means required for the implementation of toleration, the institutional, conceptual, and ideological processes that helped to bring it about. Because toleration involves risk and allowance of others who seem on the face different from ourselves, persons must find it compelling at some level to take that risk. To be able to conceive oneself as a distinctly political person, when politics stands for norms of law and justice that diverse groups find workable, is part of what makes toleration possible.

CHAPTER

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Montaigne and the Body: Self-Reflection in Time To give The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book —Auden, “Montaigne,” Collected Poems

In the previous chapter I examined how Bodin worked to re-establish order and a stable basis for power through a distinctly political construction of authority, in part as a way to reorient public identity during the wars of religion. Bodin’s focus on public institutions (power and law) and on their normative underpinnings was a necessary starting point for the establishment of toleration. The security of the state helped to reconfigure identities. But as it stands this approach does not fully confront the problem of identity, which requires a deeper grappling with selfhood. Writing in the same context of extreme and violent conflict, Montaigne sought a solution in a very different form, one that recognized and confronted issues of the self missing in Bodin. To get across the threshold of pure antagonism, Montaigne did not directly question the nature of political bonds but carved out a new perspective on the self when he performed a profound act of cultural invention by putting himself on display. This was an act not only of diversion but of basic revaluation of what ought to matter, what ought to motivate how one lived life. With Montaigne, the question of identity is at the center of his Essays. His radically innovative portrayal of the self was a cultural breakthrough and his perspective set the ground for what would become major keys of modern thinking: the critique of knowledge, self-analysis, and openness to 65

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a diverse world of experience.1 We cannot understand changes in the relation of identity and toleration in the early modern period without a reading of his work. Specifically, I focus on an issue that has not been sufficiently explored in Montaigne studies or in the foundations of toleration—Montaigne’s revaluation of the body. In this chapter, I begin by presenting the limitations of three prevalent interpretations of his toleration. Then I explore Montaigne’s emphasis on the body as most important for his grounding of toleration.

Three Views of Montaigne’s Toleration Although Montaigne is widely recognized as one of the most important early modern sources for justifications of the idea of toleration, there is little agreement about what stands as its most fundamental basis. I briefly present three interpretations of his position. Seeing the insufficiencies of these views sets the stage for what I consider essential to his position on toleration.

Skepticism The most pervasive image of Montaigne is as the skeptic.2 “Que sais-je?” (II, 12, 591) What do I know? He had the question inscribed in his study. Much of the Essays and particularly the longest chapter “The Apology for Raymond Sebond” (II, 12)3 is a critique of human knowledge. Montaigne attacked all foundations of moral and empirical truth: Neither sense perception nor human reasoning was capable of securing truth. The diversity of ideas and their instability through time undermined efforts to answer the question of what one knew in an absolute way. If Nature includes among her normal activities—along with everything else—the beliefs, judgements and opinions of men; and if such things have their cycles, seasons, births and deaths, every bit as much as cabbages do, the heavens changing them and influencing them at will: what permanent, magisterial authority should we go on attributing to them? (II, 12, 648) What kind of Good can it be, which was honoured yesterday but not today and which becomes a crime when you cross a river! What kind of truth can be limited by a range of mountains, becoming a lie for the world on the other side! (II, 12, 653)

Many commentators have focused on skepticism as the source of Montaigne’s toleration, and modern enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire,

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Rousseau, and others are seen to have brought to fruition the seeds of his ideas of freedom. That Montaigne’s support for toleration rests in some measure upon his skepticism is clear. But again, the connection between the two, as I stressed in the previous chapter, is indirect. Although Montaigne recognized that we could not find an absolute and universal truth— that truth was unstable and relative—he did not conclude that all ideas ought to be given free reign—a Millian market-place-of-ideas toleration. This seemingly natural link between toleration and skepticism has rightly come under criticism (Tuck, 1988). One may believe that nothing is certain and therefore that public order requires protecting a single version of some public truth for the good of the society. Indeed, Montaigne sometimes seems to draw this conclusion explicitly: [I]t is his soul that a wise man should withdraw from the crowd, maintaining its power and freedom freely to make judgements, whilst externally accepting all received forms and fashions. The government of a community has no right to our thoughts, but everything else such as our actions, efforts, wealth and life itself should be lent to it for its service or even given up when the community’s opinions so require. . . . For the Rule of rules, the general Law of laws, is that each should observe those of the place wherein he lives. (I, 23, 133)

Montaigne’s skepticism does not automatically commit him to supporting a public condition of openness as an end in itself. Moreover, and more tellingly, Montaigne’s vigorous rejection of persecution throughout his Essays is only partly based on his skepticism (certainly, the counterfactual claim that if one found secure grounds of truth, one would in fact be justified in burning people, was ruled out completely by Montaigne’s approach). Shklar, in an important essay, emphasizes the rejection of cruelty as the cornerstone of his moral perspective. She connects his skepticism to his belief that cruelty is the summum malum, both in that skepticism can be a source of his rejection of cruelty and that perhaps it can also alleviate the negative consequences of this moral view. In putting cruelty first, one rejects “higher” or externally authorized standards of judgment. It is actual suffering that condemns what causes it, without recourse to some other measure. This attitude must in some way be tied to skepticism, but it may be that an abhorrence of cruelty comes first and is so overwhelming that one comes to doubt the meaning of redemption. Montaigne’s “skepticism grew until it embraced every convention of the public order and all the accepted usages of private life” (Shklar, 1984, 31). Of course it may also be that Montaigne’s willingness to put all certainties in doubt led him to mistrust the traditional justification of what looked to the

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naked eye as constant infliction of pain, from which any sentient being recoiled. In any case, skepticism taken as a negative stance does not explain his toleration, though it may have led to, or supported the more positive values underlying his hatred of cruelty. Putting cruelty first in moral terms, as Nietzsche and Robespierre might be interpreted to have done, leaves fertile ground for intense manifestations of intolerance—of a justification of physical coercion in the name of the victims of moral cruelty. Montaigne did not go this route because of this respect for the physicality of life, as Shklar notes on a number of occasions. It is this more positive orientation that I take as most fundamental. We cannot understand Montaigne’s contribution to a broad liberal ethos without a study of the nature of his emphasis on the body.

Pragmatism A second main approach is to see Montaigne’s toleration narrowly as a pragmatic accession to necessity. The proliferation of Protestant sects simply required that they be allowed to exist; violence had not worked to prevent their spread, had indeed done the very opposite (see Smith, 1991). Therefore, one must make a virtue out of necessity. In the chapter “On Freedom of Conscience” (II, 19), Montaigne describes the use by the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate of freedom of religion for the purpose of increasing dissention among Christian sects, which would be to his advantage as a pagan. In the French wars of religion such a policy might lead to the opposite result—that is, less conflict rather than more: “You could say that to slacken the reins and allow the parties to hold on to their opinions is to soften and weaken them by ease and laxity; it blunts the goad, whereas rareness, novelty and difficulty sharpen it. Yet for the honour and piety of our kings I prefer to believe that, since they could not do what they wished, they pretended to wish to do what they could” (II, 19, 763). Thus, the monarchy in groping for peace and national unity had been forced to a policy of toleration by circumstances. Should we agree with Tuck’s statement that for Montaigne, “the question of toleration is a pragmatic one, to be resolved in accordance with the particular social circumstances and the general principle of the priority of civil peace” (Tuck, 1988, 27)? This question goes to the heart of why we would continue to read Montaigne as a source of toleration if this were all he had to offer—a pragmatic point of view. On the historical issue of what ought the French government’s policy toward Reformers be, Montaigne supported the moderate politique approach rather than a radical Catholic

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League position.4 But Montaigne’s importance for the development of toleration cannot be founded on this pragmatism. Both Montaigne’s acceptance of the Protestants, as well as his resistance to the Reformers’ religion are based upon a broader view of the relation between mind and body that I explore shortly. I simply want to assert here that Montaigne’s pragmatism by itself cannot be the reason he inspired a more positive attitude toward toleration (and why we read him as foundational to liberalism), though it was crucial for securing the public space in terms of which the value as a practical reality forced persons to reorient themselves.

Privacy and Self-Interest The third major approach to Montaigne’s toleration is to derive it from his view of the “self,” a focus that many consider his most important contribution to the history of political thought.5 The radicalness of Montaigne’s approach to the self is striking when we consider it in the context of his time: the extent to which he explores his “soul,” his recording of the infinite movements of body and mind, and his exposition of intimate details to public view. The Delphic injunctive “Know thyself ” was given a concreteness and a self-orientation that was entirely new. “I give my soul this face or that, depending upon which side I lay it down on. I speak about myself in diverse ways: that is because I look at myself in diverse ways. Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute” (II, 1, 377). And later he elaborates: “All men gaze ahead at what is confronting them: I turn my gaze inwards, planting it there and keeping it there. Everybody looks before himself: I look inside myself; I am concerned with no one but me; without ceasing I reflect on myself, I watch myself, savour myself. . . . I turn round and round in myself ” (II, 17, 747). What about Montaigne’s conception of the self would ground toleration in general terms? Is it that one is no longer concerned about public issues and therefore political quietism precludes actions that are inherently coercive of others? Or is it that one’s predominant desire for private satisfaction leads one to care about securing public conditions only insofar as these serve the purpose of self-interest? In the first instance, toleration is a byproduct of a private reorientation; in the second case, toleration is seen as the necessary condition for the pursuit of self-interest. I will note only two problems with the emphasis upon individual privacy as the foundation of toleration. First, Montaigne’s understanding of the relation between the individual and the public, social world was much more complex than this explanation of toleration assumes. Second, toleration cannot be secured

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only on a basis of individual self-interest but requires a public culture that propagates or at least allows for a certain type of openness. To put it another way: A typical explanation of toleration in general and of Montaigne in particular is that the growth of the value of individual freedom of thought led to toleration. It is not usually noticed that that value itself— that way of being a person, of experiencing subjectivity—is fundamentally dependent on a type of social culture in which the body comes to play a prominent normative role. By elevating the individual self and privacy to paramount values, Montaigne is often seen to have denied the importance of the public or collective life,6 and that regardless of his own commitment to public duty, he rendered social-political life secondary. This judgment mistakes the nature of Montaigne’s emphasis on the self and therefore how his work supports toleration. In the long run, toleration requires attention not just to the individual but to the social/political relations between persons and how these create conditions for being an individual.

The Salience of the Body These three interpretations of Montaigne’s toleration do not go to the heart of his position nor recognize what is most strikingly new about it. The problem of intolerance pervaded his political and ideological world, and shadows his Essays. Skepticism, peace, and privacy are certainly fundamental as responses to this problem, and yet they do not explain the deep toleration embedded in his perception. Both as a mode of openness and non-judgment and as a rejection of coercion, Montaigne exemplified what we would call toleration. Here is a passage in which he describes his own non-judgment:7 I do not suffer from that common failing of judging another man by me: I can easily believe that others have qualities quite distinct from my own. . . . I can conceive and believe that there are thousands of different ways of living and, contrary to most men, I more readily acknowledge our differences than our similarities. . . . (I, 37, 257, see also III, 8, 1046)

Later he writes: But the most beautiful of souls are those universal ones which are open and ready for anything, untaught perhaps but not unteachable. (II, 17, 741)

This deeper toleration was not argued for directly in a language of superior political and moral principle, but it was supported directly through

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the alternative moral psychology that Montaigne’s Essays lay out. In one version, Montaigne’s Essays can be read as an exercise in constructing and practicing a new moral psychology.8 He withdrew to the solitude of his tower in Bordeaux but his mind did not withdraw from the world. The decades-long exercise in essaying himself—testing his limits—was undertaken in a context of religious, political, and cultural upheaval and violence. Writing the Essays embodied an original mode of grappling with this world, filtering it through the many other worlds that populated his mind. It was not so much a philosophical project as a comprehensive effort to come to terms with the forces—political, psychological, physical, literary, cultural, ideological—that shaped his life. Montaigne believed that his own personal odyssey could be a metaphor for others: “Every man bears the whole Form of the human condition. Authors communicate themselves to the public by some peculiar mark foreign to themselves: I—the first ever to do so—by my universal being, not as a grammarian, poet or jurisconsult but as Michel de Montaigne” (III, 2, 908). If we interpret what Montaigne is doing as constructing a new moral psychology, we can better understand how toleration is central to the book. Montaigne shows the reader a possible way to live in the world: what sorts of things one ought to pay attention to and cultivate, alternative modes of feeling, thinking about, and responding to stimuli. The survey of life, history, and ideas that he goes through is always interwoven with his engaged response. In what follows, I will lay out how Montaigne’s moral psychology supports toleration. We can find its source in his basic reorientation of value away from timeless, abstract truths to immediate, concrete experience.9 The body in its complex relation to the mind and to social existence stands as a limiting point in the endless variability of morality and ideas that Montaigne delights in contemplating. This centrality of the body is clear throughout the Essays, a very visceral book. He argues the value of corporeality directly and indirectly via the images and topics that he takes up (animals, death, food, illness, nature, sex, suicide, war). “We are always dealing with Man, whose nature is wondrously corporeal” (III, 8, 1054). Or earlier, “We are not bringing up a soul; we are not bringing up a body: we are bringing up a man. We must not split him in two. We must not bring up one without the other” (I, 26, 185). Speaking about the body in the very last chapter of the book he writes: “There is no part unworthy of our concern in this gift which God has given to us; we must account for it down to each hair. It is not a merely formal commission to Man to guide himself according to Man’s fashioning: it is expressly stated, inborn, most fundamental, and the Creator gave it to us seriously and strictly” (III, 13, 1266).10

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Montaigne’s turn toward the body as a moral orientation did not lead to privatism or hedonism. Rather, it gave him a vantage point to condemn in harsh terms the intolerance generally accepted at the time in three highly public issues: witchcraft persecutions, the use of torture for political purposes, and Spanish colonization of the Americas. During the flare-up of witchcraft persecutions in the sixteenth century, which such thinkers as Bodin supported, Montaigne scathingly criticized those who believed in and killed so-called witches. In one of his concluding chapters “On the lame,” Montaigne writes: “To kill people, there must be sharp and brilliant clarity; this life of ours is too real, too fundamental, to be used to guarantee these supernatural and imagined events” (III, 11, 1167). And he continues, “After all, it is to put a very high value on your surmises to roast a man alive for them” (1169). In “On conscience” and more elaborately “On cruelty” (II, 11), he considers torture and the cruelty that feeds on itself in the civil wars, and denies that we ought to resign ourselves to this bloodshed. Finally, in one of the most moving passages in the Essays, Montaigne denounces the chauvinistic horrors of the Spanish Conquistadors’ treatment of the Indians in the new world. In III, 6 “On coaches,” he retells the stunning indignities to which the Spanish subjected the King of Peru, combining torture and baptism simultaneously followed by hanging, all witnessed by the king’s people; similar atrocities were committed against the King of Mexico. On these issues, Montaigne has no problem judging those who would coerce others. He cuts through the layers of justification and obfuscation of these acts and denounces them as brutal inflictions of bodily suffering, which ought not to be justified in any language or ideology. The body here is not a retreat from the public but a means of engaging and judging it. Montaigne’s position asserts the sheer value of life as it exists for any particular human being. In questioning the Stoic’s concern with death, Montaigne writes: “Life must be its own objective, its own purpose. Its right concern is to rule itself, govern itself, put up with itself ” (III, 12, 1191). What exists without doubt is physical life, and the moral logic is that one ought to create and nurture rather than destroy and tear apart. To claim that Montaigne upholds life above all including goals like salvation or truth does not directly show us how this position leads to toleration. “Life” is endlessly variable. For humans who live with minds and in societies, not simply as animals with instincts of the body, being alive is always filtered through ideal and particular forms: We believe many different things about the world and we feed ourselves, sleep, procreate, and function through culture. Natural human lives and societies are customized and diversified. How would the moral psychology Montaigne develops in his book

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enable persons who are attached to different forms of living to accept those unlike themselves? For purposes of a psychology of toleration, I begin by looking at two dimensions that affect its possibility—the individual/social relation and the mind/body relation. I explore how Montaigne thought we ought to understand the pulls within each of these relations and orient ourselves toward them in such a way as to minimize violent conflict and coercion. First, in regard to the individual/social relation, the individual is, on the one hand, embodied through society/culture, and this makes the particularity deriving from the culture a source of irreducible meaning that must be respected. On the other, the possibility of individual freedom rests in protecting particularities not only of societies but within persons. Thus, particularity is itself a value: Montaigne was a skeptic about any particular value, but he was not a skeptic about the value of particularity. Second, in the mind/body dimension, Montaigne asserts that the fact that we live in a physical body is as important as the fact that we have a mind. The body pushes the person toward valuing life in the present-time, toward immediacy, a perspective that can underscore an attitude of toleration.

Individual/Society: The Spectrum of Particularity A root distinction in Western thought is the individual-society dichotomy. Liberalism is defined in part as the protection of the individual against group or social demands. Along these lines, Montaigne is often seen as a founder of ideals of individual liberty. One commentator notes: “Seldom, if ever, has a writer defended intellectual and moral freedom more strenuously than Montaigne. . . . His love of freedom gave Montaigne a deep understanding of people who came into serious conflict with authority for no other reason than that they, too, were attached to personal freedom” (Smith, 121, 122). The following famous quotation would seem to exemplify Montaigne’s support for individual freedom: “We should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum” (I, 39, 270, 272). I will argue that this sharp contrast between the individual and social is misleading for Montaigne’s depiction of the person. Montaigne did not reject the social in favor of the individual, but held that the social world and the individual assertion of self against it represented different ways of living that ought to be accepted for their distinctive compulsions. Put simplistically, we might say that in the face of the dichotomy, the social represents the body, the weightedness, limits, and embeddedness of one’s ori-

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entation to the world. The predisposition one ought to cultivate toward it is respect. In contrast, the individual represents the unbounded, creative, limitless possibilities of the self. The predisposition that one ought to cultivate toward this is freedom. The person that Montaigne describes in such many-sided terms—the creature of individuality—is as much a socially embedded and constrained person as he/she is a holder of individual liberty. A profound theme of the Essays is the constant magnetic force of society, custom, law, and others in every capacity to hold a person and to make that person who she or he is. Montaigne’s understanding of the person as simultaneously bonding to and retracting from society indicates that we ought not to define his toleration as supporting only one half of this complex relation. For Montaigne we simply cannot be frozen in one or the other of these incarnations. Because we can never escape society, we ought not to try to base a moral psychology on overcoming it. The room at the back of the shop—an arriere boutique all one’s own—is precisely a protected space apart but one that necessarily remains attached to a larger orientation. It cannot be back of anything if there is no social space to give meaning to the noninterference and protectiveness that one finds there. Society: Infusing Particular Bodies For Montaigne we have to understand human nature by beginning with the social: Humans are always born into a social world that gives them shape and identity as persons, individually and collectively. “There is nothing more unsociable than Man, and nothing more sociable: unsociable by his vice, sociable by his nature” (I, 39, 267). Montaigne held that the obligations society places on persons should not be dismissed as morally secondary to the dictates of the self. Here is an eloquent defense: To my taste, those men who steal away from common obligations and from that infinity of thorny, many-sided conventions which a punctiliously decent man treats as binding when living in society spare themselves a great deal, no matter what singular penance they inflict upon themselves. That is to die a little so as to flee the pain of a life well lived. They may win some other prize, but never, it seems to me, the prize for difficulty; for where hardship is concerned there is nothing worse than standing upright amid the floods of this pressing world, loyally answering and fulfilling all the duties of one’s charge (II, 33, 831–832).11

These observations are not made simply to assert that one ought to fulfill one’s social duties. Ultimately, Montaigne does not provide an easy answer

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about how to assign priority in cases where social obligations and the dictates of the self collide. But these observations are also helpful in how they indicate a way to approach life: The thick of social involvement demands more of an individual than the difficulties of solitude. His explicit moral injunctives indicate that Montaigne did not counsel withdrawal for the person. More interesting than Montaigne’s traditional demands in this regard are his trenchant observations about how society forms a person and the moral conclusions we can draw from this. We are by one nature constructed to give ourselves a second social nature: “Whatever the cost, human society remains cobbled and held together. No matter what position you place them in, men will jostle into heaps and arrange themselves in piles, just as odd objects thrust any-oldhow into a sack find their own way of fitting together better than art could ever arrange them” (III, 9, 1083). Society is functional at one level—ordering a group of persons—but it takes on, at the individual level, a subjective compulsion. Montaigne’s description of the existential fact of social embeddedness is sometimes presented in negative terms: But the principal activity of custom is so to seize us and to grip us in her claws that it is hardly in our power to struggle free and to come back into ourselves. . . . Since we suck them in with our mothers’ milk and since the face of the world is presented thus to our infant gaze, it seems to us that we were really born with the property of continuing to act that way. And as for those ideas which we find to be held in common and in high esteem about us, the seeds of which were planted in our souls by our forefathers, they appear to belong to our genus, to be natural. (I, 23, 130)

Custom or habit is “a violent and treacherous schoolmistress” and he elaborates this physically coercive image: “She establishes in us, little by little, stealthily, the foothold of her authority; but having by this mild and humble beginning settled and planted it with the help of time, she soon uncovers to us a furious and tyrannical face against which we no longer have the liberty of even raising our eyes. We can see her at every turn forcing the rules of nature” (I, 23, 77). Finally, he concludes: “Nature brought us forth free and unbound: we imprison ourselves in particular confines” (III, 9, 1101). The language of constriction that Montaigne uses to describe society’s hold would seem to imply that we should do all we can to escape. Yet, given that that is impossible, how ought we interpret what he is saying? Society constructs persons physically through the habits, tastes, and customs it imprints upon the body. Like the constraints of physical nature, those erected by society are absorbed by persons so deeply that it is exceed-

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ingly difficult to extract oneself from their grip. Particular habits infuse lives with substance, distinctiveness, and coherence. Their magnetism is described on one occasion as follows: Consider the diversity between the way of life of my farm-labourers and my own. Scythia and the Indies have nothing more foreign to my force or my form. And this I know: I took some boys off begging into my service: soon afterwards they left me, my cuisine and their livery merely to return to their old life. I came across one of them gathering snails from the roadside for his dinner: neither prayer nor menace could drag him away from the sweet savour he found in poverty. Beggars have their distinctions and their pleasures as do rich men, and, so it is said, their own political offices and orders. Such are the effects of Habituation. (III, 13, 1229)

One implication of viewing society as a naturalized force that thereby creates meaning for persons is that we ought to give it a prima facie respect. His extensive historical and anthropological interests led Montaigne to dwell on the variability of human customs and rules. He pointedly notes that as political theorists “we have to take men already fashioned and bound to particular customs: we are not begetting them anew like Pyrrha and Cadmus. We may have the right to use any means to arrange them and to set them up afresh, but we can hardly ever wrench them out of their acquired bent without destroying everything” (III, 9, 1083).12 If we see custom and society as investing our bodies with ingrained predispositions and particularized types of pleasure and pain, then rejection or denial of another culture is a type of physical harm. Consequently, the importance of preserving various cultures is based not on a “conservative” attitude toward change but rather on his perception that social practices embody persons. The goodness of particular cultures and worlds comes not from being old per se but from constituting the tissue out of which humans have lived life, providing an organic order to a mass of human desires, expectations, and demands. Much of his conservative rhetoric in the chapter “On habit: and on never easily changing a traditional law,” derives from the observation that the destruction of laws and customs is akin to physical harm and fullscale change works only by violence. On this interpretation, Montaigne does not encourage adherence to tradition and laws because of the radical indeterminacy of knowledge of good and bad (the skeptical argument), but rather because he believes that there will be less suffering in the world if we do so. A recognition that custom is a “second nature” ought to make anyone reticent to attack another community: Each involves more than a set of expungible practices and dispositions.

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But as always with Montaigne, the matter doesn’t rest here. Innovation and criticism are not automatically questionable for him. First, the interlocked entity that we conceive of as a stable society is always in a constant state of change: “There is no existence that is constant, either of our being or of that of objects. And we, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion” (II, 12, 455). Furthermore, the whole society at times comes unraveled and Montaigne believed that France was suffering through such an “extraordinary accident.” In that case, innovation is inevitable: “When you resist the growth of an innovation that has come to introduce itself by violence, it is a dangerous obligation and a handicap to keep yourself in check and within the rules, . . . against those who are free as air, to whom everything is permissible” (I, 23 89). Significantly, Montaigne ends his chapter on custom with the same words that end his chapter on freedom of conscience: “It would be better to make the laws will what they can do, since they cannot do what they will” (I, 23, 89).13 We are not condemned to a total uncertainty about deciding between what is simply different and what is wrong/evil and must therefore not be tolerated. We don’t respect cultures because they are old but because they provide viable and life-affirming possibilities for their inhabitants as embodied persons. This argument works well from the perspective of the persons who see themselves as bonded to the particular society that needs or wants protection, but it would appear to fail to provide toleration between conflicting societies, or for individuals within societies who do not subsume themselves within the confines of the group. Here we must emphasize that Montaigne is in fact not pushing moral reasoning toward the level of the group, but rather toward the perspective of that which gives meaning and substance to particular lives. His emphasis on the way society does this thereby justifies society’s pull. When persons see each other as deriving a coherent life from social distinctions then those who confront one another across social divides must take this into account. Doing so does not presume a recognition of a commonality of a universal nature, except perhaps the inevitable human desire for particularistic meaning. Thus, although Montaigne demands a prima facie openness to and respect for others, he does not approach this from the point of view of an abstract sameness but from a desire to communicate and engage with others as they exist in a here and now located in concrete worlds. Along these lines, what Montaigne is stressing in his cosmopolitanness is a desire to experience the world and

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communicate with those in it. If we wish to do so, then a recognition that all persons are indelibly particular would force us to accept that as a starting point of interaction. Most importantly, not all social embeddedness is justified because it is not justified by the sheer fact of being collective or old. If it is the body that justifies the power of the collective, then it is also the body that judges the substance and meaning given by a collective. As I noted earlier, practices of torture, witchcraft persecutions, and the destruction of the native cultures by Spanish conquests were all condemned in the harshest terms by reference to the body. Individual: Creating Particular Minds As one anchor of toleration, then, Montaigne depicted the person as shaped by the particularity of the collective world of which he or she was a part. To repress social particularity is to cause harm nearly equivalent to bodily harm. But from the point of view of the individual living in society, the pressure from the collective may be experienced subjectively as a wholly negative force. Thus, although the view of society as a naturalized source of meaning and substance gives a justification for tolerating social/customary differences, it does not necessarily recognize a demand for individual freedom, of beliefs, ideas, or practices against the society or others in it. One point of Montaigne’s writing the Essays was precisely to push himself beyond the confines of a settled world of convention and appearance. Society may clamp down on our bodies through instilling habits and traditions, but we can hope for a realm of freedom in the mind’s capacity to transcend social strictures, standards, and beliefs: [L]et us disentangle ourselves from those violent traps which pledge us to other things and which distance us from ourselves. We must unknot those bonds and, from this day forth, love this or that but marry nothing but ourselves. That is to say, let the rest be ours, but not so glued and joined to us that it cannot be pulled off without tearing away a piece of ourselves, skin and all. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to live to yourself. (I, 39, 271–272)

In passages such as this, we can see how Montaigne finds freedom in release from social embeddedness. But his freedom, the form of release from society is of a particular kind. It is not on the one hand, the liberal impulse to experiment with various forms of living, nor on the other hand is it a Stoic version of freedom, a life of ataraxia or imperturbability of the passions, the life of inner tranquility and outer obedience. Freedom for the individ-

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ual is primarily found in a building up of the internal self as distinct from society’s picture of what that self should be, such that true self-reflection can proceed. How was that inner voice or eye woven together from the kaleidoscope of pieces that make up the experiences of a person? The search for form is itself part of the exercise of freedom. The mind can lead the person out into wide open pastures or dense forests: “Just as fallow lands, when rich and fertile, are seen to abound in hundreds and thousands of different kinds of useless weeds . . . so too with our minds. If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject which can serve as a bridle to reign them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts” (I, 8, 30). And in concluding this same short chapter, he describes his own motivation for dwelling on his mind: [I]t bolted off like a runaway horse, taking far more trouble over itself than it ever did over anyone else; it give birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another, without order or fitness, that, so as to contemplate at my ease their oddness and their strangeness, I began to keep a record of them, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself. (I, 8, 31)

What gives order to this wildness are settled patterns that one can find and that one adopts as right for oneself. A person must give him or herself internal standards, which both absorb and question the outside world and create a depth to self-reflection. Toleration is related to this type of freedom in two ways. First, it protects the possibility of such a freedom by enabling sources of particularity. Second, when one thinks of and experiences oneself in these terms one will be more open to toleration; in other words, a moral psychology of this nature is inherently more open to others. Montaigne’s exploration of the mind approaches it from both within and beyond the boundaries set by the particularity of society. He presents the possibilities of a psychology in which the individual’s experience of itself is necessarily embedded in social norms but also attempts to break free of these and to give itself its own individual standards.14 Note this remark: “My one desire is that each of us should each be judged apart and that conclusions about me should not be drawn from routine exempla” (I, 37, S257). This is a desire for others’ judgment of him, not for a life lived in solitary hedonism. His fundamental ethical claim here is that the value and appreciation that the individual has of itself must not collapse into the standards imposed upon it by the outer society.15 How would we protect

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the capacity of the individual’s mind from sinking into an unreflective acceptance of beliefs and dogma around it? For Montaigne we are creatures who live in a spectrum of particularities: within the singular person, between individuals, between societies/ customs. Within a person, different selves predominate at different times and two (or more) aspects of the self may be balanced or compete at the same time. There is no permanent resolution of the self. We change constantly and are confronted with particular angles or persona that are surprising: “If my soul could only find a footing I would not be assaying myself but resolving myself. But my soul is ever in its apprenticeship and being tested” (III, 2, 908). And later in the same vein he notes: “in the natures of men, there are hidden parts which cannot be divined, silent characteristics which are never revealed and which are sometimes unknown even to the one who has them but which are awakened and brought out by subsequent events” (III, 2, 917). The theme of the self ’s inconstancy and of its layers and diversity is one of the most central in the book, and there are many memorable passages that could be brought to bear. It might be summed up in this: “there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people” (II, 1, 380). How ought we to pay attention to this inward diversity? Does reflection on it lead only to a series of selves or a pastiche of various fragments? For this inner diversity to provide one landing-place in a psychology of toleration, a person—as an agent—would have to appreciate, not fear or avoid, the depths of the self. That is, for a person who acts in a world external to the self, this experience of the self ’s internal particularisms must be a source of positive orientation and not a source of confusion, incoherence, and frustration, which might then lead the person to an assertion of a singular dominant and often intolerant public identity. Part of Montaigne’s objective is to demonstrate by his own action of self-reflection the intrinsic value of exploring the myriad selves within a person. He brings the reader along on the voyage, as if leading an exploration of a foreign land. Self-knowledge is made less threatening and more familiar. If one motivation for intolerance is the desire to demonstrate unity and simplicity of identity by publicly asserting superiority, then the impulse toward this is undercut if unity and simplicity of identity are consciously recognized as impossibilities, and their opposite is seen as a source of meaning and enrichment. It is true that many people do not want to explore the darker regions of the self. Montaigne’s method is to bring these regions into the light of day and make them less terrifying.16

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We need to pass to the next level—relations between individuals—to see how out of multiplicity the self is made more whole. Here Montaigne highlights the particularities between individuals, which he sets forth in three modes. First, he dwells on the distinctiveness of persons by describing their unique appearance, habits, and traits, ranging from examples such as the peasant thief Pincher in Armagnac (who became rich in his old age and gave back to the heirs of those from whom he had stolen) to the looks, peculiarities, and excellences of Socrates or Alexander. He often contrasts himself to others by giving intimate details of his own features, experiences, desires, etc. throughout the book. Second, Montaigne presents an idea of a person’s “master-form”: “Provided that he listen to himself there is no one who does not discover in himself a form entirely his own, a master-form which struggles against his education as well as against the storm of emotions which would gainsay it” (III, 2, 914). What this master form might be—given the flux of the individual personality referred to in the preceding—is a key question of the Essays and one I shall not try to answer here. As a fixed, final endpoint, it remains permanently elusive. Yet, the search for individual integrity is essential to human freedom and is an objective that Montaigne believes ought to guide how we live. Third, the individual’s distinctiveness or wholeness vis-à-vis others comes out in the various roles and social forms that he or she is called upon to occupy. “Mundus universus exercet histrionem. [Everybody in the entire world is acting a part.] We should play our role properly, but as the role of a character which we have adopted. We must not turn masks and semblances into essential realities, nor adopted qualities into attributes of our self ” (III, 10, 1144). Previously, he had asserted: “We are nothing but etiquette. We are carried away by it and neglect the substance; we cling to branches and let go of trunk and body” (II, 17, 718). Montaigne’s chapter attacking glory also contains extensive analysis of the sources of false distinctiveness for the individual, thereby setting up an alternative authentic individuality. How useful is a notion of an authentic individuality? What is the substance, the “trunk and body” of a distinct person? If Montaigne begins with the transitoriness of our souls, where does the solidification of identity come from? On the one hand, the relations between persons can make us lose ourselves in the external presentation of self. This he sees as a loss; yet on the other, the relations between persons also give us the contrast by which to constitute ourselves. In the interplay with others, one comes to recognize the substance of what makes each person a different whole—an

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individual. We all have distinctive physical, mental, and aesthetic constitutions, which taken as a bundle make a person unique. But while an individual gathers his or her uniqueness from being situated in a context of other persons, these other persons do not give the individual his moral worth. That intrinsic worth comes from the sheer fact of existing as life. The idea of the intrinsic worth of each person’s life, however unheroic and pedestrian, is a major theme of the book. Near the end, he writes: “What great fools we are! ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I haven’t done a thing today.’—“Why! Have you not lived? That is not only the most basic of your employments, it is the most glorious.’ . . . If you have been able to examine and manage your own life you have achieved the greatest task of all. Nature, to display and show her powers, needs no great destiny: she reveals herself equally at any level of life, both behind curtains or without them” (III, 13, 1258). Earlier in the chapter on glory he observes “How many beautiful individual deeds are buried in the throng of a battle?” (II, 16, 707). The actions of our lives must be undertaken not with a hope for some external (social or historical) reward and recognition but because they are well done for their own sakes. The measure by which we ought to judge ourselves must be carried about within us. His emphasis upon a notion of intrinsic worth is essential to Montaigne’s understanding of individuality. Because a cliché about liberal toleration is that it is based on the protection of the individual from the intolerant tendencies of social constraints, I have set out an alternative depiction of the relation between these two that nevertheless demonstrates the centrality of toleration. One may be tempted to describe the two models as either protecting the group or protecting the individual—the tradeoff can’t be erased. But that would be wrong: When one perceives social forms as justified through their connection to the body, then it is also the body that puts limits on the allowable social practices. The latter are not justified sui generis. On the other hand, the freedom of the individual that Montaigne supports is not at the expense of society or against it, but essentially depends on society for its realization. Montaigne’s toleration therefore would protect particularity across the board: between societies and within individuals’ depth of self. I have made some conjectures about how a moral psychology of selfreflection in these terms could enable a general openness to particularity. But confrontation with particularity is inherently charged. It is, after all, collective particularities—of ideas, race, religion, traditions, etcetera— that have caused the horrors of human intolerance. In the next section, I

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look at another root distinction in Western thought—that between the mind and body. Montaigne’s focus on the body in this juxtaposition helps us to find another way in which the threat of particularity can be modified, and toleration made a less provisional part of a cultural world.

Mind/Body: The Value of Immediacy In the traditional evaluation of the mind/body relationship, the mind (or soul) is ranked ahead of the body. The mind is the part of the human that is above, beyond, and something distinctly other than the body, which links us directly to the animal realm. Montaigne accepts that humans are distinguished from animals insofar as they reflect on themselves and use verbal language and thought to construct worlds out of the involuntary basis of the body. “[O]f all the animals, Man alone has freedom to think and such unruly ways of doing so that he can imagine things which are and things which are not, imagine his wishes, or the false and the true!” (II, 12, 514). The values of the mind in part lie in the fact that it can conceive of the world and of acting as other than what has existed in the past; it can extract itself from time, create possibilities for a better or different life. It does not only go beyond in abstracting from what is, but can also go deeper and accentuate what does exist at a particular time. And finally, it can create the illusion of holding existence constant by creating memories. These capacities make the mind an extraordinary and distinctive tool for the human moving about in the world. In the traditional ranking of the mind and body, religious and philosophical thinkers denied the intrinsic value of the body, and considered motivations deriving from it as, for the most part, a negative weight on the soul. Montaigne completely rejects this tradition of philosophy and of the ascetic movements within the Church. In this section, I want to emphasize how Montaigne’s treatment of the body does not counsel simply that we balance out the values of mind and that of body, but that attention to the body involves recognition of the element of time and its passage, a recognition that Montaigne uses as a source of toleration. Montaigne observes: “I who am always down-to-earth in my handling of anything loathe that inhuman wisdom which seeks to render us disdainful and hostile towards the care of our bodies” and later “I hate being told to have our minds above the clouds while our bodies are at the dinner-table. . . . Aristippus championed only the body, as though we had no soul: Zeno embraced only the soul, as though we had no body. Both were flawed” (III, 13, 1256, 1257–1258).17 The denigration of the body mattered to Montaigne not as a

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question of style or aesthetic preference. Montaigne believed the mind, when disconnected from the body, had a predisposition to intolerant actions. Dangers are inherent in our mental capacities to abstract from the concreteness of the here and now. In completing his description about what distinguishes humans from animals that I began in the preceding, Montaigne observed: “But he has to pay a high price for this advantage— and he has little cause to boast about it, since it is the chief source of the woes which beset him: sin, sickness, irresolution, confusion and despair” (II, 12, 514). The negative aspects of the unfettered mind are noted repeatedly. “Our minds are dangerous tools, rash and prone to go astray: it is hard to reconcile them with order and moderation” (II, 12, 629) and “What an outrageous sword the mind is, even for its owner, unless he knows how to arm himself ordinately and with discretion” (II, 12, 630). “We are never ‘at home’” he said, “we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be—even when we ourselves shall be no more” (I, 3, 11). The mind ignores values of order, moderation, and discretion, and propels itself outward and into a chimerical future, toward a world that will likely never exist. This compulsion to go beyond might be harmless if it were in search of abstract knowledge about nature, or in the use of the imagination for creative, artistic purposes, but people use ungrounded ideas as blueprints to act. What does exist and the persons who actually occupy space in the world are taken to be justifiably dominated, coerced, and overridden in the service of making abstract ideas a reality. The mind motivates actions to impose on others and to create the world after its own inventions—to reshape it to fit an abstract image of what ought to be. These images themselves do not come from rational contemplation but are fed by impulses from disparate directions, often motivated by desires to dominate others for one’s own aggrandizement. This is the crucial point: For Montaigne, if the mind works without a firm cognizance of the immediacy and concreteness of the body in time, it will fly off in potentially harmful and coercive directions, led as it is to make its constructions a reality. This detrimental quality of the mind was a prominent feature of the civil wars in the context in which Montaigne wrote. He criticized those who were led most astray by abstract ideas and pure beliefs—the philosophers and religious fanatics on both sides of the confessional wars. Philosophy ought to be denounced because it failed to provide answers about how to live in the world.18 And religious reformers ought to be denied because they sought to remake society from the top down to conform to their be-

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liefs; possessed by religious fervor they believed that the body must be harnessed to the realization of those beliefs. Both mistook the source of value in the world. In one of Montaigne’s most groundbreaking chapters “On Some Lines of Virgil” (III, 5), where he defends the naturalness and goodness of human sexuality, he depicts this correspondence between philosophers and religious fanatics, specifically in the coercive self-repression that lead them to a righteousness in the repression of others: What a monstrosity of an animal, who strikes terror in himself, whose pleasures are a burden to him and who thinks himself a curse. . . . We show our ingenuity only by ill-treating ourselves: that is the real game hunted by the power of our mind—an instrument dangerous in its unruliness. . . . Alas, wretched Man. . . . You are not afraid to infringe her [Nature’s] universal and undoubted laws yet preen yourself on your own sectarian and imaginary ones: the more particular, uncertain and controverted they are, the more you devote your efforts to them. The arbitrary laws of your own invention—your own parochial laws (les regles de ta parroisse)—engross you and bind you: you are not even touched by the laws of God and this world. (III, 5, 994–995)

Notice the use Montaigne makes of the idea of natural law here, contrasting the mind’s laws to the laws of nature. Humans mistake these two: They consider their particular laws to be universal and ignore the real substance of natural law. We might interpret him as saying that humans delude themselves by their own gift/curse of law-making—this gift/curse derives from the mind, and it makes the mistake of elevating the content produced by the mind as sacrosanct, absolute, or true in a timeless realm. But the substance of natural law is not what the mind has produced— ideals of morality that differ among peoples—rather what the mind must acknowledge as having produced it—the constraints of living in a body in a larger realm of nature, subject to necessity and time/decay. Thus, if the law of nature is not the law of reason, as the Scholastics had presented it, what is it? “If there truly is a Law of Nature—that is to say, an instinct which can be seen to be universally and permanently stamped on the beasts and on ourselves (which is not beyond dispute)—I would say that, in my opinion, following hard on the concern for self-preservation and the avoidance of whatever is harmful, there would come second the love which the begetter feels for the begotten” (II, 8, 434). The issue of natural law in Montaigne is too large and complicated to broach here, but his reference to it in the preceding context indicates a basic objective of his work. He refers to nature’s “universal and undoubted laws” as a way to recall the embodied, physical nature of “nature” in natural law, which in

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the works of the Scholastic tradition had come to carry strong rationalist connotations. Thus, a mind unfettered by the body is potentially dangerous and coercive. It makes the body secondary, a mere instrument to be used for some greater glory (religious, communal, or otherwise).19 Montaigne fundamentally indicts the logic of this system of value—“Are we then not beasts to call the labour which makes us bestial?” (III, 5, 993)— a logic that had served as a major source of cruelty, violence, and domination. Given the potential of the mind to construct and justify situations of intolerance, how in contrast does a recognition of the body modify these impulses? One possibility is that an emphasis on the experience of pleasure gives us a perspective by which to come to understand other persons. The Essays consistently emphasize the rightfulness of the pleasures that the ordinary person (as opposed to the hero, sage, or ascetic saint) experiences. In reflecting on one’s own body’s sensations, one might be led to recognize in other persons the fact of similar (if not exact) experiences of pleasure and pain. This recognition produces a level of familiarity, more of a natural sympathetic response, in contrast to antagonism that frequently results when encountering others through abstract, alien ideas.20 And importantly, an orientation toward the body and its pleasures would preclude justification of large-scale social intolerance in the name of a higher goal. Nevertheless, an awareness of one’s body does not necessarily lead to empathy or preclude coerciveness. It might bring about a more refined use of others as instruments for one’s own pleasure. Despite some depictions of Montaigne as a hedonist, the moral importance of the body did not derive from its being a producer of good physical sensations. A focus on the body in order to maximize its pleasure will not provide the moral perspective that Montaigne is seeking. He was acutely aware that a person might derive pleasure from harm done to someone else, and thereby his emphasis on sentience raised the issue of the formation of our experiences of pleasure and pain. “Pain and pleasure, love and hatred, are the first things a child is aware of ” (III, 13, 1262) he notes, and he explores the ways in which persons develop and are educated to gain pleasure and pain from diverse sources—they are not brute, uncultivated experiences. Persons could be constructed such that they gained pleasure from causing pain rather than from empathizing with another. This indeed is one of the salient features of France at the time, as Montaigne describes:

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I live in a season when unbelievable examples of this vice of cruelty flourish because of the licence of our civil wars. . . . If I had not seen it I could hardly have made myself believe that you could find souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the sheer fun of it; would hack at another man’s limbs and lop them off and would cudgel their brains to invent unusual tortures and new forms of murder, not from hatred or for gain but for the one sole purpose of enjoying the pleasant spectacle of the pitiful gestures and twitchings of a man dying in agony, while hearing his screams and groans. (II, 11, 484)

Pleasure by itself therefore cannot be the measure of value. Pleasure must be life-affirming rather than life-denying, and his directive in the chapter “On educating children” stresses the necessity of gentleness rather than harshness in the education of a person: “Get rid of violence and force; as I see it, nothing so fundamentally stultifies and bastardizes a well-born nature” (I, 26, 185). Thus, Montaigne rejects two opposing sources of value: transcendent ideals and brute pleasure. If the body must be engaged equally with the mind, it is not simply the body as a processor of pleasure. Montaigne’s emphasis on embodiment carves out a specific conception of human experience that engages the body and mind in mutually supportive roles, and he acknowledges the distinctive impulses of each. “Let the mind awaken and quicken the heaviness of the body: let the body arrest the lightness of the mind and fix it fast” (III, 13, 1266). The mind is the locus of agency, the active center to which Montaigne’s appeals are addressed. We must be able “to put into effect the counsel that each man should know himself ” (III, 13, 1219), and we can only put this counsel into effect by the volition of the mind. A value of freedom of mind is essential to his worldview, yet, although the mind is the source of freedom and agency, it can, as we noted, be led astray in this capacity perhaps more easily than it moves toward self-realization. The body weights the mind and keeps it from flying off into diseased acts.21 There is another path, however, through which attention to the body leads one to toleration. When the mind is wedded to the body, the person becomes highly aware of the body’s existence and movement through time. Montaigne emphasized the importance of living each moment cognizant of the irreplaceable value of any particular person’s experience in time and the body’s embeddedness in it. “Some have lived long and lived little. See to it while you are still here” (I, 20, 106). And again: “For, in the end, life is our being and our all” (II, 3, 397). “Go on then, just to see: get that fellow over there to tell you one of these days what notions and musings he stuffs into

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his head, for the sake of which he diverts his thoughts from a good meal and regrets the time spent eating it. You will find that no dish on your table tastes as insipid as that beautiful pabulum of his soul” (III, 13, 1267). And in a key passage about the importance of time: Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. . . . Other folk enjoy all pleasures as they enjoy the pleasure of sleep: with no awareness of them. . . . I deliberate with my self upon any pleasure. . . . Do I find myself in a state of calm? Is there some pleasure which thrills me? I do not allow it to be purloined by my senses: I associate my Soul with it, not so that she will bind herself to it but take joy in it; not losing herself but finding herself in it; her role is to observe herself as mirrored in that happy state, to weight that happiness, gauge it and increase it. (III, 13, 1263)

Through stressing the connection of the mind, body, and time, Montaigne offers a view of the moral importance of a specific type of experience. When the mind focuses on the body, not only does it passively experience the emotions and sensations that occupy the body, it also experiences those emotions and sensations as moving through itself and thereby leaving a sensation of the passage of time. What it may want to hold onto it cannot do so for long, as the person moves through space and time as well as thoughts and emotions. This passage of time can be a painful and regretted state, and the mind creates memories to retrieve and restore the desired lost time. We seek to keep what we value the same, and a reminder of the passage of all into nothing would seem to foster nihilism more than a valuation of that very present time that will not last. But while the body makes us conscious of the passage of time, in this realization there may also be a recognition of the absolute value of each moment that one is living. Each moment is irreplaceable and brings the person closer to death. Knowing that all will pass into oblivion, if one seeks value at all, one must accept and live as fully as one can in the immediacy of one’s life: I who boast that I so sedulously and so individually welcome the pleasures of this life find virtually nothing but wind in them when I examine them in detail. But then we too are nothing but wind. And the wind (more wise than we are) delights in its rustling and blowing, and is content with its own role without yearning for qualities which are nothing to do with it such as immovability or density. (III, 13, 1256–1257)22

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Living in the immediacy of life does not mean instant gratification or mindless sensualism. An approach to living this way induces an attitude toward others that is not instrumental or coercive. How would this psychology work? Remember that for Montaigne all humans (healthy ones at least) are basically constructed to want life and to avoid death.23 When one lives in the present, one’s way of interacting with the surrounding world is not to take a static picture and apply it to reshape an “outside” world. To do so would be to assume a value separate from the present. Rather, it is to engage with the persons, places, and events in the midst of which one finds oneself without enforcing a set script or static picture. If one is truly open to the immediacy of experience, one is struck much more by diversity of forms of life than by sameness: “no quality is so universal as diversity and variety” (III, 13, 1207). The self that is cognizant of the concreteness of everything around inoculates itself against the fear of what is different. The point of living in immediacy is precisely to be open to contact with the world around you, a contact that generates unforeseen thoughts, emotions, and sensations. We can see here how valuing immediacy is a path to toleration. The practice of living in the present precludes the value of forcing others to “believe like me” or to “be like me” because such a rigid picture dissolves into a meaningless replica of value in the face of the openendedness of experience itself. There is a porousness between the self and others that prevents defining oneself and persons one encounters in unchanging categories. The deep toleration that Montaigne supported then is grounded in a certain way in which the mind moves about the world—attuned to the body in the here and now. On the one hand the mind is a machine, a calculator, and a trap: It classifies, systematizes, ranks, compares, and makes judgments. On the other hand, the mind is an explorer, adventurer, and artist: “It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consist in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty” (III, 13, 1211). Without the body, the mind is diminished, dry, and inherently prone to intolerance. Thus, it is the experience of the mind as rooted in the body and the body as illuminated by the mind that provides a foundation for toleration. A reorientation of thought away from values internal to thought itself, and toward the experiences of the body (its necessities, beauties, peculiarities, sensations) can begin to undercut the motivations toward “diseased” and intolerant actions. The mind firmly cognizant of the body will not shoot off into a bodiless future, and if the

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mind’s rule-making is filtered through the body, it will not reduce the body to a mere instrument to be used for some other—religious or communal—glory.

Conclusion Does Montaigne’s moral and cultural innovation leave us with a weak means of countering intolerance? Shklar remarks on “his sense of the futility of public action” (1984, 43). One would have to have a restricted view of the meaning of public action, I believe, to conclude this. At one level, he dwelled upon the forces out of human control—social, political, and psychological. Yet at another, to write and publish his peculiar self-examination was a distinctly public act, though engaged at a cultural level rather than an institutional or directly political one. Montaigne did not articulate a direct defense of an individual moral or a specifical political principle of toleration per se. Nor, like his contemporary Bodin, did he focus on juridical, institutional measures to counteract and harness divisive attachments. However, one intuition of Montaigne’s work was an awareness that strictly formal measures are never enough to counteract particularity—another center of gravity—an ethos—has to be constructed. The whole thrust of his work was to create an attitude toward oneself, others, and the nature of existence that would make toleration the condition of living in the midst of diversity and multiplicity. In the middle of violent conflict, Montaigne’s book does not set out the political bridge to cross the threshold to peace. His language is not one of command, nor does it seem directed purposefully to persuade but rather to create reflection. Recognizing our embodied nature involves an attitude toward mind and body: Embodiment emphasizes virtues of attentiveness to the body, to nature, and to the particularity of ways of living and of each human life. Exposing and dwelling on identity in this way presents the practice of selfreflection in the most public forum and therefore creates the possibility that others may take up the habit of reflecting on themselves. Thus, in both content and form, he contributed to the capacities that build up identities of toleration.

CHAPTER

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Locke and Society: Boundaries of Recognition Our fundamental experience is duality: mind and body, freedom and necessity, evil and good, and certainly world and God. —Czeslaw Milosz

We now move to another intellectual and political context, the latter half of the seventeenth century in England and the work of John Locke. Locke’s famous defense of toleration was developed in what I have called a context of “negotiation.” Before turning to Locke’s work, I want briefly to justify the rubric under which I have placed it. I describe this period in England as one of negotiation in order to highlight the different sorts of problems of conflict that required attention. Conflict, debate, and dislocation are intense, yet they take place within a community of some representable sort that is engaged in the process of negotiation. Struggles to establish toleration emerged in extreme, threshold conditions of social anarchy and war, as the case of France represented, but were pursued in these relatively stable societies over the long run. The description of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury years in England as relatively stable may seem to need explanation. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was not a change that threatened collapse into political-social anarchy. J. R. Jones’ describes the situation: The speed and bloodlessness of the Revolution in England, the near unanimity of the formerly hostile Whig and Tory parties in support of the main parts of the Settlement, are all the more remarkable when set . . . against the background of chronic political crisis, instability and lack of mutual trust which characterized the period after the Restoration. (1972, 3)

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On a spectrum of crisis and trust, the period was not as smooth as some but it does represent—in comparison with the nadir of civil war—a type of conflict and interchange that we can legitimately call negotiation. No period in which basic questions are raised about political and social obligation will be devoid of disruption and turmoil. In situations of negotiation, a minimal order is already established, so the demands for toleration will be of a more complex sort. It is not merely one’s existence as a human being or subject/citizen under law that is at stake, but expectations about a more subtle and complex construction of the self. In some sense, this is a natural social process: Once survival of a community becomes apparent, members of that community, through the persistence of interaction and consequent growth of interconnections, will generate more and more observations and reactions among themselves. We might think of this as a growth of psychic energy out of interaction, and it demands renegotiation of the terms of relation. Locke and Defoe worked out reconceptions of basic terms of identity within such a context. Domestically our own contemporary context in the United States and among Western democratic nations might be seen as a condition of negotiation of this sort. Negotiation does not call for any specific outcome—the protection of the integrity of a particular group, for instance—but a willingness to consider the terms of interaction and to acknowledge the natural processes of change that all societies, liberal and otherwise, must undergo. In this interpretation of Locke, I focus on his attempt to manage the confrontations plaguing his society through a construction of boundaries, not so much between groups, but more significantly (and generalizably) between spheres of life and authority, and by implication within the person. This reading of Locke does not claim that this is the only or the most accurate way to explain his reasoning about toleration. As I show, he had a very complex approach to the issue. Rather, it highlights what is most unique about the language he developed for this purpose and that we still consider central to negotiating toleration. Locke was engaged in the most contentious issues of politics of his time and understood intimately the potential for social crisis and violence. His classic defense of toleration is constructed with this in mind. Locke addressed the issue of toleration repeatedly during the course of his life. His earliest writings and his last were extended discussions of it: In what have come to be known as the Two Tracts on Government (1660), he first confronted the question in responding to Edward Bagshaw’s The Great Ques-

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tion Concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship (1660), and he died in the course of composing his Fourth Letter on Toleration in response to Jonas Proast in 1704. His most important exposition of the subject, the famous Epistola de Tolerantia, was written in 1685 while he was in exile in Holland, published in 1689 in Latin in Gouda, as well as in London that year as A Letter Concerning Toleration, where it had been translated into English by William Popple. The work can be seen first of all as an impassioned reaction to a conjunction of events, including the revocation of the Edict of Nantes1 and the continued persecution of Huguenots in France, the failure of Monmouth’s Rebellion in England,2 and the attempt on the part of supporters of James II to repeal the Test Act.3 Strikingly, Locke moves from a defense of political absolutism and a rejection of toleration in the early 1660s to an unequivocal support of toleration in the 1680s. Clearly, his basic thinking underwent genuine growth and transformation. On the other hand, it was not simply pushed around by context—there were persistent questions and predilections in his approach. The framework of this chapter takes this change in views as a starting point for understanding what he attempted to solve. In addressing that question we come to see how Locke’s defense of toleration depended upon his depiction of the nature and power of a social identity. This defense was basically shaped by his awareness of human psychology and motivation, in part, his fear of the human capacity to go beyond rational or established bounds of behavior. Locke’s position on toleration is not usually seen as having derived from a psychological perspective of any depth.4 Indeed, a typical reading of his work is as a seminal encapsulation of the Whig/liberal view of persons as driven by understanding and reason.5 In contrast to this one-sided emphasis, I want to argue that buried in his proto–Enlightenment doctrine is a less naive psychology. Locke was clearly aware that persons were not always creatures of reason, especially when it came to questions of religion. Locke’s views on toleration developed as he came to terms with a major problem for early modern thought: What is the status of individual moral authority and how can the dangers it poses to a political collectivity be handled? The debate on toleration raised this set of issues in its most acute form. Locke understood that for toleration to acquire more permanent grounds, this core problem would have to be resolved in some mode or other, and the answer had to be generalizable to all persons, not restricted to any one set of believers. The logic of his response emerged as follows: Toleration must be promoted because it allowed the free exercise of a person’s moral identity, but at the same time, in order for the anarchic tenden-

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cies within individualism not to undermine the conditions for it, toleration must be premised upon a set of boundaries, primarily that between public and private, which would act as constraints. Toleration then was a freedom for the individual and a recognition of rights to moral expression, but it was also essentially dependent upon a socialization of that individual. The constraining or privatization of moral life made a public openness possible. This establishment of boundaries between a political and private realm had ramifications not just “outside” between people, but within the person’s psychological life as well insofar as the internalization of those boundaries gave the person a dual or multiple perspective on the self. This reconfiguration of the self is part and parcel of making the ideal of toleration a viable one in the context of early modern Europe. In the following analysis, I present this interpretation of Locke in four main parts. First, I locate toleration in light of Locke’s psychology of human nature. I then examine his early rejection of toleration and how this rejection should lead us to interpret his later defense. Third, I briefly consider reasons for his change of mind on the issue. Finally, I present the defense that Locke gave in A Letter Concerning Toleration.

The Tension at the Core We are accustomed to describing Locke as the father of modern liberalism, the classic promoter of human freedom—individual, social, and political. But this picture captures only the refracted outlines of his much more subtle account of the human situation. While we may interpret his “freedom” to mean a release from the “arbitrary” will of another person, namely an absolute sovereign, for Locke this remained always a relative freedom because we were still bound within a web of constraints imposed on us by God, or natural reason, or natural law, however he chose to refer to the constraining power. Human bondage, we might say, is the negative of the photograph of Locke’s freedom. All of Locke’s works are tied in some way to this matrix. Given this normative view of the human situation, a central question for Locke was—what is the nature of the constraints? From where do they derive and, therefore, to what extent are they justified? Behind this normative perspective, which indelibly tied together freedom and constraint, Locke carried a parallel image of human nature as a highly ambivalent combination of both irrational and reasonable impulses and beliefs. On the one hand, people are inevitably motivated by self-interest, particularism, irrational enthusiasms, unrestrained passions. These negative features need to be controlled and contained through edu-

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cation, institutions, laws, incentives, and so forth. On the other hand, a person is also a center of moral life, maintaining an independent relationship with God, holding an inviolable conscience, a subject of rights. We see in this form, “the modern, post–Reformation individual,” that is, the person “constituted by moral sovereignty over one’s core beliefs and practice that cannot be alienated” (Tully, 1993, 53). These positive and negative characterizations of the human being motivated Locke at different periods in his life to take up contrasting positions in regard to them. He is in some modes notably pessimistic (Two Tracts, some passages in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and in Some Thoughts Concerning Education) and in others remarkably optimistic (A Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government). One could in part attribute the difference in emphasis to his objective in writing the piece under question. If we accept Ashcraft’s depiction of Locke as an engaged political activist supporting the cause of the Dissenters, as I do (though he was more than this as well), then it may be that the hopeful view of human action implied in the Letter Concerning Toleration and the Two Treatises was in large part a result of the political point of these works—to motivate policy and to persuade others to one’s position. Rhetorically, given these practical objectives, it would have been defeating for Locke to dwell on the doubts about human nature he held just as strongly. Nevertheless, the various expressions of Locke’s view of the individual person as both a source of moral authority and a creature exercising reason as well as a source of particularism, irrationality, and social chaos indicate a deep tension in his thinking that Locke maintained throughout his life. The negative, empirical view that Locke derived from personal observation of religious conflict and from various anthropologically and sociologically informed travel books and histories remained in the background shadowing even his most hopeful treatises. How did this dualistic view of human potential affect Locke’s construction of toleration? Locke’s support for toleration derived from his belief in the inviolability of a separate individual sphere of moral experience and its expression: “The principal and chief care of everyone ought to be of his own Soul first” (Letter, 49). That is why Locke was led to defend it. However, the way in which he did so, that is, how he defended it, was greatly influenced not only by the second hopeful incarnation of the morally sovereign individual, but also took account of inevitably partial and irrational human impulses. The “private person,” as he referred to what we would now label the individual, was not a solitary and self-justifying reference point but had always to be located within a balance of internal and external laws and constraints. To

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defend toleration, Locke developed a view of the world as bounded. Through this binding into separate spheres, he intended to accomplish two things at once: to construct a realm of freedom but also to keep in check the unreasonable, anarchic potential in human interaction. In the establishment and guarantee of freedom within certain spheres, Locke aimed to domesticate destructive passions. The way he balanced the tension between the positive and negative characters of human action may have appeared as a resolution to him, yet we are still fighting over what belongs to which realms of life, or even over this division itself. Indeed, from our twenty-first century vantage point, Locke did not ultimately solve anything, yet his attempt represents one way of coming to terms with the modern choice between authority and order versus individuality and freedom. A more careful reading of him will show that this posing of a stark choice of the issues is a false one. In fact, what was novel about Locke’s defense of toleration was the implication that a trade-off between individual freedom and political constraints did not have to be zero-sum and that the binding allowed room for expansion. This does not mean that there was no loss involved in the new structuring of constraint. But loss is compatible with growth in other directions. In the Letter Concerning Toleration,6 we see the way in which Locke attempted to balance the two conflicting pictures of action. Before examining that, we need to place the evidence of that single text against the background of the profound worries and pessimism he had expressed earlier in the Two Tracts on Government.7

Fear and Loathing: Denial of Toleration in the Two Tracts In his Two Tracts on Government, Locke argued in favor of an absolutist position against a general toleration of religious worship. Written in the context of the Restoration of Charles II after the English Civil War, the issue he addressed was a technical but nevertheless highly politicized question about the nature of “indifferent things”—adiaphora—and how the government ought to handle them.8 Originally derived from theological distinctions, by 1660 the category of adiaphora marked out all those things not expressly commanded by God as revealed in Scripture, such as ceremonies and signs of worship (wearing surplices, bowing in front of the cross, kneeling at communion, etc.). Because it remained an open question whether and to what extent the government ought to control religion, the issue of adiaphora served as a theoretical lightning rod for that larger question. To what extent did civil authorities have the power to govern religion?

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Was the magistrate justified in making laws that would mandate adiaphora for his subjects? Those arguing for toleration sought to carve out a space for actions that were exempt from governmental authority because of their status as “religious.” But by whose or what standards was this to be determined? (Scripture was a hopeless reference here because it was not the Ten Commandments that people were fighting over.) Was it up to government, religious bodies, or individual consciences? Furthermore, even if specific matters were considered “religious,” why should that exclude them from governmental power? Locke’s unequivocal answer in 1660 was that governments had the rightful authority to impose indifferent things on their subjects: “[T]he supreme magistrate of every nation what way soever created, must necessarily have an absolute and arbitrary power over all the indifferent actions of his people” (Abrams, 122–123, 175; see also 172).9 Locke used two different rhetorical strategies to defend this position. First, he explored the nature of indifferency and of magistracy to demonstrate that civil authority over such matters was justified, in the First Tract (or English Tract) dissecting Bagshaw’s arguments one at a time, and in the Second Tract (or Latin Tract) presenting a conceptual analysis of “what is meant here by magistrate, what by religious worship, and what by things indifferent” (212). In a second strategy, Locke broke out of this traditional mode of presentation and emphasized instead the anthropological, sociological, and psychological observations of human motivation and behavior that underlay his thinking.10 Let me briefly review his arguments in the first mode, before turning to the second, which, I will argue, though unexplored, are crucial for understanding his later position on toleration. Locke developed one main argument and a subsidiary, but necessary minor argument to buttress it. His main line of attack was to demolish the distinction between civil versus religious adiaphora: “indifferent things of civil as well as religious concernment” are “of the same nature, and will alway be so” (153). Everyone agreed in principle that the magistrate had authority over civil adiaphora; the question was to what extent he controlled religious things. If he could show that the distinction was untenable, then it necessarily followed that government had as much authority over the one as the other (see 125–126; 127).11 To deny the validity of the distinction between civil and religious adiaphora, Locke had to show that the religious perspective, from which the distinction derived, was wrong, incoherent, or incapable of achieving what it purportedly set out to do. The last quality undermines the effort (from the religious point of view to charge it with being “wrong” or “incoherent”

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is irrelevant because it can simply counter assert its rightness or coherence). One should not expect the religious point of view to provide the standard by which to judge the magistrate’s power, because there were too many incompatible religious points of view out there. This situation called for, by its very nature, a perspective that was not mired in one or another of these particular (incommensurable) positions. That perspective had to be a political one: Now as the indifferency of all things is exactly the same and on both sides we find the same arguments and indeed the same matter, the only difference being in the way they are viewed, there being no greater distinction than there is between a gown worn in the market-place and the self-same gown worn in church, it is clear that the magistrate’s authority embraces the one type of indifferent things as much as the other. . . . (229, emphasis added)

Note here the same attitude toward symbols or acts of religious expression that Locke adopted in the Letter 25 years later: Sacrificing a cow or wearing a gown are seen as phenomenologically neutral events that carry a charged meaning only in the context in which they take on religious significance. But it is his flat description of them as behaviors rather than morally weighty acts that should strike us. In both texts, from the political point of view, they are just behaviors, yet he draws different justificatory implications from them in his two different treatments. Here the religious behaviors are marked out as on a par with other secular acts and hence subject just as readily to civil authority. In the Letter, they are marked out as on a par with other secular acts that we do not feel alarmed or threatened by, hence implying that we should neither be alarmed (and consequently provoked to suppress them) when they are used in a religious way. Note that in the first case, Locke assumed these acts to be dangerous, hence necessarily subject to sovereign authority, whereas in the second he emphasized their immateriality as sources of harm. Locke was led to coercion along the first line and to toleration along the other. It was not, as we can see from this passage, because he actually saw or described the religious behaviors themselves in radically different forms but rather that the consequences resulting from people’s perceptions of them were different. A mental technology had to be developed to reconceptualize the status of religious beliefs, a point I explore at length in the following. The crucial supplementary argument Locke made to back up his primary point that adiaphora were all of one kind was that Christian liberty, because of the nature of faith, would not be compromised by his depiction of indifferent things. From the perspective of any Christian believer at this

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time, an essential question was the nature of Christian liberty: One’s belief and the expression of that belief must come from the free assent of the individual conscience. In the Dissenters’ view, inner belief and outer worship were inextricably linked and indeed that dichotomy itself was a false one. One could not divide up the self in such a way that liberty would be preserved while outward movements bound; they were all of a piece. Religious expression through particular ceremonies was absolutely essential in manifesting one’s belief in God. If this were the case, Locke could not both protect Christian liberty and at the same time allow government authority over worship. A Christian magistrate would deny the very core of his religious identity if he defended such a position. Locke’s solution, typical of the Anglican position at the time, was to postulate a distinction between inner belief and outer worship and to claim that only inner worship was important in God’s eyes. Hence one still remained free, even though one might be required for political reasons to conform in outer ways. As he said, “the great business of Christian religion lies in the heart” (164). Because of this, “the service of the inward man which God looks after and accepts may be a free will offering, a sincere and spiritual performance under what shape soever of outward indifferent circumstances, the heart may be lift up to heaven, whilst the body bows” (146; see also 164, 216). Clearly, this separation between inner belief and outer worship was critically important in making Locke’s argument about adiaphora possible: If outer worship were as sanctified as inner belief, then there remained an irreconcilable clash between the authority of the sovereign over outward matters and the authority of the individual over outward matters premised upon his or her relationship with God. Locke solved this confrontation here by redefining the nature of religious faith so that the inviolability of a separate sphere remains but its scope is shrunken. Locke’s so-called solution was neither new nor sophisticated and it trapped him in an uncomfortable position, one he would later abandon. Because he later held the reverse of this as an ideal, that is, as a strong motivation (Locke came to see individual belief and action/expression as inextricably linked and as necessarily so for human freedom), we might be inclined to read back into the Tracts that the opposite view here must indicate the earlier view’s similarly central motivating status. This would be to misinterpret the significance of the Tracts. The importance of the Tracts for an understanding of Locke is minimal if we see them as another iteration of the argument that beliefs and actions are distinct, and hence that suppression of public worship can be justified. This argument, although crucial to his support for sovereign authority, was not the primary motivation for his

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position. The significance of the Tracts is not found in the familiar arguments Locke deploys, nor are the Tracts only of interest as remnants of Locke before he became a Lockean. Rather, in the Two Tracts, Locke expounds on powerful concerns in such a way that the two discrete arguments laid out in the preceding appear pale by comparison. Indeed, they should be seen simply as the conceptual mechanisms he used to back up a position he had arrived at through other considerations and fears. The forcefulness of these background preoccupations led Locke to an absolutist position. The basic problem as Locke saw it in this early writing was: What were the sources of disorder and chaos that threatened the possibilities for civilized existence, and how could these be controlled? As with absolutist arguments on the model of Hobbes, Locke’s derived from a fear of the anarchy that would result if unbounded “freedom” were given to individuals within society. As he stated, “a general freedom is but a general bondage” (120), attesting here that he valued liberty as much as any other man, but sought to guard against the licentious tendencies that would inevitably result if no strong limits were placed on it. The specter of disorder, anarchy, and chaos pervade this work: “I no sooner perceived myself in the world but I found myself in a storm, which hath lasted almost hitherto, and therefore cannot but entertain the approaches of a calm with the greatest joy and satisfaction” (119). He remarked on the “Furies, War, Cruelty, Rapine, Confusion, etc., which have so wearied and wasted this poor nation” (118). And in marked contrast to his later liberal position, but presaging many of his later arguments as well, he described what he saw as the hard and extreme nature of the choice in this Hobbesian way: Who might not this way declaim government itself out of the world and quickly insinuate into the multitude that it is beneath the dignity of a man to enslave his understanding and subject his will to another’s pleasure, to think himself so ignorant or imprudent as to stand in need of a guardian, and not to be as God and nature made him, the free disposer of his own actions? To fight to support greatness and a dominion over himself, and rob his own necessities to maintain the pomp and pleasure of one that regards him not, to hold his life as a tenant at will and to be ready to part with his head when it shall be demanded, these and many more such are the disadvantages of government, yet far less than are to be found in its absence as no peace, no security, no enjoyments, enmity with all men and safe possession of nothing, and those stinging swarms of miseries that attend anarchy and rebellion. (155–156)

The cause of this anarchy as Locke explains it here is the nature of human motivation itself. How are we led as individuals and as groups to such selfdefeating ends?

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We can decipher three main features of Locke’s description of human social-psychology in this text. First, beliefs and symbols are ubiquitous and ineradicable in differentiating us from one another. Second, these beliefs/symbols motivate us to act. Third, the actions undertaken in their expression and defense are inherently “boundless” actions. Locke maintained the first observation, that humans are inevitably custom-, tradition-bound creatures who hold their particular beliefs and expressions as central to their identities, throughout his life. Particularism, or partiality, was not something one could ultimately praise or blame—it was simply an inevitable characteristic of human nature, like all markings in the animal kingdom. “Our deformity is others’ beauty, our rudeness others’ civility, and there is nothing so uncouth and unhandsome to us which doth not somewhere or other find applause and approbation” (146). In a notable passage, he remarked on the depth to which attachments to aspects of one’s particular identity could go: We have recently heard reports of a city, situated in the East, among the Chinese, which after a prolonged siege was driven at last to surrender. The gates were thrown open to the enemy forces and all the inhabitants gave themselves up to the will of the triumphant victor. They had abandoned to their enemy’s hands their own persons, their wives, families, liberty, wealth, and in short all things sacred and profane, but when they were ordered to cut off the plait of hair which, by national custom, they wore on their heads, they took up their arms again and fought fiercely until, to a man, all were killed. These men, although they were ready to allow their whole civil existence to be reduced to slavery by their enemies, were so unable to allow them even the least interference with their hair, worn according to an ancestral custom, that the slightest of things and one of no significance, a mere excretion of the body, but all but sacrosanct by general esteem and the custom of their race, was easily preferred to life itself and the solid benefits of nature. (217)

Certainly, Locke did think this behavior barbaric, but it was pervasive, as he went on to note: “whoever cares to contemplate our own civil commotions will confess that perhaps even among us war has at times been waged by some with equal barbarity and similar bitterness over issues of no greater weight” (218). Note that Locke was here emphasizing specific symbols or matters that could be “externalized,” that is, explicit ways of marking oneself off from another, as opposed to beliefs that did not in theory have to be apparent.12 By stressing the outward signs of diversity, Locke wanted to accentuate the point that ineradicable differences among people(s) were evidence that there was not and could never be one common standard of correct behav-

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ior. This fact of diversity had not deterred others from contending that they indeed did have access to the right way to live a Christian life and to worship God. Their line of reasoning led them to argue for toleration—they ought to be allowed to practice as their beliefs required. Locke insisted in contrast that one could not ignore the fact of diversity and he used this empirical observation to draw a completely different conclusion. According to his logic, human behavior was various and hence undetermined by God; therefore, it could not be “sacred” to Him and, it followed, could be controlled by the sovereign. But the implications of his empiricism could not be contained within this roundabout logic. That this observation served as a hard empirical reality must in the long run make forced conformity highly unnatural. That is, the fact of diversity may have helped to undermine the transcendent sanctity of any particular act and consequently the justification for its protection on a religious basis, yet, on any other basis this fact would argue against enforced uniformity of practices. Even in the Tracts, the direction of Locke’s argument would lead him to adopt toleration were it not for what he believed inevitably followed on it—bloody conflict and anarchy. The question remained: How do we guard against the chaos that unbridled differences brought about? What is it about differences that Locke believed must eventuate in irreconcilable conflict? The second major feature of Locke’s social-psychology is that people would act on the symbols of differentiation and the beliefs that went with them. Locke’s recognition of this in the Tracts is clear from his description of the Chinese hair story: He points out how matters of mere appearance— a slight thing of no significance, a “mere excretion of the body”—went deep into the psychological and emotional make-up of the person, so much so that people were driven to give up their lives for these particularities. What this indicates is that although Locke saw a clear connection between belief and action in this instance, the type of action was decidedly irrational. Early in his theoretical study of politics, then, Locke was so fixated on sources of disorder that a more subtle apprehension of the relation between belief and action was not yet accessible. That he saw a connection between “faith” and (irrational) actions would not conflict with his earlier argument that true faith does not necessarily require outward expression. The latter argument was meant to deny the normative upshot of what Dissenters believed to be an ontological and sacred linkage—justifying a policy of toleration. Locke kept a lid on this source of social and political disruption by completely skirting the issue of the potential rationality of such belief-driven action. His later writings would demonstrate a more complex grasp of the issue.

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The third feature—the unbounded nature of human self-expression and the dynamics of interaction that resulted—was what most profoundly troubled Locke in the Tracts. He sought to display its pervasiveness and danger at every opportunity but particularly in the context of two discussions: “conscience” and what I call his “slippery-slope” argument. We have previously discussed Locke’s limited argument about the nature of Christian liberty: He adopted this position in the context of a much larger debate which centered the idea of Christian liberty on the notion of conscience. Conscience existed as that inner, subjective knowledge of one’s duty to God. As Locke himself defined the phenomenon: “God implanted the light of nature in our hearts and willed that there should be an inner legislator (in effect) constantly present in us whose edicts it should not be lawful for us to transgress even a nail’s breadth” (225).13 This inner light carried with it a sanctity that other individuals and the sovereign must respect. For Puritans and others seeking grounds for toleration the implications were clear: They appealed to conscience as the reference point by which the limits of the magistrate’s authority should be judged. If one’s conscience demanded that one observe God in a specific manner, then the sanctity of that experience of connection with God within the individual must be respected by civil authorities. The designation of some thing as belonging or deriving from one’s conscience marked it out as authoritative in a fundamental, nonnegotiable way. Locke argued forcefully against the claims of conscience, first, by emphasizing that to appeal to conscience got one no further along in the debate about what is rightfully to be subject to secular control and what is not: And he must confess himself a stranger to England that thinks that meats and habits, that places and times of worship etc., would not be as sufficient occasion of hatred and quarrels amongst us, as leeks and onions and other trifles described in that satire by Juvenal was amongst them, and be distinctions able to keep us always at a distance, and eagerly ready for like violence and cruelty as often as the teachers should alarm the consciences of their zealous votaries and direct them against the adverse party. (121)

“[A] liberty for tender consciences was the first inlet to all those confusions and unheard of and destructive opinions that overspread this nation” (160). The standard of conscience was incapable of providing indisputable grounds for determining the magistrate’s authority. But the idea had not only failed to resolve the most important debates; as a purportedly sacred standard, it carried other potential harms. To demonstrate this, Locke also sought to accentuate the ordinariness of the claim to conscience, to desanc-

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tify it: “conscience being nothing but an opinion of the truth of any practical position, which may concern any actions as well moral as religious, civil as ecclesiastical” (138). Conscience, by being equated with mere private judgment can be shown up for what it might very easily become—a pretext for imposing one’s own particular desires and views: “If private men’s judgments were the moulds wherein laws were to be cast ‘tis a question whether we should have any at all” (137). Locke here leads us directly to perhaps the most persistent theme in the entire work, an argument about the consequences that will inevitably result if societies were to allow religious standards (e.g., conscience) to govern political laws. The slippery-slope argument runs as follows. If people believed that the state was not justified in maintaining authority over religious issues, they would readily use this as a basis to overturn all laws as being contrary to freedom of religion: Grant the people once free and unlimited in the exercise of their religion and where will they stop, where will they themselves bound it, and will it not be religion to destroy all that are not of their profession? (159) [N]or can a subject’s vow or a private error of conscience nullify the edicts of the magistrate, for, if this is once granted, discipline will be everywhere at an end, all law will collapse, all authority will vanish from the earth and, the seemly order of affairs being convulsed and the frame of government dissolved, each would be his own Lawmaker and his own God. (226–227; see also 154, 234, 237, 240)

From the opening pages of the First Tract to the last pages of the Second, Locke hammered out the consequences that would result from allowing religion to adopt an authoritative stance vis-à-vis the sovereign. The slippery-slope argument that Locke made use of throughout the Two Tracts indicated a specific psychology of identity. The issue was the following: Religious motivations were seen by Locke to be of a particular nature. It was not just that people were inherently lawless, nor that they would be self-interested rather than supportive of the common good in applying a veneer of religion. Furthermore, the problem was not simply that people held the wrong religious beliefs,14 nor that the multitude was ripe for being misled by foolish or depraved zealots. All four of these human qualities—lawlessness, self-interest, ignorance, and credulousness—were no doubt pervasive problems for sovereigns attempting to maintain peace, order, and prosperity, and all four of them characterized the misguided application of religion on many occasions. Nevertheless, there remained a

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residual and specific quality to the nature of religious attachments that was not captured by these generic human failures. That is, religion also embodied and too readily carried away the person, giving him or her a singular and powerful locus of identity. In what way could a set of beliefs come to constitute a person’s identity? From a psychological perspective, the process might go as follows. Because religious beliefs concern ultimate authority about the meaning of life itself and about matters of good and evil, they inherently impose themselves as the primary building blocks of an individual’s conception of the world and what sense she can make of it. One’s attachment to such beliefs may appear at first as a cognitive orientation, yet because they answer basic questions that all humans experience with some anxiety if not existential emotion, these beliefs entail strong emotional commitments as well. For those who believe, belief is compelling not for intellectual reasons but for emotional ones. Thus, there is no distance between these beliefs and the believer “holding” them—the connection is intimate and constitutive, not objective and rational. A distanced or objectifying mode of holding beliefs would imply room for reason and application of less emotional faculties, but the religion Locke feared was not held in that way. How far this depiction of religion is from what has been the customary interpretation of Locke is obvious even from the (nonironic) title of one of his later works—The Reasonableness of Christianity. Many scholars of Locke argue that the fundamental objective of his greatest work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was to prove somehow that reason essentially conformed to God’s law, that there was no basic disjuncture between religion and reason.15 Although true, his attempt to achieve such an interdependence was constantly undercut by Locke’s own empiricism.16 Religious beliefs as motivating facts about persons are dangerous. Why? That Christians believed in the truth of their religion should not in and of itself necessitate an imposing, aggressive quality to its expression and practice. Locke also, along with other proto–Enlightenment thinkers, believed in a rational truth that could be attained by the careful application of reason and judgment in combination with observation of the world. But for him, truth was contained within specific boundaries, as one’s beliefs and actions ought to be when following its dictates. However, truth can easily become destructive when it is combined with certain qualities of religion as a source of identity. Three key features of identity lend it potential danger. First, religious beliefs have a great tendency to become identities that categorize the world

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into enemies and friends—“Those who are not with us are against us.” Locke indicates this in these characteristic passages: And will they not think they do God good service to take vengeance on those that they have voted his enemies? Shall not this be the land of promise, and those that join not with them be the Canaanites to be rooted out? . . . They that have got the right use of Scripture and the knack of applying it with advantage, who can bring God’s word in defence of those practices which his soul abhors and do already tell us we are returning to Egypt, would, were they permitted, as easily find us Egyptians and think it their right to despoil us. (159–160, emphasis added)

Or again, in arguing specifically against a policy of toleration, he wrote of “people that are ready to conclude God dishonoured upon every small deviation from that way of his worship which either education or interest hath made sacred to them . . . [people] who are apt to judge every other exercise of religion as an affront to theirs, and branding all others with the odious names of idolatry, superstition or will-worship” (161–162, emphasis added). The whole tenor of these passages, as well as specific words—“enemies,” “Canaanites,” “Egyptians,” “honour,” “affront”—attest to Locke’s perception of religion as a way in which people group themselves in oppositional terms. When one’s fundamental perspective on the world revolves around such categorization of other persons or groups into potential apostates/ heathen versus brethren (strangers/enemies/foreigners versus comrades/ sisters/brothers, etc.), then cues to action will come as responses to what one perceives as threats, affronts, or aggression against one on the basis of this identification. One responds to them as a type and specifically, as a type to beware of: One seeks to protect oneself and those with whom one identifies. Because the categories are so unambiguous, the responses tend to be brittle and quick. For Dissenters and other religious activists during the post–Reformation period, their Christian identity constituted the core way in which they conceived of themselves. In addition to the positive logic of categorization, two negative logics make accommodation among those holding different religious identities difficult. The first of these might be termed non-negotiability: That is, religious beliefs transformed into identities are not based upon rational argumentation, as Locke noted. The collapsing of distance between the self and belief leads a person to identify him or herself wholeheartedly and uncritically with a particular set of beliefs. Hence, finding some commensurable grounds for reasoning about ways to live together is extraordinarily difficult. In extreme cases, there are no places at which one can find a hook for

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communication. The identities are based on an all-or-nothing affirmation and unless the sanctity of this commitment is felt to be protected, the believer may not negotiate over particular concerns because the “bargaining” will be seen as a means to undermine the integrity of the group. The Puritan refusal to make concessions about specific rituals exemplifies this quality: The standards for what will harm and what will not harm the status of the religious group are internal to the belief system or the self-perception of the group and therefore, to find a common language becomes an intractable problem. The second negative logic of religious identity derives from the fact that religious beliefs, which the person holds to be essential to him, take on a paramountcy that crowds out, or makes subsidiary all other sources of identification and meaning within the person. These beliefs and actions appear not just as one among other modes in which the person could conceive himself: They are necessarily the primary form that pervades and directs all others. The person cannot see alternative views of the self as having much meaning. At the extreme, this monodimensional self-understanding may lead to an incapacity to empathize or connect with persons who do not share in this overridingly important identity or set of beliefs. Therefore, it is harder to appeal to understandings that require some displacement of the core identity, because a religious believer of this sort cannot do this. The non-negotiable and monodimensional aspects of identification in these terms describe a self for which there is no alienated distance between that self and the actions, beliefs, or desires that it may or may not find attractive or good. This is of course a caricature of a true believer whose identity is absolute and overweening, but it does capture the logic of how identity could become a destructive force in a world in which not all were members of the accepted orthodoxy. In this analysis of a psychology of identity, I have given one reading of Locke’s slippery-slope argument that makes sense of his contention that persons motivated by religion were too often led to unbridled, unconstrained action in order to protect it. Religious attachments as identifications served as a primary source of political and social instability. The most important issue in the Tracts was—How could this instability be avoided? Toleration was impossible here because it would only further the sources of disorder in two ways: First, it publicly ratified “religion” as a public authority. This constituted a juridical act with not only legal but also sociological consequences, because second, the explicit ratification of religious diversity would let loose the conflictual forces embedded within this diversity. Conversely, if a particular religious group were not allowed to rely explicitly on

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religion as a legitimate juridical reference point in pursuing its claims against others (both other groups and the civil authorities), then the conflict inherent in religious diversity could not grow so out of control as it would otherwise. The denial of toleration was a denial of the right of religion to serve as an authority in the public arena. Presumably, this legal denial put a clamp on the naturally conflictual claims of warring religious groups. The only way to insure stability was to deny the free expression of various religious practices: Decisions about religion (not expressly ordained by God) must remain solely within civil jurisdiction. Two things should be noted about Locke’s argument against toleration. First, it is a contingent one: Locke did not support absolutism because he believed sovereign authority ought to be unlimited regardless of the situation.17 The extent of authority was limited by strictures of natural law and the logic of order. Hence, the second point about Locke’s view of toleration at this time: It was determined by the rigid and simplistic conception of the possibilities for order that Locke believed existed. Either an infinity of individual judgments (consciences) was allowed free play, leading inevitably to a coalescing of these around antagonistic groupings each maintaining its sanctity, claiming to embody the truth, and thus leading the collective body into chaos; or a political community upheld one single center of judgment in making decisions about the common good, this center being the sovereign against whom no other judgments could be valid.18 It is my contention that a central consideration in Locke’s later defense of toleration is a more complex understanding of the sources of political order in relation to human motivation.

Transformation: Politics, Epistemology, Psychology We have thus far examined Locke’s rejection of toleration in his early works, the Two Tracts. Twenty-five years later, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, he argued unequivocally in its favor. I want briefly to consider how we should look at this change of view.19 One main, if often implied, explanation attributes the change to Locke’s role as a partisan for one political party or another. Here he is said to hold radically different views because of the rhetorical stance used to get his preferred policies enacted within a particular political context. Thus, it is suggested that at the time of writing the Tracts, during the Restoration of Charles II and the accompanying debate over the grant of indulgence toward dissident groups, Locke found a way to justify the sovereign’s independent authority because he recognized Charles’ support for the Dissenters

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and sought to justify this power in generalizable principles. When he disapproved of James II’s crypto–Catholic policies in the 1680s, Locke felt compelled to give an equally powerful and theoretically developed argument against his control of religious matters. Tully does not offer such a simplistic portrait of Locke’s change, yet he does underline the highly pragmatic considerations that may have been involved: “Locke’s analysis in the Two Tracts underwrites Charles’ declaration of indulgence from Breda in April 1660 on purely pragmatic grounds” (Tully, 1983, 5). Similarly, Ashcraft suggests that Locke, the political activist, saw no “need” for toleration at the time and that not until “actual political conflict” pushed the issue and its implications into prominence did he develop a position in support of it (Ashcraft, 1986, 88 note #51, 90 note #65; see also Klibansky and Gough, 12). We can put this point another way: In the Tracts, Locke was more fearful about individuals overstepping the bounds of civil society. In the Letter, it was the state overstepping its boundaries that appeared much more threatening to him. Doubtless, governmental abuse of power was a prime concern in Locke’s later defense of toleration. Yet, this could only have become a salient problem once the threat of religiously driven disorder had mitigated to the extent that this other sort of evil loomed large and took its place, either in fact or in his understanding of political order. Furthermore, Locke had adopted a position favoring toleration in his Essay Concerning Toleration, which he had begun to put together by 1666 (perhaps at the behest of his new acquaintance, Lord Ashley). In any case, a strictly political explanation or one focused exclusively on the threat of sovereign abuse of power cannot sufficiently explain Locke’s transformation. A second important line of argument focuses on the change in his understanding or definitions of specific concepts. Presumably, because his view of a concept changed his view of toleration likewise shifted. This argument is made first in regard to the notions of “faith” and “belief.” The change may have come through conceptual developments internal to Locke’s thinking or from his experience and observation of toleration and intolerance in practice. However the change came about, it resulted in a more hopeful view of the possibilities, and a deepened understanding of what faith constituted. Tully argues that Locke changed his beliefs about toleration because he actually saw people acting differently from what he expected, both in the Dissenters’ continued refusal to conform to the Anglican Clarendon Code between the years 1662–1667, and in his observations during his travels to the Duchy of Cleves in 166620 that “toleration could work in practice if it were based on the two true Christian beliefs”21 (Tully, 1993, 52; see also Tully, 1983, 5; Ashcraft, 92). Accordingly, Locke

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was pushed to alter his views about the relationship between beliefs and actions—they could not be so radically separated as he had maintained in the Two Tracts. He now recognized that a person sincerely holding a religious belief would necessarily be led to act on it, that is, seek to worship as he or she believed right. Because it is sincerity (a subjective state) and not truth (an objective state) that matters, a person believing something to be “necessary” and not “indifferent” to salvation must be allowed to act on this belief. It follows from this that government must not force the believer to her damnation by requiring an outward, hypocritical conformity. Closely related to this is Harris’ argument that once Locke developed conceptions of the civil sphere and of conscience that were self-contained (conscience as properly informed by reason would not, by definition, intrude upon the civil sphere, see Harris, 76–77), he could reconcile them and thus was left “conceptually free” to support toleration. The conceptual development that Locke experienced was indeed a vital factor in his transformation. However, a specific conceptual change, even of an argument that served as a linchpin in Locke’s earlier position, indicates a wider reassessment of how the whole picture fit together. If we focus solely on this aspect of the transformation then we leave out an entire body of fears and motivation that had driven his previous position, that had indeed driven him to make use of that particular argument about the relation between belief and action. To see Locke’s thinking on the issue of toleration in the round, so to speak, we need to follow how Locke dealt with the problem of order that had preoccupied him so completely at an earlier time. That problem was not solved by a change in concepts; the question of order could not be defined out of existence. The question is—What happened to the overriding concerns expressed in his earlier writings? Neither the political nor the epistemological explanation takes into consideration the misgivings Locke had previously expressed about toleration. His fundamental concern in the Tracts had been to insure the order of a commonwealth given the dangerous tendencies of religious identification. Are we to believe that Locke simply ignored these previous sociological concerns which had appeared at the center of his rejection of toleration? Perhaps he did. David Wootton (1990) has argued that Locke maintained deep inconsistencies among the positions set forth in his various works.22 Should we conclude along with Wootton that in his Letter, written in 1685 or so, Locke simply had other objectives in mind and that the concerns that drove him 25 years earlier were irrelevant by this point, for whatever biographical, epistemological or political reasons? That he had forgotten or dismissed these concerns by this date is impossible, we know

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not least of all through the evidence of his vivid descriptions of the effects of enthusiasm in An Essay, published in 1689. That he bracketed these concerns for the time being, given the rhetorical imperative of his normative argument in favor of toleration may in part be true, but here again evidence throughout his writings on toleration indicates that Locke continued to acknowledge the possibilities of disorder resulting from religion. Two other explanations exist. It might have been the case that Locke came to think the threat of disorder not as frightening as he had previously thought. Drawn as he was to a life of political action and struggle in his association with Shaftesbury, the fear of religious factions and the enmities these necessarily brought about may have abated because of his involvement in the thick of political conflict.23 Nevertheless, it would be a great distortion to claim that Locke came to accept chaos and thus was able to defend toleration whatever the anarchic fallout. Order, peace, and prosperity remained the permanent background canvas against which he drew out his arguments against and then in favor of toleration. One final explanation appears most convincing: Locke believed that in the very implementation of toleration, the dangers of religious identification would be mitigated. This worked not simply because persons would be mollified into acquiescing in a regime of tolerance because they accepted it as directly to their advantage.24 Rather, Locke now saw that toleration, as the establishment of boundaries, particularly that between public and private, constituted a way in which the individual freedoms and expression that he had always valued could be channeled, thereby making their chaotic tendencies less inevitable. The juridical guarantee of freedom in tolerant policies facilitated simultaneously a form of psychological constraint. This move constituted an advance in his thinking about the relation between psychological motivation and social structure.

Defending Toleration in the Letter The argument against toleration in the Two Tracts did not break new ground conceptually, but was essentially carried on within the language and assumptions of the traditional debates on indifferency. By contrast, A Letter Concerning Toleration stands out as an attempt to formulate a wholly different language and set of concepts by which to understand the problem. Locke did not develop a single tight argument in terms of assumptions and concepts that he could rely upon as shared between himself and his readers. Rather, in a period of profound moral ambiguity and dispute, he attempted to reconstruct a way of looking at the world which would actually provide the missing common ground in which argument could

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subsequently be carried on in more precise terms. This staking out of an uncharted field, so to speak, characterizes the theoretical project of the Letter and gives it its odd status as a work of philosophical argument. The fact that it may also be interpreted as a political tract rather than a more strictly philosophical text does not obviate the need to understand the peculiar presentation of the issues in the Letter.25 Locke’s “clearing ground” in the case of toleration was accomplished through his presentation of a set of fundamental dualisms. He constructed a new framework by carving up the human world into distinct and separate spheres: religion/politics, mind/body, public/private. Through development of these dichotomies, Locke sought to naturalize them, that is, to make them inevitable aspects of human societies, and thereby to entail the corresponding necessity and rightness of toleration. If people could see their actions and experiences as bounded in this way, they would see the inevitability and naturalness of toleration. Let me briefly mention the more typical ways of reading the Letter. Locke leaves his text open to divergent interpretations of its fundamental meaning because he uses an assortment of reasons for his defense of toleration. Five discrete points stand out: 1. Christian doctrine upholds it 2. Political order will result from a policy of toleration 3. We cannot know for certain if one particular doctrine is correct— skepticism 4. Persecution by the sovereign is irrational 5. Individual persons must have the liberty to choose their own way to salvation Points 1. through 3. are not meant to carry the primary weight of the defense but are used to give his position added cogency. Point 4. may very well appear as the main argument, and commentators such as Waldron have taken it as such. That argument seems simple enough.26 The state held a specific circumscribed function, which was to maintain order through means of coercion such as laws and physical force. This type of action was incapable of accomplishing other types of ends, namely the assent of a person’s mind to a set of religious beliefs. Therefore, it would be “irrational” for the state to attempt to do something that it was constitutionally incapable of accomplishing. Toleration, the noncoercion of religious worship, was the logical outcome. Waldron claims that this argument fails because Locke cannot sustain his contention that beliefs are immune from the effects of coercion. The psychological assent re-

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quired for someone to come to believe something may not result from direct application of coercive mechanisms (coercion only works on the will, and beliefs are not a matter of will, see Letter, 46), but beliefs are indirectly open to change. They do not come out of nowhere, and Locke’s writings both in An Essay and in Some Thoughts Concerning Education amply attest to his recognition that “external” information and experiences are essential to the creation of beliefs in the first place. Hence, in forcing a person to consider alternative views or dogmas, one may lead that person to alter her beliefs. This acknowledgment, Waldron claims, completely unravels Locke’s argument for toleration. It seems plausible to read Locke as if he were arguing strictly from the narrow premise of function and irrationality because this remains the most explicit and developed line of defense in the text. But Waldron’s excessively rationalistic interpretation leads him to draw the wrong conclusion.27 Locke used “irrationality” as part of a rhetorical strategy to advance a position which was itself rooted in a much deeper and broader perspective. Indeed, the more fundamental concern which compelled Locke to develop the specific argument of the state’s incapacity was his commitment to the inviolability of the individual and his or her relationship with God (point 5). As he emphasized throughout the Letter: “the care of each Mans Salvation belongs only to himself ” (47); “Liberty of Conscience is every mans natural Right, equally belonging to Dissenters as to themselves; and . . . no body ought to be compelled in matters of Religion, either by Law or Force” (51); “the Sum of all we drive at is, That every Man may enjoy the same Rights that are granted to others” (53). He writes of the “Sufferings and Oppressions” that lead believers to rebel against the “tyrannical Yoke” of some governments (52). The background concern with individual liberty drove Locke to see toleration as a good thing. That is fundamentally why Locke defended it.28 He had always maintained this belief in some form. Even in the Tracts he had held that: Besides the submission I have for authority I have no less a love of liberty without which a man shall find himself less happy than a beast. Slavery being a condition that robs us of all the benefits of life, and embitters the greatest blessings, reason itself in slaves (which is the grand privilege of other men) increasing the weight of their chains and joining with their oppressions to torment them. (Tracts, 120)

What he had not always conceived as possible was that the state could “protect” this in principle without its leading inevitably to chaos. Locke be-

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lieved that freedom must be protected by power, that there was no liberty without order. In the early view, liberty did not have sufficient power; in the later, liberty could be threatened by too much. Locke’s objective in the Letter was not simply to give carte blanche to the inclinations of individuals and their religious expressions. These inclinations still required constraint, but he saw that the constraint might now be premised upon a reconstructed social sphere which was self-enforcing rather than dependent upon external, sovereign coercion. Thus, in dividing the world into a set of dualisms, Locke accomplished two things simultaneously.29 First, he had needed a language considerably more capacious than any specific argument if he were going to make headway in resolving the assertions and counter-assertions that had stymied any real movement in thinking about toleration. The dualisms served to reorient a view of the world: They helped people see things differently. Second, implicit in his theory is the belief that the acknowledgment of such dualisms by his readers would engender psychological responses more conducive to toleration in their actions. That is, the dualisms might be seen as constituting mechanisms supporting toleration not only as an abstract possibility but, more importantly, as a psychological one: They might help persons act differently. We should turn to the text first to observe Locke’s use of boundaries. A primary objective in A Letter Concerning Toleration was to establish a particular way of looking at the political-social world. Locke stated unequivocally at the beginning of the text: “I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the Business of Civil Government from that of Religion, and to settle the just Bounds that lie between the one and the other” (26). Clearly, the explicit distinction between the two institutions of church and state was not new (indeed it was as old as Christianity itself). What was controversial was that they should be separated, bounded, not allowed to interfere with the business of the other. An initial, obvious reading of Locke’s objective is to see toleration as somehow necessarily dependent upon a sharp separation between two institutions: “the Power of Civil Government relates only to Mens Civil Interests, is confined to the care of things of this World, and hath nothing to do with the World to come” (28). The church, in contrast, is taken to be “a voluntary Society of Men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the publick worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the Salvation of their Souls” (28). We need to ask then—How is toleration related to this institutional separation? We take this connection for granted and sometimes define toleration in terms of the separation between church and state and their mu-

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tual forbearance from one another’s business. But the juridical fact of separation between the two is not equivalent to toleration. For the separation to stick, it must be supported and enforced by social attitudes: Everyone must agree that these jurisdictions are essentially different and unrelated to one another. To encourage attitudes of toleration, did Locke think all he had to do was baldly state the dichotomy? He maintained that the institutional dichotomy was the true or right way to perceive the nature of church and state, but many people, if not most, disagreed with him: They had long believed that the two spheres must be mutually dependent for the good of the community. Therefore, Locke’s presentation of the institutional dichotomy as a fact—which was indeed what Locke sought to persuade his readers of— should be seen as a means to reorient the basic picture. It was the first outward step in the construction of a deeper dualism that would prove the self-evidentness of toleration. Locke’s conceptual framework organized the world into “realms” divided by sharp and clear boundaries: the Church it self is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the Commonwealth. The Boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles Heaven and Earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two Societies; which are in their Original, End, Business, and in every thing, perfectly distinct, and infinitely different from each other. (33)

His point in the Letter was to underline the incommensurability between the domains by elaborating a corresponding view of human action and experience itself as similarly separate and bounded. Locke mapped out the church/state or religion/politics split into psychological and social dichotomies. He did this in an intuitively persuasive way. In contexts of comprehensive moral and theoretical disjunction, for a writer to gain some foothold in defending a position, he or she must begin with basic building blocks, and the most prominent of these revolve around social-psychological issues of “human nature” or the self. The way in which Locke’s distinction between the religious and political realms facilitated his defense of toleration occurred at another level than the institutional one. Toleration was shown to be natural or self-evident given the radically dichotomous nature of these two types of human actions, experiences, and ideas. To make his case for the multiple nature of human experience so as to lead the reader to see toleration as the right or correct outcome, he appealed to two other boundary distinctions, that between body/mind and between public/private. Descartes transformed the mind/body duality into a foundation for modern philosophy; Locke used it to construct the foundation of modern

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government.30 The whole thrust of the Letter turns on the dualism between mind and body, and he made the point repeatedly: Civil interests that were subject to the magistrate’s authority were defined as those things such as “Life, Liberty, Health, and Indolency of Body; and the Possession of outward things, such as Money, Lands, Houses, Furniture and the like” (26). Spiritual or religious authority pertains to the inner self: “All the Life and Power of true Religion consists in the inward and full perswasion of the mind” (26). Locke did not only refer to this distinction in the context of specifying the respective jurisdictions of the sovereign and the church; he also elaborated it directly and thereby appealed to the reader’s emotional recognition of a powerfully experienced dichotomy within himself. Every man has an Immortal Soul, capable of Eternal Happiness or Misery; whose Happiness depending upon his believing and doing those things in this Life, which are necessary to the obtaining of Gods Favour . . . But besides their Souls, which are Immortal, Men have also their Temporal Lives here upon Earth; the State whereof being frail and fleeting, and the duration uncertain; they have need of several outward Conveniences to the support thereof, which are to be procured or preserved by Pains and Industry. (47)

His appeal to the mind/body distinction was a strong persuasive move on Locke’s part: The reader could not avoid acknowledging that indeed his experience within these two spheres was often sharply conflictual. If they were so heterogeneous, shouldn’t one rethink the relation between them, Locke implicitly suggested. Locke developed the dichotomy further in his remarks on what causes harm or injury: Only that which leads to bodily pain or harm is considered to be real “injury.” In his analysis of various rituals practiced by different religions, he contended that none should be omitted solely on the basis that they offended another’s sensibility or beliefs about the correct way to worship; only when one could point out bodily or political (i.e., the body writ large) injury should the magistrate interfere. In defending the killing of a calf as religious sacrifice, Locke writes that “For no Injury is thereby done to any one, no prejudice to another mans Goods. . . . The part of the Magistrate is only to take care that the Commonwealth receive no prejudice, and that there be no Injury done to any man, either in Life or Estate” (42).31 We can see from this that the boundary between mind and body was a sharp one that did not countenance exceptions like mental offense, scandal, or cultural disgust: One was not essentially hurt by such things because one’s body was not touched. The point here is that over and above his dis-

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crete argument about the nature of faith (discussed earlier), Locke’s view of the person as basically divided within him or herself had deeper ramifications for the naturalness of toleration: It should require no major manipulation of the self to be able to put up with practices and words that one might find offensive. The other significant extension of the religion/politics duality was made in Locke’s use of the dichotomy between public and private. This second line of demarcation had in fact more far-reaching implications for the possibility of toleration in the modern world. The traditional clash between state and church or political/religious was reinterpreted by Locke into a distinction between public and private. This shift, which may seem theoretically uninteresting or so obvious as to require no comment nowadays, is in fact of central importance in explaining the settling of toleration into a recognizable pattern of living rather than simply a free-floating idea within a public discourse. Locke made the linkages between the political/religious and public/private in an offhand way. Unlike his use of the mind/body split, he did not explicitly elaborate it as a central component of a specific argument. Nevertheless, it served a crucial orienting role. Locke draws the link in a number of ways. To begin, he frequently refers to the “private person” as a source of normative justification throughout the text: No private Person has any Right, in any manner, to prejudice another Person in his Civil Enjoyments, because he is of another Church or Religion. All the Rights and Franchises that belong to him as a Man, or as a Denison, are inviolably to be preserved to him. . . . What I say concerning the mutual Toleration of private Persons differing from one another in Religion, I understand also of particular Churches; which stand as it were in the same Relation to each other as private Persons among themselves. (31)

The use of the words “private person” does not necessarily tell us that Locke understood here what we mean by that notion; he could simply be referring to persons who are not magistrates, or representatives of the Church, etc. But its close tie with our own usage is spelled out further: In private domestick Affairs, in the management of Estates, in the conservation of Bodily Health, every man may consider what suits his own conveniency, and follow what course he likes best. No man complains of the ill management of his Neighbour’s Affairs. No man is angry with another for an Error committed in sowing his Land, or in marrying his Daughter. No body corrects a Spendthrift for consuming his Substance in Taverns. Let any man pull down, or build, or make whatsoever Expences he pleases, no body murmurs, no body controuls him; he has his Liberty. (34)

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We here find the core of the content of private life as Locke described it. What fell within the boundaries of the private were one’s family life and one’s economic behavior. We will see how contested this was in a moment. For now, the theoretical point Locke made by using the idea of privacy was to subsume religion under its aegis and thereby make it similarly immune from interference as he claimed other less theologically disputed matters to be. According to the logic of this view, the private was naturally protected from interference and we ought to include religion under this rubric. By lining up dualisms according to the classification of political/outward/public versus religious/inward/private, Locke sought to draw the connotations of a naturalized (and naturalizing) privacy to the status of religion, thereby entailing toleration.

Toleration Through Boundaries A society is, from one view, a constant renegotiation of the terms on which persons and self-consciously identified groups jostle for power and recognition vis-à-vis one another. But some periods are more transformative than others. The construction of toleration in the seventeenth century context of renegotiation led Locke to use the strategy of marking distinctions and boundaries. This boundary establishment ultimately had the effect of enabling the functioning of a diverse community. The compartmentalizing of the world undergirds toleration by structuring, in part, internal life, thereby making toleration a more stable possibility.32 A cogent reorientation is a necessary first step in creating such stable possibilities: People cannot go forward without ideas to organize and guide them. Locke reconceptualized life at two levels: that between people and within persons. I have labeled the two levels or means through which Locke carved out toleration “public privacy” and “psychological pluralism.” With the former, boundaries are rearranged among people. For persons to live in such a newly configured world, however, they will have to be different from the type of person for whom intolerance was a normal and acceptable practice. The internal experience of the self that Locke is suggesting here is what I call a psychological pluralism or multiple self. Before turning to these two substantive levels, I also want to point out that the sheer fact of emphasizing boundaries is an important component in what Locke was trying to accomplish. Through the elaboration of the dualisms between religion/politics, inner/outer, mind/body, private/public, Locke established explicit lines of demarcation. In accentuating boundaries, one stresses not only what marks two things as distinct but also that

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there must be rules for moving from one sphere to the other. Boundaries automatically entail codes or rules for crossing the lines (“invisible” or not as the case may be—the coercion may not be physical but often the strongest brakes on action are psychological). As Mary Douglas notes, “All margins are dangerous” (1966, 121), and the boundaries between different spheres of life require ways of negotiating them. Locke does not make this argument explicitly, but it emerges from the thrust of his work in the Letter.33 Boundary crossing must be justified. Staying within the set spheres of activity is equivalent to toleration: The state, clergy, and individuals ought not to impose themselves in areas where the logic of their proper function does not apply. The first substantive level through which toleration could be more securely grounded on the basis of dichotomies that Locke indicated in the Letter was what we might label the creation of a “public privacy.” By way of introducing this, let me first consider the paradox of the public/private distinction in terms of toleration. On the one hand, public recognition is demanded in the name of true toleration, whereas on the other hand, pleas for privacy and protection of matters from public scrutiny and laws are also claimed as toleration. This paradox results in part from the ambiguous and shifting value ascribed to the public versus the private. In one guise, the distinction between the public and private points to a ranking between them. According to the ancient Greek worldview, human action and expression had to be realized within the polis for them to have true significance, whereas for the most part, that which belonged to the private sphere was devalued. This model of self-expression remains a powerful strain within modern life. An example is the demand of gay groups for public acceptance and recognition: A mere cessation of private persecution is not considered sufficient. Along these lines, the public and private are not just “different” spheres of action and experience but involve a hierarchy of power. For something to be “public” entails the deployment of explicit recognition, display, or presentation before an entire community, which also brings in the use of communally justified sanctions including, on occasion, force. When a thing is private, on the other hand, it is hidden from full view of the community in which one lives or at least from the whole of it: A private thing is not subject to or allowed (depending on whether one seeks publicity or not) the light, openness, and likewise not the explicit sanctions of a communal forum.34 What is precluded from the public sphere is less. But this is only one logic in which the public/private duality plays itself out. It is also the case that people do not always see a zero-sum tradeoff, or

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an absolute loss, but very often a benefit to “seclusion” in the private sphere. They are seen to have different kinds of power; different meanings derive from an action or experience that is part of the private as opposed to the public. Thus, with the extensive development of ostensibly private pursuits in modernity, including the accumulation of property and the expansion of nonpolitical “voluntary” communities,35 one might now argue that the public has lost its status as the forum for expression of one’s most important ends. What it has lost has been gained in other ways by the private. What one protects, celebrates, and nurtures in the private will necessarily be very different from what one would have done so in the public. And to many views, the most significant sphere has now become the private because it is here, not in the public, seen as an abstract, amorphous, arbitrary collectivity, that the most important meanings and concerns of one’s life can be pursued. Indeed, liberalism is sometimes praised or condemned for exclusively fostering a valuation of the private. Be that as it may, the ambiguity between the value of the public versus the private sphere remains very much at the core of the debates about the nature and deficiencies of liberalism. Locke, of course, had no conception of this paradox and it was not his aim to defend toleration solely in terms of the public/private dichotomy. But he did indicate indirectly some tools through which this incipient split could provide grounding for toleration. Locke advanced the conceptualization of a private versus a public sphere first by assuming a generally recognized space designated as private. But the boundaries of just what constituted the public versus the private were under dispute at the time. According to one study, “One of the marks distinguishing early modern from industrialised and urbanised society is the lack of a concept of privacy” (Fletcher and Stevenson, 1985, 40). This observation is curious in light of Locke’s Letter: Although it may have been true insofar as the abstract concept of privacy is concerned, it was not true in terms of how persons were coming to conceive of themselves in relation to others and to their own personal experiences.36 Therefore, Locke’s contention that the sphere of privacy and its contents were well-established and respected, as the passages examined previously indicate, though a fiction ideologically, was presented by him as an accepted reality because he needed it for his reconstruction. And what he was stating must have been in some sense plausible for his readers. But Locke did not hammer home the public/private duality in its modern formulation. The categorization of areas of life under each rubric was too fluid, though becoming less so, during the seventeenth century. This may have made it easier for him to implicitly mark out a third area between

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the two poles. I call this sphere a public privacy. Locke pointed to it in this passage: Having thus at length freed men from all Dominion over one another in matters of Religion, let us now consider what they are to do. All men know and acknowledge that God ought to be publickly worshipped. Why other wise do they compel one another unto the publick Assemblies? Men therefore constituted in this liberty are to enter into some Religious Society, that they may meet together, not only for mutual Edification, but to own to the world that they worship God, and offer unto his divine Majesty such service as they themselves are not ashamed of, and such as they think not unworthy of him. (38–39, emphasis added)

I suggest we interpret Locke’s demand that worship of God be carried out in public in this way.37 One’s belief in God must be expressed, presented in public before a community. There must be witnesses as one “owns to the world” the nature of one’s faith. Now this public presentation of one’s faith is not equivalent to the other (more medieval) idea that a community must share and share together one religious belief, that is, the idea of unity. A fundamental characteristic of this public or community was that it was not made up of all like-minded persons, believers in the same confession. These two facts—that one must express oneself in public and that the public to which one presents one’s self is a heterogeneous one—had profound consequences for how persons live and think of themselves in a socialpolitical world. Locke’s position indicated, first, an individuation of belief. It also pointed crucially to a “space” in which presentation of one’s religious identity in public was protected from interference or coercion by others and by the state. Finally, this juridical space of protection (a cold, formal state of affairs) was much more than that because it involved expression/display, on the one hand, and recognition/awareness on the other (an emotional, substantive state of affairs). This created a type of community that was neither purely formal nor purely confessional. It was indeed a community insofar as it involved expression and recognition, but the heterogeneity at its core also left a distance between members, requiring a guarantee from the state of protection of its members. This space or community I have called a public privacy: It emerged as a buffer zone between the purely private (intimate family) and the purely public (law and coercion). In it, persons acknowledged a type of involvement without demanding total exclusivity and intimacy. The expectation that a realm of public privacy existed, even if only tacitly, allowed persons the necessary margin to tolerate those with whom

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they did not share religious (or other) beliefs or identifications. It worked as a safety valve. The development of a sphere of privacy in the early modern period, in which people increasingly separated out their political from their private lives, enabled toleration to become a more stable value. When persons live as if all spheres of value must be translatable into one another, as if the content of virtue and right in one’s individual “private” existence must be realizable or reflected equally in one’s collective “public” action and in one’s public institutions, there are no borders preventing one from demanding the immediate realization of divisive attachments. The progressive detachment of public from private did not lead to a rigid dichotomy between two exclusive realms but engendered a middle ground as well in which the risks of toleration would not seem too overwhelming.38 We should turn finally to the way in which the person is constructed who would inhabit a world of explicit boundaries and a world in which he or she would need to be able to cross boundaries. I call this psychological makeup a psychological pluralism. In Locke’s Letter, the experience of a psychological pluralism derived from both the mind/body and the public/private split. By focusing on the divergent modes of a person’s existence, Locke underscored that within one person multiple points of view and multiple experiences were possible.39 One was both a spiritual being as well as a base, physical animal; one exhibited and experienced life in both a hidden world of family as well as in a public world sanctioned by the gaze and organized power of a larger community. By stressing this, Locke was countering those writers whose primary goal was to render humans first and foremost creatures of God—religiously guided and structured all the way through. In their view, all other facets of one’s earthly life were derivative and insignificant in terms of spiritual existence. But when religion (or any other single identity) assumes the whole of one’s conception of self and meaning in the world, the chances of understanding persons—even if only in partial ways—who do not share this identity become very difficult. In a context in which alternative experiences and identifications are given attention as potentially important for who one is, whether these are political, existential, or social/cultural, crosscutting possibilities emerge and considerations of alternatives do not appear as alien or threatening. We can interpret Locke’s position, especially in light of his criticisms of religious identity in the Tracts, as having developed a view of the person as a divided being who could consider his or her own perspective from a plurality of viewpoints. The plural or multiple self is more amenable to toleration in a disciplinary way, where a rational, controlled self takes charge of constraining the irrational, emotionally volatile self, as Tully (1993) has explored in his fine

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article on Locke, “Governing Conduct.” Or it can work by providing the person with alternative points of view or focuses of identification. Distinctions of this nature may lead persons to see themselves as having multiple allegiances and a number of sources of meaning and motivation in their lives. Hence, the dualism that Locke underlined set the stage for perceiving toleration as a bona fide value in the public realm from both a negative and positive direction. That is, to the extent persons did not hold one orthodox and exclusive view of what was important to them, they might be less deaf to other sources of meaning. More positively, toleration might be seen as a way to protect the very character of one’s own peculiar individuality—any person’s internal plurality pointed to her uniqueness. And toleration ostensibly guarded against the coercion or manipulation of this individuality. Eventually, one strong source of toleration as a broad and culturally significant value emerged in this model of the person as embodying a “psychological plurality,” which developed alongside it; indeed, they are partially conducive to one another’s existence. With this shift in the view of the person, which Locke’s constructions initiate, toleration begins to appear less as a foreign or extraneous political device imposed on the expectations and motivations of recalcitrant believers in the early modern period, and takes on a naturalness that makes it more than provisional state policy.

Conclusion By interpreting Locke’s support for toleration in light of his earlier rejection, I sought to uncover certain aspects of his defense that are not usually remarked upon. Implicit in the Letter is a recognition of the irrational nature of human action and motivation. In order to keep this dimension in check, Locke believed we ought to view human relations as divided into bounded spheres that would act to constrain unreasonable impulses. Locke’s work underscores toleration at the public institutional level in the separation between spheres of authority and experience, at the social level in his support for a notion of society as a sphere of recognition and display, and at the level of political-psychology in which persons find it natural to conceive of themselves as living within an outer plurality. Presumably, by marking the world into distinct spaces, Locke implicitly (assigning intentionality here is not the issue) relied upon or hoped to construct internal cognitive and emotional capacities more conducive to toleration between persons. In conclusion, there are three observations I wish to highlight about the work done through a language of boundaries. First, in conditions of extremity, the establishment and protection of separate spheres can serve to

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stop incessant conflict. The beginnings of this were seen in the work of Bodin, and Locke carries this much further into a modern and different sort of idiom through the public/private contrast. Second, once a collectivity has accepted the idea and practice of boundaries, slides into crisis situations are more difficult. A rubric for negotiation then exists. Nevertheless, conflicts will sometimes be brought to a head and this may lead ultimately to constitutive crises.40 The final and most important conclusion is that boundaries are not impermeable, opaque, walls but exist to create community itself and must therefore be subject to renegotiation. People will not agree on just what ought to be included under various rubrics. The dualisms of church/state, mind/body, and public/private are constantly challenged and negotiated not only on the basis of what ought to fall within each sphere, but on the very construction of such dichotomies themselves. Much of modern Western political discourse (not to mention philosophical analysis and cultural critique) centers on marking off where one ends and the other begins: Issues such as homosexuality, abortion, adoption, school prayer, protection of racist, sexist, “hate” speech, pornography, etcetera all force this issue. What is private and what ought to be subject to public regulation? What belongs to religion and what to politics? Is “harm” only a physical phenomenon or should psychological and emotional pain be included within the political sphere as well? Furthermore, the boundaries drawn in the past may no longer mark the relevant terms of justice and obligation. We do not consider it acceptable now to maintain that men can rule as they please over women and children within the privacy of their homes. Therefore, situations of negotiation demand debate on how and why certain borders of authority and obligation to one another are drawn. The public recognition of boundaries as legitimate and yet also subject to erosion and reconstruction is itself a resource within liberalism: It accepts conflict while mitigating slides into extreme conflict and animosity. In this case, boundaries are far from being an impediment to community but constitute it.

CHAPTER

6

Defoe and the Individual: Forms of Public Judgment The best way for spiritual transformation . . . is through literature. —Lu Xun (1881–1936)

In this final chapter on the authors who helped establish an ethic of toleration, I turn to Daniel Defoe (1660–1731). Defoe’s engagement with politics was more extensive and concrete than any of the other writers I have examined so far and he considered much of this activity to be in the service of toleration. I will argue that his act of writing Robinson Crusoe, the form of the work, and its content constitute efforts to create a culture of toleration, and that this act was political not only artistic.1 Defoe’s work is a response to a central problem in the development of toleration. I touched upon this problem in my discussion of Locke’s implication of a zone of public privacy: Toleration establishes the possibility that the presentation of one’s individual or group distinctiveness is for others to witness. What kind of reaction to this demonstration of difference counts as toleration? To insure coexistence and accommodation, must all persons as members of diverse groups or as holders of different beliefs refrain from judging others as a public act? It may appear that toleration requires that we do away with public judgment2 altogether, that the state stand neutral, and that individuals holding their preferences and desires refrain from a public verdict on others’ beliefs and commitments. But this is not possible: Toleration is an issue because there is no radical separation between diverse and conflicting groups but a commitment to continue as a community in some form. Any form of community will 125

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generate public judgment, even if not officially sanctioned, it arises as a natural process of collective interaction and decision making and persons living in the society perceive themselves as constrained or supported by it. Toleration demands of persons individually and as members of groups that they be able to live with conflict, strong disagreement, and concrete otherness. We might describe all of Defoe’s work throughout his prolific life as involved in directly confronting this question of public judgment. All writers, of course, attempt to shape public judgment. But Defoe was much more directly cognizant and also much more adept at the mechanics of shaping that judgment. I have already examined in the cases of Bodin and Locke the political means by which minority and majority groups might agree to live on mutually acceptable terms. But toleration, as this book has meant to demonstrate, is much more than a bargain between groups, and requires a deeper acceptance. In its original establishment, those supporting it sought ways to inculcate habits of living in the midst of this type of diversity and under the penumbra of a public judgment that would not always coincide with one’s own. Defoe offers different standards of judgment and a different way to filter one’s relationship to these standards for persons caught in intense ideological debate and intransigence. He demonstrates that toleration is not a matter of getting rid of public judgment, but of finding alternative means of relating oneself to it. The means that he offers is the fictional form of constructing images of the person, as opposed to public dictates of correct behavior and rules. The standards are presented in the types of persons he holds up as remarkable—creative, adventurous, resourceful, and famously subversive of standards of the society around them. The individual Defoe paints in his fiction is both embedded in and striving to remake the standards by which society judges him or her. In examining Montaigne’s cultural innovations of the self, I focused on the role played by the mind in reflecting on itself and on the body in which it is housed. Defoe’s fiction is not a fiction of introspection—his characters are outward, action-oriented protagonists who imprint their presence upon an external world. Yet, in them he gives modern culture an indispensable tool for the process of reflection that is necessary for securing toleration—as embodied values they are debatable but also attractive standards of openness, and because of their fictional representation, they allow public reflection and judgment without coercive sanctions. The usual interpretation of Defoe’s contribution to modern pluralist society is of his depiction of the isolated individual. His most famous cre-

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ation—Robinson Crusoe—represents “the myth of modern individualism” in the words of one of Defoe’s best interpreters, Ian Watt. I fundamentally challenge this view of Crusoe and correspondingly of the dependence of pluralism and toleration on a highly individualistic culture. Doubtless, the individual and the nature of his or her distinctiveness are the focus of much of his greatest fictional work, but the substance of the individual is deeply social, a point I have emphasized in various ways in examining Montaigne and Locke. The idea of the individual can be seen to stand for a person’s relationship to the problem of constraints lodged in the society surrounding them. A person’s consciousness, feelings of who they are, where they fit among others, how much room they have to move around their world, indeed what the nature of “their world” is are all hemmed in or opened up, at least in major ways, through their experience of public judgment. This approach to understanding Defoe also enables us to see how toleration is an issue in situations of negotiating the nature or shape of the community. In contrast to extreme conditions that I have called threshold situations in which groups must move into a form of community out of a situation of complete noncommunity or antipathy of identity, conditions of negotiation assume a relatively stable set of institutions and channels of interaction, but require active and conscious efforts to reinterpret the relations of identity between persons or groups within the society. In the case of Locke, I focused on the distinctive features of the political community itself—which boundaries and spaces of interaction were to characterize his politics of toleration. With Defoe the focus of negotiation is over the type and standards of judgment existing within a society, which put pressure on the individual to act and be certain ways. Defoe explores the dynamics of change and of antagonism in the shaping of a person’s identity and in this way makes the capacity of continual negotiation itself a solution to the problem of how the person is related to social standards and boundaries. Defoe in effect asserts that boundaries of toleration, what is acceptable and what is not, are not forever fixed in public judgment but subject to change. The process of negotiating the nature of the community then becomes a value itself, not a background source of instability. Before turning to his fiction, I want to examine some of Defoe’s earlier polemics in his efforts to persuade the public. We might see the search for and successful elaboration of a fictional presentation of the self as an alternative to this earlier ideological mode of political argument on issues surrounding freedom of belief.

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Toleration as a Fighting Creed In his obituary, Defoe was described in these terms: A few days ago dy’d Mr. Daniel Defoe, sen. a person well known for his numerous and various writings. He had a great natural genius; and understood very well the trade and interest of this Kingdom. . . . He was in the interest of civil and religious liberty, in behalf of which he appeared on several remarkable occasions. (quoted in Backscheider, 530)3

Defoe wrote during a period of great political tumult and great ideological disagreement that defined the shape of English national identity for many years to come. Like Locke, he addressed an agitated and combustible public, which was nevertheless located within a relatively stable political system. But even more than Locke, Defoe himself was one of the prime instigators of the intensity of the conflict. Defoe is one of the most remarkable and prolific writers in English history. His fictional work is merely the most famous summit of a mountain of writing, which Defoe produced in his efforts at persuasion throughout his life. By conservative estimates, his bibliography includes over 200 items (one of these “items” being his journal Review which itself comprises over 20 volumes) spanning the fields of politics, economics, history, sociology, psychology, journalism, religious controversy, travel, poetry, and fiction.4 Writing was akin to breathing for him: “if being tied under Sureties and Penalties not to write . . . be not equivalent to being dead” (An Elegy on the Author of the True-Born English-Man, B129), he wrote after being released from Newgate prison. Early in his life, Defoe had decided against a career as a Dissenting minister, in favor of business and trade. He would always be drawn but continually fail at the latter pursuits. He came to recognize his calling through the printed word: “Preaching of Sermons is Speaking to a few of Mankind: Printing of Books is Talking to the whole World” (preface to The Storm, B144–145). Defoe stood at the center of the shaping of public opinion in an age when the meaning of freedom of the press was being worked out. During one extended period, he served as chief propagandist for Robert Harley (Queen Anne’s secretary of state for the north during the years 1704–1708 and then lord treasurer from 1711–1714). Harley was “absolutely crucial to the rise of a free press in Great Britain” (Downie, 1979, 3) and Defoe’s Review was the prime organ through which Harley and Defoe attempted to shape public opinion.5 We now take for granted the role of public opinion and a free press as core features of liberal political culture, but in the earliest years of the formation of a “free” press, newspapers and pamphlets were intimately linked to

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particular political points of view; essentially in England papers were either Tory or Whig propaganda instruments. As Downie stresses: “From the outset the connection between electoral activity and the rise of a virulent political press can be discerned” (ibid., 1). Defoe’s gifts for expression were so great (and his need for money so bottomless, given his large family and continually failing business ventures) that he often wrote for both sides on an issue. Indeed his capacity and willingness to do this earned him a reputation for hypocrisy and villainy. Yet, from Defoe’s point of view, it was always for the good of England as a whole and for its flourishing, politically and economically, that he wrote. Defoe never sought to align himself completely behind one party, though his sympathies much more clearly lay with the Whigs. In 1689 the Toleration Act had been passed in England, insuring freedom of worship to Nonconformists. In tandem, Locke had developed a more abstract language and justification for the idea. Despite these achievements in theory and policy, the culture of early modern England remained a dangerous and repressive place for Dissenters who were continually threatened with a retraction of liberties. The words defending toleration and legal constraints enforcing it were themselves highly charged volleys in wars between religious confessions, political parties, and cultural antagonists. Defoe was a prime participant in these paper/pamphlet wars. Much of what Defoe wrote can be linked to arguments for toleration. He supported religious rights for Dissenters, freedom of the press, and economic trade and the development of markets.6 Although Defoe did not systematically study the idea of toleration and its complexity and left no obvious canonical text similar to Locke’s for the cause, he repeatedly argued for its rightfulness as a political policy.7 For him toleration was very much a fighting creed, one he had grown up with as a shield against the persecutions reinstated against Nonconformists in the years following the Cromwellian Protectorate.8 Backscheider notes that Defoe maintained consistent positions in his nearly two dozen publications on the subject of the Dissenters. These are, as she lays them out: (1) Dissenters are loyal Englishmen, not congenital rebels. (2) It is to England’s advantage to let Dissenters serve their country in the military and in government. (3) The Corporation and Test Acts9 “are a Bait to People to Banter their Consciences”; they make “the Sacred Institutions of Christ a Drudge to Secular Interest, and a Cause of mens Sins.” The Test is “an Unjust Design” and “an Unreasonable Method.” An Act of Exclusion would be the straightforward way to go. (4) He has always opposed the bill to prevent occasional conformity10 because he believes it contradicts the Act of Toleration. (5) Occasional conformity weakens the Dissenters (“prepares their Members to fall off, and Posterity to Conform totally”). (B125–126)

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The combativeness with which he engaged the fight over Dissent is best observed in Defoe’s pamphlet The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), his most provocative effort to sway opinion against the Church of England. In this pamphlet, Defoe adopts—as a means to demonstrate its inherent diabolical nature—the perspective of a High Church zealot and with inflammatory language calls for radical repressive treatment of Dissenters, as made clear in the following three quotations: If ever you will establish the best Christian Church in the world. If ever you will suppress the Spirit of Enthusiasm. If ever you will free the Nation from the viperous Brood that have so long sucked the Blood of their Mother. If ever you will leave your Posterity free from Faction and Rebellion, this is the time. This is the time to pull up this heretical Weed of Sedition that has so long disturb’d the Peace of our Church, and poisoned the good Corn. But, says another Hot and Cold Objector, this is renewing Fire and Faggot, reviving the Act De Heret. Comburendo: This will be Cruelty in its Nature, and barbarous to all the World. I answer, ‘TIS Cruelty to kill a Snake or a Toad in cold Blood, but the poyson of their Nature makes it a Charity to our Neighbours to destroy those Creatures, not for any personal Injury receiv’d, but for prevention; not for the Evil they have done, but the Evil they may do. . . . [T]hey are to be rooted out of this Nation, if ever we will live in Peace, serve God, or enjoy our Own; as for the Manner, I leave it to those Hands, who have a Right to execute God’s Justice on the Nation’s and the Church’s Enemies. (Defoe, 1702, 125–126) If one severe Law were made, and punctually executed, that who ever was found at a Conventicle, shou’d be Banished the Nation, and the Preacher be Hang’d, we shou’d soon see an end of the Tale, they would all come to Church and one Age wou’d make us all One again. (128) Alas the Church of England! What with Popery on one Hand, and Schismaticks on the other; how has she been Crucify’d between two Thieves. Now, let us Crucifie the Thieves. Let her Foundations be establish’d upon the Destruction of her Enemies: the Doors of Mercy being always open to the returning Part of the deluded People: let the Obstinate be rul’d with the Rod of Iron. (133)

The document’s language fully exploits images of contagion, mixture, blood, infiltration and pollution: “the Wound is coroded, the Vitals begin to mortifie, and nothing but Amputation of members can compleat the Cure” (131).11 Because of this, he counsels, the faithful must have the strength to undertake the physically harsh measures necessary to cleanse the body politic. These images were rife in the anti–Dissenter rhetoric of the time. Defoe builds this diatribe in all its rhetorical excess as a means to expose the underlying logic of the High Church position on the occasional

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conformity bill. The logical conclusion of the anti–Dissenter language is shown to lead to extremes from which his readers would recoil. Thus, the reader would be led to reject High Church extremism.12 Unfortunately, the tract was so convincing that many rallied to the position voiced by the spokesman Defoe elaborates in the text, whereas Dissenters were infuriated and alarmed. The rhetorical strategy backfired, Defoe was charged with seditious libel, pilloried, and imprisoned. Defoe’s aim had been to discredit the inflammatory language that had come to characterize much of the discussion of Dissent in the press and pulpits. However, instead of leading to public disgust with the polemics of enmity, his writing had increased animosity and distrust and hardened divisions between groups. This central event in Defoe’s life (he used his Newgate prison experience frequently afterward, for example in images of imprisonment in Robinson Crusoe and more famously for Moll Flanders’ birth and imprisonment in Newgate) underscored the nature of ideological conflict in the context of his time. Defoe showed how ideas can be transformed into identity through bodily metaphors, thereby preventing any reasonable consideration of the issues. The free-for-all of public language heated to this level can serve as much to distort and limit public options as to extend public discussion. This changes identity but into highly intolerant positions. Brandishing the dangers of public debate is of course a favorite weapon used by the powerful to silence critics. Defoe repeatedly argued against censorship of the press, nevertheless, for those seeking to change the minds of the public in order to propagate the good of the whole, questions of tactics of oppositional language ought to be weighed. The good of England— its flourishing as a unified and prosperous nation—was the overarching ideal that inspired Defoe’s work. But the question of the nature of that good and who most faithfully carried it forward was itself unanswerable if both sides insisted on exclusive representation of that good. In a similar vein, Schonhorn notes in discussing the Tory/Whig controversy over the origins of government during this time:13 This violent antithesis, this mutual exclusiveness of ideology, accounts in great part for the shrillness of political debate in Anne’s reign. It also accounts for the eclecticism and seeming contradictions in Defoe’s later political writings. Once, policies, procedures, and political philosophies had been varied and complex, facilitating debate and helping to keep multiple options open. The hardening of views, the retreat to irreconcilable extremes, in the years following the Revolution closed these options and precluded a settling of disagreements on some middle ground. Defoe . . . refused to maintain a position on the origins of government and the accession of a sovereign that would lock him into either camp. (Schonhorn, 1991, 41)

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The marketplace of ideas is not a neutral space for persons to enter and leave at will; the images, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs accentuated there take hold of the minds of readers and listeners and cause them to see themselves and others in specific, negative or positive, calming or inflaming, stereotyping or open-minded ways. Defoe was a master at manipulating the malleability of the public mind, but his experiment in caricature with The Shortest Way failed to bring reason, illumination, and mutual accommodation to public debate. If the rhetoric used implies that accommodation can be achieved only on the terms of one side’s defeat, then progress out of stalemate and division will be very difficult. Clearly, there are times when one side must be defeated—the Nazis and American slavery are permanent examples for us. But Defoe’s attempts to demonstrate the consequences of vilification also made obvious the dead end of a discourse of this type from either side.14 When one side insists that the other side vilifies it, this is as well a form of name calling. In pointing out the dangers of ideological conflict, which can easily descend into a language of enmity, we should not hope for a false consensus but look for alternatives or compensating strategies for public argument.

The Uses of Fiction After 1714, at a relatively late age, Defoe entered one of the most creative periods of his writing life, when he turned away from pamphlet writing and began experimenting with newer narrative and fictional forms. It was during this explosive period that he produced Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel Jack (1722/1723), and Roxanne (1724) among many other substantial and innovative works. Though he focused indirectly on specific issues of controversy, in all of these works, it is clear that Defoe means to comment on the world around him. His fictional writing is just as fully concerned with the construction of public judgment as his more directly polemical pieces had been. How might fictional writing serve a public, political purpose that journalism would not? The pamphlet form of argument had not alleviated partisanship and acrimony but only intensified it because it forced interlocutors to take sides. Public judgment in this version is reduced to the prevailing public opinion. But perhaps the way forward, out of internecine conflict, is not to be found in forcing a final resolution of substantive issues as much as in finding and developing cultural resources which work through a society’s engraved divides and problems, on an ongoing basis. Defoe’s aim was to find grounds for persuading the nation on the right course for

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her flourishing and central to that very flourishing was the subsiding of implacable conflicts and the creation of a public community. Therefore, fictional writing might serve as a less charged means to facilitate alternative perspectives. To enable a society and the working (not just substantive content) of public judgment to become more open and fluid, the “tool” of the novel served to direct attention and public animosity in less head-on collisions. Another iteration of an argument about the rightfulness of religious liberty and the legitimacy of the Toleration Act would not accomplish this. If we see one engine in Defoe’s productivity as his drive to shape public judgment to be more open-ended, then it helps to make sense of his turn away from traditional forms of political expression toward newer modes. I do not mean by this claim that his aesthetic experimentation was driven by purely strategic considerations. Human motivation and the causes of human action can almost never be reduced to such simplistic formulas. The way I have conceived the logic for this shift may not have been Defoe’s conscious intention in writing fiction, yet it can make sense—politically and culturally—of his development and the blockage he may have felt in continuing to use older forms of debate. Before looking at Robinson Crusoe, I want very briefly to justify my use of the term “novel” in this context. While I have sought to frame Defoe’s use of fictional writing as in part compelled by his sense of the insufficiency of other rhetorical methods, his turn to the genre of narrative fiction that we now call the novel was not equivalent to a political philosopher’s or journalist’s dabbling in novel-writing today. His turn was, in fact, part and parcel of the invention and development of this new type of writing itself. During the course of the eighteenth century, a distinctly new mode of cultural expression emerged, which we have come to call the novel.15 While the stabilization of this category of narrative itself, i.e., the recognized concept of the novel, did not come about until later, the term serves as a necessary rubric through which we can follow the coalescing of what Richetti has called “a deep cultural transformation” in everyday consciousness that sought literary exploration in more “realistic” terms. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the novel as “a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length . . . in which characters and actions representative of the real life of past or present times are portrayed in a plot of more or less complexity.” One feature of this form of writing is its realism.16 The reader is led to recognize in it persons who have experiences, emotions and thoughts with which she can identify and participate, cognitively and emotionally. The point of maintaining the idea of the realism of the novel here (I use this in

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a descriptive not a normative sense) is that it signifies the presentation of lives and choices that are concrete and seemingly accessible or close to home for the reader, so they serve the function of allowing or pulling in the reader in a more direct, undistanced way. Granted all writing, and “realistic” novel writing is no exception, is full of artifice; nevertheless, the attraction the reader has for this type of life-story derives more from its quotidian rather than awe-inspiring quality. The reader knows these are not “true” stories of actual persons and events, and yet they convey a palpable sense of reality. With the emergence of the novel, there is initially ambivalence about the “truth” that is possible if we tell stories of great detail about individual lives. McKeon notes Defoe’s insistence that his tale of Robinson Crusoe is “in its Substance true” (120). “The Story, though Allegorical, is also Historical” (in Shinagel, 259). Defoe continues to claim in the Preface to Volume III17 of his Robinson Crusoe books after he is criticized for constructing a romance and therefore a lie. In this situation of epistemological uncertainty in which traditional categories of truth and fabrication have been fundamentally challenged, Defoe must work to create the mind of a reading public in which persons come to be subtly accustomed to experiencing truths about themselves through imagining and sympathizing with others whom they do not have to believe have actually lived. Defoe’s attempt to shape the mind of the reading public through novelistic tools enabled him to present new ways of thinking and feeling and a new cultural resource for negotiating the deep conflicts within society without a direct assault on readers’ assumptions. In this mode, he was able to carry forward a more pluralistic mentality with which toleration could be stabilized. The form of the novel in its original stages therefore can be seen as a highly political phenomenon. When he was nearly sixty years old, Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, a work that was instantly wildly popular and controversial. Robinson Crusoe has been paired with The Odyssey as one of the two greatest stories in the world.18 One quality of its greatness is that it presents a human life that is both supremely ordinary and flawed and simultaneously extraordinary and emblematic. Defoe constructed, on the one hand, a myth of the solitary individual triumphing over nature and his own spiritual emptiness, but he also gave us this in the form of a concrete, particularized person, with what feels to the reader as highly specific characterization, action, and dialogue. He was able to build a story that was more than a reproduction of the stock characters and events in other travel, adventure, pirate, history, or religious guide literature of the time.19 As Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted: “Crusoe himself is merely a representative of humanity in general; neither

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his intellectual nor his moral qualities set him above the middle degree of mankind; his only prominent characteristic is the spirit of enterprise and wandering, which is, nevertheless, a very common disposition,” and “he who makes me forget my specific class, character, and circumstances, raises me into the universal man. Now this is DeFoe’s excellence” (in Shinagel, 288, 289). From the first publication of Robinson Crusoe, the meaning of Defoe’s message has been in dispute. Its multiple layers and meanings are in part what make the book so universally and timelessly engaging.20 However, there are more and less paradigmatic frames that have been applied to it. One of the first frames in which it was located was that of religion. Paul Hunter argues that we should see it as an exercise in spiritual autobiography: “Although Milton and Bunyan are usually considered to present the poetry and prose epitomes of the Puritan view of life (and Defoe is thought to present only a fractured, diluted, and ultimately materialistic view of it), Robinson Crusoe also embodies the Puritan view of man on a most profound level; it also portrays, through the struggles of one man, the rebellion and punishment, repentance and deliverance, of all men, as they sojourn in a hostile world” (1966, 126). Another classic perspective depicts Crusoe as homo economicus, the modern economic man with an inherent drive toward ingenuity, productiveness, and technological progress. Typical of this approach is Watt’s: “That Robinson Crusoe, like Defoe’s other main characters . . . is an embodiment of economic individualism hardly needs demonstration. All Defoe’s heroes pursue money, which he characteristically called ‘the general denominating article in the world’ ’’ (1960, 63). A third line of interpretation is that Robinson Crusoe is fundamentally an exploration of the nature of the self as a locus of consciousness and action—that is, Crusoe is the isolated individual in modern conditions of mutual isolation. In Homer Brown’s words: “Defoe’s novels are based on a notion of radical egocentricity. Robinson wonders why his isolation on the island was ‘any grievance or affliction’ since ‘it seems to me that life in general is, or ought to be, but one universal act of solitude’” (Brown, 1971, 565). Finally, Schonhorn emphasizes the political nature of the text and the significance of the “rhetoric of magistracy” (Schonhorn, 1991, 144), rulership, and implicit physical coercion as part of a theory of monarchy that he finds in Robinson Crusoe. He maintains that Robinson Crusoe is “a political fable that emanated from an imagination that had been actively engaged in the most intense political debates in modern English history” (ibid.). Clearly, each of these perspectives contains part of the meaning of the work.

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In this chapter, I examine another possible frame in which to locate Robinson Crusoe’s significance. In writing Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was performing an act of political and social criticism and persuasion. Defoe did not only seek to entertain his readers; he also meant to stir up the platitudes that they carried with them. The book launches a critique of public judgment as it was then embodied in traditional social norms and by conflicting religious parties. One of the earliest critics of the book, Charles Gildon sensed its subversive capacity and was led to denounce it: “to render any Fable worthy of being received into the Number of those which are truly valuable, it must naturally produce some useful Moral . . . but this of Robinson Crusoe . . . is design’d against . . . publick good” (quoted in Hunter, 1966, 20). Defoe’s fiction is deeply political, not only in what it explicitly depicts (an island kingdom ruled over by Robinson, for instance) as in what it does. A political act is designed to affect the mind of the public, and in affecting that mind Defoe’s act was aimed at influencing certain persistent and calcified dilemmas in English political society. It makes the individual, replete with idiosyncrasies, irrational drives, self-justification, and doubt, as well as charms and talents, a palpable reality. It locates in the experience of one person a complex of tensions, and in exploring this individual Robinson Crusoe circumnavigates the intransigent positions of opposing causes. But it does more than that. In its content, Defoe’s invention—Robinson Crusoe—lives a life of unparalleled creativity and variety. Through his telling Defoe elevates these qualities, and these qualities are essentially antithetical to the life of traditional role-playing and static honor. Thus, in its form and content it aims to open up the consciousness of its audience. We can find in Robinson Crusoe a critique of a conventional grounding of the public good and of public judgment. In his Preface to Volume III of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe states: [I]f the Obstinacy of our Age should shut their Ears against the just Reflections made in this Volume, . . . there will come an Age, when the Minds of Men shall be more flexible, when the Prejudices of their Fathers shall have no Place, and when the Rules of Vertue and Religion justly recommended, shall be more gratefully accepted than they may be now, that our children may rise up in Judgment against their fathers, and one Generation be edified by the same Teaching, which another Generation had despised. (262)

The looming problem for Defoe was the obstinacy of the public mind, the intransigence of deadening collective judgments. In its place, he does not

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lay out a fully developed alternative set of “public standards” for collective judgment but he does indicate possible sources for them. Recalling that Defoe’s life’s work was oriented toward politics (even his mercantilist economics was firmly tied to the interests of state) we can see his writing of Robinson Crusoe not as a diversion from politics but the continuation of it by other means.21

Inclinations of the Modern Self Robinson Crusoe is a text that might be read as an attempt to go beyond confessional and ideological conflict, to move the readers’ minds to a level of reality that all can identify with. Nevertheless, the book is certainly not reducible to questions about religious conflict; these conflicts themselves are an outgrowth of larger social changes at work and Defoe’s writing addresses these changes as well. The book is an extended examination of Robinson’s actions, drives, impulses, work, thoughts, and emotions. Defoe embodies Robinson as a character who can become a point of identification for readers who disagreed on many fundamental issues. He is able to serve as this cultural resource because Defoe makes him intriguing and attractive through the dynamism integral to Robinson’s personality; he is not a wooden personification of any particular point of view or virtue, except perhaps the virtue of perseverance. The tensions in Defoe’s creation parallel both the tensions in English culture during that period and the tensions at the core of Defoe himself. But Defoe also sets his character on a certain trajectory: He does not leave him in suspended animation. That trajectory ultimately comes down on the side of freedom, self-creation, and social needs as opposed to tradition, honor, and social norms. Because he uses the medium of fiction, Defoe is able to give an account of one man’s life as a complex testing of a myriad of conflicting impulses and values. The final product leaves the reader with a sense of “this State of complicated good Fortune” (236)—no easy, sound-bite lesson. We can decipher a logic to the drama of Robinson’s story that supports my interpretation of it as a critique of public judgment as then practiced. This critique is also itself an act of public judgment. A useful way to read the narrative of the individual is as a dialectic of consciousness. Robinson begins in a pure state of impulse, the need to relinquish himself from social constraints. He achieves that in the most stark of terms—shipwrecked on an uninhabited, society-less island. Here he displays and comes to recognize his irrepressible drives toward society that plague him just as deeply and painfully as his earlier impulses to shed social

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conventions had. Finally, through spontaneous acts of moral courage (and luck!) he is able to establish human society on his island and thereby provide himself with the means of escaping its isolating boundaries. On the island, by himself, Robinson had attempted to release himself from social need through his communion with God. God—as a focus of gratitude toward the simple fact of one’s existence—takes the person away from all egoistic and group pathologies. Thus, it would seem Defoe attempted to resolve the tension between his rejection and need for society by appealing to the transcendent good of God. But this never completely satisfies Robinson; his equanimity through faith is constantly destabilized. For the tension to be lessened—it can never be fully overcome—I suggest that Defoe in effect constructs an implicit argument for a transformation of society such that it can become a source of the affirmation of individual self-realization rather than primarily one of social constraint. We have to move away from a society based on stationary norms and ideals of duty/honor to the past and build a society that judges its members along less rigid categories, qualities not of imitation (how well does one follow the mold?) but of creation (how well does one take on the unforeseen?). To see how Defoe promotes this vision, we should turn to the text. Built into the book is a definite dramatic rhythm that shows us the transformative process. It begins with the set up in which he rejects his place in society. The heart of the book is the 28 years alone on the island. These years are divided between the first 15, in which he recreates a life for himself, and the second 13 initiated when he sees a human footprint in the sand in which he is constantly struggling with the imagined and then real presence of the cannibals—“the other.” Finally, in the “resolution,” he is reunited with his society; he even marries and has children of his own. But ultimately his constant need for newness is undiminished at the end as he takes off on another adventure.

Rejecting One’s Place Defoe begins the story of Robinson Crusoe by locating him in a time (born 1632), place (York, England), and social and familial lineage (he was the youngest of three sons, his father was a foreigner from Germany settled in England and had established a solid middle-class status through trade). The moral weight of family ties is undercut when he notes that his parents will die never knowing what happened to him as he never knew the fate of his second brother. By declaring at the outset that the substance of what he is about to relate is never known by his family, he takes them out of the

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central drama and emotionality of the story. They never witness, even minimally as an audience at the end of the story, the transformations that Robinson undergoes. The deep impulse that drives Robinson throughout the book is described at the outset: “my Head began to be fill’d very early with rambling Thoughts. . . . I would be satisfied with nothing but going to Sea, and my Inclination to this led me so strongly against the Will, nay the Commands of my Father, and against all the Entreaties and Perswasions of my Mother and other Friends, that there seem’d to be something fatal in that Propension of Nature tending directly to the Life of Misery which was to befal me” (5), a life which, however—through the detours of misery that befall him—turns out to be enormously successful and flourishing by the end of the book. In pursuing his irrepressible impulse to explore the world, Robinson explicitly rejects accepting the middle “station in life,” which his father begs him to realize is not only his Duty but also for self-interested reasons by far the best state of social relations in which to exist, being the least subject to envy, ambition, and other destructive passions. This pattern of leaving behind what is solid, socially recognized and duty-bound to pursue some unknown, highly risky endeavor is repeated at key points throughout the book, and it should challenge any easy interpretation of the book as a justification of bourgeois values. He undercuts the comforts of a flourishing and lucrative plantation in Brazil to procure slaves, and it is this venture that leads to his shipwreck and subsequent solitude for the next 28 years of his life. And at the end of the book, after rescue and further adventures by land, Robinson is back to his roaming ways. Though Defoe claims that “The Fable is always made for the Moral, not the Moral for the Fable” (259), it is impossible to reduce this motif to one lesson. What indeed is the moral here? In a key statement, Defoe has Robinson say the following: I have been in all my Circumstances a Memento to those who are touched with the general Plague of Mankind, whence, for ought I know, one half of their Miseries flow; I mean, that of not being satisfy’d with the Station wherein God and Nature has plac’d them; for not to look back upon my primitive Condition, and the excellent Advice of my Father, the Opposition to which, was, as I may call it, my ORIGINAL SIN; my subsequent Mistakes of the same Kind had been the Means of my coming into this miserable Condition. . . . (152)

This assertion on Robinson’s part is intriguing, given that what he finally ends up being—and the perspective from which the narrative is written— is a success story. In what way is he a “memento”—a reminder—to all those

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who may have the same impulse to move out and explore the world, that they had better stay where they are and be happy with their expected physical comforts and the satisfactions of upholding social expectations? This risk taking on his part has led Robinson to a much more well-off position economically than he would have achieved had he stayed where his father demanded. So what can he mean? The “plague” he refers to, which significantly he implies most people suffer, is not being satisfied with the social boundaries that have been placed upon one’s station. The miseries one suffers from this are not necessarily material—physical or economic—but psychological and emotional. His original sin is to challenge social convention and his misery is then to be left without a place to locate or root himself. The miserable condition that Robinson ends up in is a state of solitude on the island, which we should see basically parallel to a condition of living in a social void—a life without social acceptance through which one feels at home and located in a context of other persons. Robinson seeks freedom from social, traditional constraints; he is drawn inexorably to the life of adventure and exploration. And yet, the search for ultimate freedom devoid of social constraints will lead only to imprisonment and mortal danger in other forms, as becomes clear when all social constraints are finally relinquished in Robinson’s life on the island.

The Island The crux of the Robinson Crusoe story is almost always defined by Robinson’s solitary life on the island. Spearman writes: “There are two main themes—the wreck and the man alone on the island” (1966, 155). And Watt in his final work, Myths of Modern Individualism (1996) emphasized the attraction of the Robinson Crusoe myth—he is the icon of the independent survivor. In contrast to this view I want to show that “the man alone on the island” is never truly alone and that the forms of his solitude there indicate important aspects of the individual’s relationship to others. Certainly the theme of solitude is central to the book. Chapter 1 of Defoe’s third volume on the life of Robinson Crusoe is entitled “Of Solitude”22 and he has Robinson explicitly state: “I desire to be heard concerning what Solitude really is; for I must confess, I have different Notions about it” (264). We should go back to examine the experience of solitude on the island and try to determine the significance of those different notions. By his own admission, Defoe’s account of the solitary life is much more complex than it is often made out to be. I will focus on two aspects of this solitude: first, it is

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not desirable, and second, it does not really exist because Robinson brings society with him in his mind, habits, and desires. The distinct dramatic rhythm built into the text should alert us to these different forms of being alone. In the first half of his time there, which lasts 15 years, Robinson survives, builds himself a home, comes to read the Bible, and experiences a “conversion” of sorts. This is the phase of solitude in which he is coming to terms with himself apparently devoid of others. The blank fact that there are no other humans on the island constitutes Robinson’s solitary state. This state is repeatedly described in negative terms: “for tho’ I was indeed at large in the Place, yet the Island was certainly a Prison to me” (77). “I was a Prisoner, lock’d up with the Eternal Bars and Bolts of the Ocean, in an uninhabited Wilderness, without Redemption” (89). It is “A Place, where as I had no Society, which was my Affliction” (104); “I whose only Affliction was, that I seem’d banished from human Society, that I was alone, circumscrib’d by the boundless Ocean, cut off from Mankind, and condemn’d to what I call’d silent Life; that I was as one who Heaven thought not worthy to be number’d among the Living” (123). The reader must take these ruminations at face value: Robinson is miserable because he is without society around him, and it is a condition that he would trade for anything in the world. This condition is the cause of his coming to faith in God, and yet, even here Robinson stops himself from embracing this state wholeheartedly. He attempts to make his mind up to be happy to have been delivered from his former sinful life among others, and yet he cannot take that step: [I]t was possible for me to be more happy in this forsaken Solitary Condition, than it was probably I should ever have been in any other Particular State in the World; and with this Thought I was going to give Thanks to God for bringing me to the Place. I know not what it was, but something shock’d my Mind at that Thought, and I durst not speak the Words: How canst thou be such a Hyprocrite, (said I, even audibly) to pretend to be thankful for a Condition, which however thou may’st endeavour to be contented with, thou would’st rather pray heartily to be deliver’d from (90).

Clearly, God cannot fully compensate for a lack of other humans. What is it that he misses? Is it a voice, the warmth of another body? He has both a voice—his parrot’s—and the bodies of his cats and goats, but these are not sufficient. The human body, mind, and emotions are made to be with other humans.23 If the book begins with a rejection of the constraints of social judgment as then practiced and yet demonstrates through Robinson’s pain in his

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loneliness on the island that pure self-sufficiency is equally undesirable, then we must ask if Defoe has an alternative vision of the nature of the social bond. Defoe does provide a reorientation of values for constructing this vision more fully after the drama of the footprint, but even in this first stage of solitude, other humans are not absent and they provide a world within the mind—and even the body—of Robinson as he goes about recreating order out of the chaos of the wilderness. Although Robinson must for the duration of his years on the island repeatedly overcome the debilitating emotional state, which remains always in the background with occasional flare-ups of intensity, he also makes himself happy and at home. Having found himself in the most extreme circumstances, Robinson is able through tremendous work, diligence, and luck to recreate civilization out of nothing. We should look in particular at Defoe’s emphasis on the discovery and the pleasures of work. Here are two typical passages: I searched for the Cassava Root, which the Indians in all that Climate make their Bread of . . . I saw large Plants of Alloes, but did not then understand them. I saw several Sugar Canes, but wild, and for want of cultivation, imperfect. I contented my self with these Discoveries for this Time, and came back musing with my self what course I might take to know the Vertue and Goodness of any of the Fruits or Plants which I should discover. (79)

What will he do with these? How will he mix his labour with them to make them useful? Later, in an irrational effort that instructs him in the virtues of forethought, he begins to build a canoe to carry him across the ocean, but one that is entirely too large for him by himself to transport to the sea: the Eagerness of my Fancy prevail’d, and to work I went. I fell’d a Cedar Tree: I question much whether Solomon ever had such a One for the Building of the Temple at Jerusalem. It was five Foot ten Inches diameter at the lower Part next the Stump. . . . It was not without infinite Labour that I fell’d this Tree: I was twenty Days hacking and hewing at it at the Bottom. . . . When I had gone through this Work, I was extremely delighted with it. (100)

These passages are some of the most immediately appealing in the text because they bring the reader into the pleasures of discovering a new land and of watching the fashioning of a world out of raw material. It may seem that these passages more than anything else testify to the raw power of the individual through discipline and work to be creative and self-sufficient. Yet, in another light they do the very opposite. What they emphasize is the congealed knowledge and labor of a complex social world that is encapsu-

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lated in the mind of Robinson and that he must use for his survival and flourishing. Yes, Robinson is a force of nature who asserts his power over raw material, but he can only do this because he is a repository of others’ experiences and knowledge and they are invoked repeatedly in his efforts. I try’d many Ways to make my self a Basket, but all the Twigs I could get for the Purpose prov’d so brittle, that they would do nothing. It prov’d of excellent Advantage to me now, that when I was a Boy, I used to take great Delight in standing at a Basket-makers, in the town where my Father liv’d, to see them make their Wicker-ware; and being as Boys usually are, very officious to help, and a great Observer of the Manner how they work’d those things, and sometimes lending a Hand, I had by this Means full Knowledge of the methods of it, that I wanted nothing but the Materials; when it came into my Mind, that the Twigs of that Tree from whence I cut my Stakes that grew, might possibly be as tough as the Sallows, and Willows, and Ossiers in England, and I resolv’d to try. (85)

Robinson practices a great variety of trades during this time and they are duly noted by name: mechanick (55,58), farmer (84), basket maker (85), bread maker (93,94), potter (95), stone cutter (96), pastry cook (97), hunter (103), carpenter (106,113), and tailor (106). All of these trades are labeled by the identifications they carry within a complex and extended social network. Robinson has internalized others as sources of knowledge of activities and he can be all of them as the need arises. (In some sense, a reader of novels does the same thing: She internalizes others as sources of experience and she can be each character in turn.) The significant innovation made by Defoe is in showing Robinson’s inhabiting of all these roles. Thus two things appear at once: There are specific roles to be inhabited but any one individual is not locked into that role for life. Perhaps we can find here a path along which Defoe can build a view of how society can rightfully make claims on its members and on the legitimate limits of socially mandated restrictions.

The Cannibals Robinson’s first real “encounter” with the savages is one of the dramatic centerpieces of the book and it initiates the second phase of solitude—his coming to terms with the nature of the self and others. Although Robinson is afraid of the possibility of savages as soon as he begins to put his life together on the island, and his fears about them and wild beasts serve to motivate an extensive and indeed never-ending process of building

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fortifications (it continues the entire time he is there), the actual threat of living savages does not materialize until he has been on the island for 15 years, an event that falls nearly in the middle of the text. Defoe describes the encounter that leads to “a new Scene of my Life”: “It happen’d one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz’d with the Print of a Man’s naked foot on the Shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand: I stood like one thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an Apparition; I listen’d, I look’d round me, I could hear nothing, nor see any Thing” (121). This discovery profoundly disturbs Robinson, so much so that his “Fear banish’d all my religious Hope” (122). He is again thrown out of the comforts of his faith and into a world of moral chaos. The savages provoke in Robinson some of his most searching moral questions. But why should Robinson’s judgment of his relationship to God and his view of morality derived from the dictates of the Bible be challenged by the presence of a group of people who maintain a radically different mode of existence? Using the image of cannibals, although commonplace during the years of exploration in which Defoe wrote, enabled him to confront basic questions of identity, for while he may begin with cannibalism, the cannibal as a person, can be saved from this act. Cannibalism is the most fundamental of taboos: We recoil with physical revulsion at the thought of it. It was a sign of the ultimate depravity of human nature and Defoe presents the sight of cannibals consuming humans and his response in great detail: I was perfectly confounded and amaz’d; nor is it possible for me to express the Horror of my Mind, as seeing the Shore spread with Skulls, Hands, Feet, and other Bones of humane Bodies; . . . I was so astonish’d with the Sight of these Things, that I entertain’d no Notion of any Danger to my self from it for a long while; All my Apprehensions were bury’d in the Thoughts of such a Pitch of inhuman, hellish Brutality, and the Horror of the Degeneracy of Human Nature . . . in short, I turn’d away my Face from the horrid Spectacle; my Stomach grew sick, and I was just at the Point of Fainting, when Nature discharg’d the disorder from my Stomach, and having vomited with an uncommon violence, I was a little reliev’d. (129)

To Robinson’s religious inclinations, the existence of this evil is confirmation of the necessity of God’s salvation. Indeed, even when Robinson has come to adopt one of the former cannibals and convert him to Christianity, Friday’s predisposition confirms the necessity of the revealed word of

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God. In one passage where Robinson attempts to teach Friday about the Devil, Friday asks the confounding question: “But, says he again, if God much strong, much might as the Devil, why God no kill the Devil, so make him no more do wicked?” (170) Robinson’s answer to him is to reassert the necessity of the Gospel precisely to get around such questions. “It was a Testimony to me, how the meer Notions of Nature, though they will guide reasonable Creatures to the Knowledge of a God, and of a Worship or Homage due to the supreme Being, of God as the Consequence of our Nature; yet nothing but divine Revelation can form the Knowledge of Jesus Christ, and of a Redemption purchas’d for us, of a Mediator of the new Covenant, and of an Intercessor, at the Foot-stool of God’s Throne” (171). These passages support Novak’s early assessment that “Although Defoe frequently idealized the savage in order to satirize Western society or as a fictional device, in the majority of his writings he pictured the savage as an inferior being, condemned to a bestial life on earth and to eternal torment after death” (1963, 42). Yet this indictment of Robinson as the personification of the European colonialist mentality is too simplistic. Defoe, as nearly all European thinkers, believed the cultures of the Indian and African peoples whom explorers had encountered were fundamentally deficient and in need of the civilizing influence of Christianity. Cannibals, however, were still human beings. If we take Defoe as using the image of the savage as a foil to build up the superiority of European Christian civilization, we basically misread its place in his story. At minimum, because it is to his own nation that he is writing, an assertion of cultural superiority would have been a redundant claim in that context. But more importantly, in using the idea of the savages, Defoe extends both the sympathetic and critical capacities of his readers. He does this by collapsing the distance between his own people and the cannibals from two directions: They are both the same as Robinson in positive ways (sometimes better) and European Christians are as depraved as cannibals in their consumption of other humans. Defoe begins by humanizing the cannibals when he breaks through their distant otherness when Friday comes running toward him on the beach to escape those who are about to eat him. Friday himself is a cannibal and adores the taste of human flesh. But Friday is a beautiful and compelling person, physically and emotionally in every other way (and his features are made to resemble European ones as well) and thus Defoe leads his readers to sympathize and identify with him. Robinson comes to understand that the savages are like Europeans in fundamental moral ways:

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He has bestow’d upon them the same Powers, the same Reason, the same Affections, the same Sentiments of Kindness and Obligation, the same Passions and Resentments of Wrongs; the same Sense of Gratitude, Sincerity, Fidelity, and all the Capacities of doing Good, and receiving Good, that he has given to us; and that when he pleases to offer to them Occasions of exerting these, they are as ready, nay, more ready to apply them to the right Uses for which they were bestow’d, than we are: and this made me very melancholly sometimes, in reflecting as the several Occasions presented, how mean a Use we make of all these, even though we have these Powers enlighten’d by the great Lamp of Instruction, the Spirit of God, and by the Knowledge of his Word, added to our Understanding; and why it has pleas’d God to hide the like saving Knowledge from so many Millions of Souls, who if I might judge by this poor Savage, would make a much better use of it than we did. (163)

Importantly, the terms in which Robinson engages, thinks about, and feels in regard to the cannibals subtly moves his text out of the realm of commonplace expectations in his readers. Their reactions may be confirmed and comforted at an explicit level but they are also vibrated beyond the norm at a subtler level. The cannibals are one of the major confrontations that push Robinson to become something other than a stock figure in a story of religious redemption, because they lead him continually to push the question of God’s intention and meaning, inquiries which, although resolved in the text by Robinson’s admitting faith in God’s unknowable justice, nevertheless directly establish tension and questioning that go beyond an orthodox parroting of belief. In a later discussion of Defoe’s attitude, Novak observes: “when . . . Crusoe remarks that Friday was a better Christian than he, we should not ignore the compliment. Friday is clearly the superior human being, more loving, more giving, more capable of gratitude. These were the qualities Defoe admired above all. There was much about the evils of colonialism that Defoe did not grasp, but . . . Robinson Crusoe provided the materials for mounting an attack against it” (Novak, 1996, 52). Defoe does not only bring the savage close to the reader, he also uses the image of the savage as a critique of relations between Christians in Europe. On the occasion when he finds a wreck of a ship close to shore with no sign of survivors, Robinson wonders if they may all have gone off to sea in their boat, and being carried away by the strong current around his island, they found themselves in “Misery and Perishing; and that perhaps they might by this Time think of starving, and of being in a condition to eat one another” (146). Later, when he spots what is obviously an English ship anchored near his coast he is immediately wary because it is so out of

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the ordinary for an English ship to be there. His doubts turn out to be correct when he witnesses three bound prisoners being taken on shore and abused by the others: I was perfectly confounded at the Sight, and knew not what the meaning of it should be. Friday call’d out to me in English, as well as he could, O Master! You see English Mans eat Prisoner as well as Savage Mans. Why, says I, Friday, Do you think they are a going to eat them then! Yes, says Friday. They will eat them: No, no, says I, Friday, I am afraid they will murther them indeed, but you may be sure they will not eat them. (195)

Finally, the resonances of humans devouring each other are played out when Robinson is back in Europe and traveling from Lisbon by land to England. Their guide in the venture warns them that they must be armed sufficiently to protect themselves from wild beasts, especially in the snow covered mountains: We told him, we were well enough prepar’d for such creatures as they were, if he would ensure us from a Kind of two-legged Wolves, which we were told, we were in most Danger from, especially on the French Side of the Mountains. (226)

The reference here may be to the adage: Homo homini lupus: man is wolf to man. Or in Erasmus’ version: Man to man is either a god or a wolf. But the issue of cannibalism leads Robinson to more profound questions than a recognition of the viciousness of humans in general. It is through this that Defoe raises the issue of public judgment directly. Again, we can cite in this connection Montaigne who, in his chapter “On the Cannibals” (I, 31) in the Essays, makes the following comparison between the barbarities of the cannibals and the barbarities of his contemporary Europeans: It does not sadden me that we should note the horrible barbarity in a practice such as theirs: what does sadden me is that, while judging correctly of their wrong-doings we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; more barbarity in lacerating by rack and torture a body still fully able to feel things, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs (as we have not only read about but seen in recent memory, not among enemies in antiquity but among our fellow-citizens and neighbours—and, what is worse, in the name of duty and religion) than in roasting him and eating him after his death. (Montaigne, I, 31, 235–236)

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How can we criticize others and their practices when our own are just as reprehensible? Robinson experiences a murderous rage and his mind becomes obsessed with slaughtering the cannibals, the embodiment of inhumanity to his mind. And yet, strikingly, he then stands back and ruminates on whether he is really justified in taking action. Certainly there are other reasons for not killing them which Robinson notes (other cannibals might return in greater numbers to avenge the deaths of their people). Nevertheless, Defoe raises the moral issues starkly. Although he does not make the identical equation of Christians with cannibals as Montaigne had, he does compare the killings done by all of them: What Authority, or Call I had, to pretend to be Judge and Executioner upon these Men as Criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit for so many Ages to suffer unpunish’d, to go on, and to be as it were, the Executioners of his Judgments one upon another. . . . When I had consider’d this a little, it follow’d necessarily, that I was certainly in the Wrong in it, that these People were not Murtherers, in the Sense that I had before condemn’d them, in my Thoughts; any more than those Christians were Murtherers, who often put to death the Prisoners taken in Battle; or more frequently, upon many Occasions, put whole Troops of Men to the Sword, without giving Quarter, though they threw down their Arms and submitted. (134)

And he continues: Religion joyn’d in with this Prudential, and I was convinc’d now many Ways, that I was perfectly out of my Duty, when I was laying all my bloody Schemes for the destruction of innocent Creatures, I mean innocent as to me: As to the Crimes they were guilty of towards one another, I had nothing to do with them; they were National, and I ought to leave them to the Justice of God, who is the Governour of Nations, and knows how by National Punishments to make a just Retribution for National Offences; and to bring publick Judgments upon those who offend in a publick Manner, by such Ways as best pleases him. (135)

This is not a counsel of relativism, that different peoples do things in different ways, and that we must respect all possible forms of life. Rather, he is accentuating the limitations of judgment that justify positive or coercive action. Only God can be a judge between nations. Because there is no harm done to the outsider, one is not permitted to interfere with another nation’s practices. It was not Robinson’s “duty” to interfere, though he felt a natural inclination to do so. This is not the same as the claim that it is his duty not to interfere. Thus, we might see this as a type of toleration of restraint from action, not a duty to respect others.

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Although to our contemporary ears this may sound like a self-serving lack of action, to Defoe’s contemporaries it may have had the effect of pointing out a reduction in the universal reach of Christian standards. Defoe himself would not have desired this outcome, but I believe the power and drive of his writing, his acuity about social change and novelty, and his desire to push questions beyond the shibboleths of his time led him to suggest possibilities of thought and sensibility that overflowed the boundaries of his own conscious beliefs. Defoe believed that he could shake up assumptions about traditional bases of public censure, and that a personal belief in God, apprehended through the transparent meaning of the Bible, would suffice as a source of public morality. Many people today believe the same thing, that a personal morality is enough to secure a public one, but that clearly is not sufficient. Nevertheless, Defoe does provide a public standpoint.

Conclusion Robinson Crusoe is an embodiment of a new attitude of public judgment, one that is more oriented toward the good of the whole of England, acceptance of diversity, and allowance for individual beliefs. But this set of beliefs was not yet the dominant attitude of the time. Defoe is a leader in bringing on this structure of feeling rather than merely reflecting it. I have looked at how he challenges norms of conformity in the dialectic of Robinson’s life. But Defoe is much more explicit about his message of toleration than this study of the novel has so far indicated. In the last third of the book, when Robinson becomes more actively engaged with other people, Defoe directly supports norms of toleration and openness. There are two notable passages in which Robinson presents a straightforward call for religious toleration. One occurs when he relates how he and Friday had spent much of their time and conversation after Friday’s conversion to Christianity. Defoe argues here for the transparency of the Bible message: “the Knowledge of God, and of the Doctrine of Salvation by Christ Jesus, is so plainly laid down in the Word of God; so easy to be receiv’d and understood” (172). He goes on: As to all the Disputes, Wranglings, Strife and Contention, which has happen’d in the World about Religion, whether Niceties in doctrines, or Schemes of Church Government, they were all perfectly useless to us; as for ought I can yet see, they have been to all the rest of the World: . . . and I cannot see the least Use that the greatest Knowledge of the disputed Points in Religion which have made such Confusions in the Word would have been to us, if we could have obtain’d it. (173)24

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For Defoe, the simplest truths existed for all to read while the endless arguments were about theological details with which social policy ought not to be engaged. Later, after Defoe rescues both a Spaniard and Friday’s own father from the imminence of being feasted upon by cannibals, thereby expanding his little kingdom on the island, he notes: “It was remarkable too, we had but three Subjects, and they were of three different Religions. My Man Friday was a Protestant, his Father was a Pagan and a Cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist: However, I allow’d Liberty of Conscience throughout my Dominions” (RC, 188).25 This explicit support for toleration was unmistakable to his audience in England. Defoe reinforces the toleration at the heart of his book by personifying most of the characters with whom Robinson comes into positive contact as being of a contrasting religion or nation. The man who saves him once he has escaped from enslavement early in the story (17ff) is a Portuguese captain, and this man remains loyal, honest, and generous toward Robinson after he has disappeared for 28 years on the island. He is the guarantor of all the wealth that will accrue to Robinson from his plantations at the end of the book. The land that provides him with wealth and the means for flourishing both at the beginning and end of the book is Brazil, through his proprietorship of a plantation there. He is drawn to return to it after his rescue from the island, but given his new-found attention to religion, he has reservations: I had once a Mind to have gone to the Brasils, and have settled my self there; for I was, as it were, naturaliz’d to the Place; but I had some little Scruple in my Mind about Religion, which insensibly drew me back. . . . However, it was not Religion that kept me from going there for the present; and as I had made no Scruple of being openly of the Religion of the Country, all the while I was among them, so neither did I yet; only that now and then having of late thought more of it, (than formerly) when I began to think of living and dying among them, I began to regret my having profess’d my self a Papist, and thought it might not be the best Religion to die with. (222–223)

Given Defoe’s strong anti–Catholicism as a political position, Robinson’s openness to Catholics as human beings and as individual believers is striking. The only other occasion in which he criticizes Catholicism is in a passage where Robinson is instructing Friday in knowledge of “the true God” and also inquiring about the savages’ religion. He learns that among Friday’s people, there are old men who have special access to their god. Robinson ob-

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serves “that there is Priestcraft, even amongst the most blinded ignorant Pagans in the World; and the Policy of making a secret Religion, in order to preserve the Veneration of the People to the Clergy, is not only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps among all Religions in the World, even among the most brutish and barbarous Savages” (169). Thus, on this occasion he notes a universal feature of all religions, the tendency for an oligarchy of religious leaders to accumulate power for themselves. Defoe of course did not exempt Protestant religions from this charge. Indeed, the point of his writing his novel was to drive a different wedge into the internecine and deadly quarrels among Protestants in England and to call into question their assumptions about a monopoly on truth for public judgments. Finally, Robinson leaves his island in the charge of Spaniards and depicts the Englishmen he has confined there as criminals. At the end of his story, Robinson relates: I visited my new Collony in the Island, saw my Successors the Spaniards, had the whole Story of their Lives, and of the villains I left there; how at first they insulted the poor Spaniards, how they afterwards agreed, disagreed, united, separated, and how at last the Spaniards were oblig’d to use Violence with them, how they were subjected to the Spaniards, how honestly the Spaniards used them. . . . (236)

The sympathetic portrait of the Spanish and the negative portrayal of the English testify to Defoe’s willingness and indeed constant inclination to call into question the traditional public assumptions about an alignment of virtue with nationality and religious confession. Ernest Gellner described Robinson Crusoe as “the shrinking of the ego to a hard ultimate kernel.”26 Yet, this is a pallid description of Defoe’s creation. Is a shriveled monad capable or desirous of the variety of life that he valued and displayed and that has garnered such universal attraction? Besides the many trades I already noted, Robinson before and after his island life was also a sailor (8,15), gentleman (15), guiney trader (16), merchant (16,17), slave (17), Brasilian planter/landowner (29), slave trader (33), boat pilot (109), general (207), and lord/king/emperor (80,188,201,208,210). Defoe challenged norms of imitation, conformity, and blind duty. What can we take away from this challenge and his depiction of the individual as we look for causal and normative grounds for toleration? Pocock writes about Defoe: “there is as yet no sign that his modernism involved a shift to any new conception of morality—only to a greater degree of liberty” (1975, 435). Defoe did not write Robinson Crusoe to fill in

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that ethic, yet he is concerned in that book with public norms and cultural resources. His contribution to toleration is not in the form of fixed standards, or arguments, which liberals can use now when confronted with the need to define limits and value-tradeoffs in diverse communities. It does not guide the construction of social institutions of toleration the way Locke’s work did. Rather, he contributed something more broadly culturally effective, an actual means of shaping the public mind toward self-reflection and an image or “myth” to serve as a focal orientation. As I have attempted to show, we can find in the cultural form of the novel and in the content of his depiction of Robinson’s action and emotion a powerful starting point for negotiating the tensions between the individual and collective constraints. Both of these—form and content—emphasize the need and good of activity, creativity, and change. These virtues are important in and of themselves for Defoe, but his purpose is to make them respected by society generally. The problem is the public acceptance of these values. Robinson simultaneously needs human companionship and yet chafes under social strictures. To resolve this, social strictures themselves must be ones that are open to self-transformation. The logic of politics centers on power, control, and mobilization of large groups of people for order, scarce resources, and conflict. A public language must be constantly concerned with the potential to harden antagonisms in the political realm. Defoe was highly aware of this given his protean capacity as a political writer to bring those antagonisms about, as we saw earlier. Defoe’s work throughout his writing life had been an effort to build public opinion, and he succeeded late in his life in his efforts to build a new public arena of negotiation. His use of imaginative literature was a way in which he sought to facilitate a more flexible and capacious public mind. When a public consciousness allows for the richness and detail of individual life, and the reflection on character at the heart of the novel form, this resource is one more collective ground in which norms and practices of toleration can take root.

CHAPTER

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Rebuilding Toleration The writers studied here—Bodin, Montaigne, Locke, and Defoe—were instrumental in the historical and cultural changes that made an ethical norm of toleration more real. Because part of the reality they affected was ideational, we cannot explain it without examining the intricacies of their ideas. This does not mean that more concrete factors of interest, relations of power, economic structure, and other forces were not as, if not more, important. To explain as dramatic a change as the emergence of a fundamental modern value like toleration, one must acknowledge the ultimate power of what it is actually feasible to do—not just wish for. Yet, humans are creatures who use ideas to get things done, to imagine alternatives, and to move themselves and others to act, and therefore the languages and articulation of those ideas are causally significant. They are a cornerstone of that transformation. Although their work supporting toleration is at the origins of the liberal tradition, we must ask whether the solutions these writers proposed remain applicable at this point in time, and whether those solutions are necessarily restricted to a Western context. Each of the writers attempts to find ways to bridge animosities between groups while not washing away the content of difference and otherness. Contrary to the individualist or universalist rendition of liberal theory, for them toleration did not require abstracting from concrete collective identities and reasoning either purely from an individual or a universal perspective. Those versions of liberal theory came later, in any case, as a consequence of the cultural and political ideas developed by these thinkers in the beginning. The lessons I draw from the interpretation laid out in this book pertain to the nature of politics and the understanding of the self. My remarks will have to remain provisional at this point. 153

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Reimagining Politics: Justice and Power The core component I have added to redefine toleration, as I discussed in Chapter 1, is the idea of continuing engagement or mutuality of interaction. By adding this element to our understanding of toleration, we have a perspective from which to critique certain typical incarnations of liberal politics as well as from which to recall the more complex and revolutionary work of the original thinkers. The matrix set out in Chapter 2 distinguishes between threshold and negotiation conditions of conflict. This distinction enables us to see that arguments for toleration are constructed in different types of political conflict, some more extreme than others, though all concerned with how to adjudicate confrontations and create terms of interaction. Bodin and Locke focused their work directly on the question of the nature of the political realm. What kind of common ground can be found or made? Bodin used the beginnings of a national identity to pose a higher order focus that might tie together religious antagonists. In doing this, he emphasized that the realm of order and power (sovereignty) must attain allegiance and to do so must be recognized as a sphere of justice. There is an inherent value to a distinct political realm, which is not reducible to its instrumental order. One question that arises in the case of Bodin is—How do we make the political a source of strong commitment without it becoming another source of intolerance through nationalism? The liberal answer has been to insist on citizens becoming liberal selves. But clearly, the history of the West has demonstrated that the creation of more inclusive domains of sovereignty did indeed lead to transfers of us/them allegiance that continue to motivate today. At this point, however, I want to emphasize the way in which Bodin’s recreation of the nature of political sovereignty helped to overcome intolerance, not to plant the seeds for the next form of it. Locke’s work created community through the protection of boundaries. This is not an artificial or premature truncation of politics but a necessary condition for it. Locke set up a conception of voluntary membership—a person can move in and out of the public and private as she desires; and he presented the naturalness of the need for public recognition through what I called a public privacy. The emphasis on boundaries makes conflict and difference feasible for a unified society. Yet, there is nothing sacred about exactly where the boundaries are placed (except perhaps the borders of the physical body). Both Bodin and Locke value an independent political realm, and therefore elaborate terms on which the autonomy of politics could be judged in-

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dependently from its usefulness to other sources of authorization (in their time, religion—in our own time, economics). Their invention of a desacralized and yet normative political sphere involved rethinking the nature of membership and obligation. This is a critical lesson for the establishment of toleration: The more people value politics and accept it as a realm of justice, the more they make it so, and the more toleration between conflicting groups is possible. Given that we already accept politics as a nonsacred and independent realm, what implications does this idea hold? The most direct implication is the reiteration of the justice-protecting nature of the political realm. The more we recognize and attempt to realize that toleration is about continuing engagement of identity difference—the more the political realm through institutions and culture will come to embody justice of an interactive nature, not as a fixed measure but as an outcome of engagement and interaction across differences. When politics is purely functional—distribution according to rules of power—it cannot do its work to maintain the allegiance of its citizens. Hence, a public language that includes a notion of a common good through an ideal of toleration as mutual engagement must be part of political debate. As important is a second lesson: To solve the problem of identity conflict in their own time, Bodin and Locke (and other thinkers like Hobbes) worked on fundamental reconstructions of power, reinventing notions of sovereignty and relations between spheres of authority within a collectivity. We must do as they did—reimagine political power and accountability in the face of current identity conflict, but in terms applicable now. In a world of global economics and global threat, where power is dispersed and layers of loyalty and political mobilization are ready and waiting for direction, we must begin thinking about different forms of public orientation and commitment. Although the activity of organizing and institutionalizing responses to boundariless problems like terrorism, the spread of disease, and environmental degradation is presently underway, theoretically and normatively we remain in a state of anarchy. We must take up the theoretical and ethical issues to develop a cogent view of the formation of identities that might serve to respond as justly and humanely as possible to these world problems. The alternatives need not be world government versus the semi-anarchy of nation-states: How the lines of authority and politicization will come to make sense must be a question that we directly address. In realizing the importance of the global (dis)organization of power, we must not lose sight of the real work of toleration that proceeds at local levels. If institutions or mechanisms of adjudicating and construc-

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tively engaging differences fail at this level, they have great destabilizing, macro repercussions. Conversely, the potential benefits of local constructions of interactions of toleration will serve to stabilize a world order. Thus, we might see the present intensity of identity conflicts as a symptom of the failure of political potential leaving a vacuum of power in local and international contexts. The human need for collective orientation appears most strikingly when it fails.1 Vacuums of power leave the way open for mobilizing around sources of meaning and identification that political entrepreneurs can exploit, if not fully create—historical experiences of victimhood, the logic of enmity, and so forth. The “new tribalism” may appear to reveal the impotence of the conscious norm and regimes of toleration, but the “resurgence” is more a symptom of the transformation of regimes of collective orientation. This is why the quality of leadership, the language of enmity and fear, and the languages of purpose and mutuality are crucial for explaining trajectories of intolerance and toleration. Hence, the seemingly ancient animosities are a result of a transition of power arrangements, a sign that we are in a major seismic shift. How do we create new levels of legitimacy and accountability at diverse levels? The prospects of toleration are directly related to these larger, surrounding conditions. One means to begin to work out a revised notion of political obligation, allegiance, and legitimacy is to tie these less comprehensively to a base of group membership and more to an ideal of political activity and the inherent human drive to create better conditions of existence. To the extent that politics makes real the capacities of persons to engage one another as actively confronting the collective problems of human life, it can serve as a realm of commitment and meaning. We ought to conceive of the nature of the political principle, then, as one founded upon the notion of political purpose rather than membership. The human rights and environmental movements are concrete examples of political mobilization of this nature. Purpose is open-ended and processual: In joint activity people do not look to each other first to justify action or to reflect the ratification of a given being; rather, they look outward first and then back to one another as common actors focused on concrete projects requiring concerted attention. The critical question remains, of course, whether we need to belong to a home group, the boundaries of which define the principle’s jurisdiction, for there to be a will toward addressing problems cooperatively. The idea of an open-ended purpose or even pressing “problems” may be too vague to serve as a source of obligation or action. It might be argued that political principles of their very nature always assume a specified polis for which ac-

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tion is dictated, in contrast to which there is an alter-polis; hence, if one believes that political motivation is fundamentally either about interest or is overwhelmed by identity emotions, then there will be no motivation to go beyond, toward justice for those “outside” one’s group (interest or identity). But perhaps we need to rethink these engraved assumptions, at least the theoretical possibility ought to be broached given the fate of our planet. Dewey notes that “most social unifications come about in response to external pressure” (1930, 20): Must those pressures of necessity be other groups? Humans have demonstrated their capacity for mobilizing collectively across boundaries of membership to overcome problems such as earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters, and as we have seen since 9/11. These emergencies are all emotionally immediate and impress themselves upon the onlookers’ minds in an existential way. Can we use this capacity for public attention, commitment, and mobilization as a basis for rethinking the nature of political obligation and mutuality?

Maintaining the Self The prospects for toleration, I have argued, are situated within a larger context, one which must exemplify and be able to realize some version of a common good through the justice-protecting role of politics. The lifespring of this politics, however, cannot be politics alone. Here again, a return to the original thinkers of toleration helps us understand other sources of it. If Locke and Bodin posit an autonomous realm of politics, Montaigne and Defoe remind us that it cannot project its own ends, independent of a substantive view of the values worth protecting. Politics cannot be its own end, even as it must not be derivative of communal or individualist values, or the police-arm of religion or the market. Political values that take the purpose of politics as self-ratifying have a tendency to become collectivist, if not fully totalitarian. Therefore, a political ethics of toleration requires a public recognition of the good of politics but it also depends upon a more primary vision of the value of the person for whom political activity is vital. In that regard, the other category of demarcation in my original matrix highlighted the cultural and psychological sources of change that took place for toleration to become more embedded. Montaigne and Defoe are great cultural innovators for this purpose. Montaigne’s attention to the body—its existence in time and how it is in some sense a vessel of cultural meaning—demonstrate that this focus is not a debasement of nobler ideals (as critics of liberalism contend) but a source of ultimate beauty and value

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and an absolute standard against intolerance. The importance of the body resides not only in its sensate nature, but also in the duties it engenders to care for its necessities and its relation to the mind. Through this we develop habits of self-reflection, which I take as essential to a long-lasting culture of toleration. In Defoe’s presentation of the individual, we saw the virtues of an active, creative self who is a dynamic source of change. This self needs toleration and is also a justification for it because society depends upon its source of energy and inventiveness. He demonstrated that valuing the individual is not a denial of the collective world but inherently an acknowledgment of it through its power of judgment and through the society’s investment in this individual. Both Montaigne and Defoe emphasized the active nature of the self, in its apprehension of the body in time, selfreflectiveness, and in its mode of self-creation and they also recognize the ineluctable collective element of this self. For toleration to be established more permanently, it must focus on and support these active capacities of the self. The contribution these two make is at many levels. Here I want to connect their vision of the person to the stability of toleration as follows. A predisposition to toleration does not require that persons become Robinson Crusoes or the Montaignian self. Rather, they give us habits, capacities that persons from any particular point of view can practice. So a focus on the body or individuality animates a substantively attached person from the inside of their particularity: It does not take the place of that particularity. This way of appreciating the cultural, psychological component of toleration also enables us to respond to one of the most important problems facing any theory of toleration—the problem of loss of self. The question of the capacity of persons and groups to let go of a centering identity to move to some other incarnation is a fascinating and difficult one. Toleration poses risks to the individual or group practicing it. When we exercise toleration, we display a willingness to be open in the midst of ideas and persons from which we consciously distinguish ourselves: These differences can always be mobilized into conflict. If the risks of this openness require what seems to be giving up core parts of who a person considers himself to be, then the stakes might, indeed one would think usually, appear too high for most people to be able to do this. Stanley Fish argues that toleration, far from being the foundation for an open society, exists only when nothing is really on the line: “Toleration is exercised in an inverse proportion to there being anything at stake” (1991, 65). If what is at stake is the basic stability or possibility of a person’s sense of self, then it will be difficult for her to practice it, requiring as it would supererogatory

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effort to do so. But certainly, if we wish to live in a plural, multicultural world, then persons will have to find means of maintaining the self amidst this constant low-level threat to the self that comes with the energy of otherness pervading such a world. One solution to this problem of the collective loss of self has been the insistence on political guarantees against such loss. Notions of group harm and group or cultural survival are used as arguments for public policies in this regard. Does toleration as public policy require prevention of this loss, normatively or pragmatically? Will political toleration interpreted in this way lead to social intolerance—the balkanization argument? Or will a failure of politics to provide guarantees against risk lead to an increase in social intolerance, as persons or groups fear a loss of self and take proactive boundary-hardening measure to prevent it? I will not address all the complexities of this set of questions but maintain that the purpose of toleration must not be to prevent the potentiality of a loss of self—life is a constant transformative process and toleration is precisely a willingness to accept this basic condition. But toleration, as the attempt to value particularity at the same time as mutuality, would institute laws against certain harms to the self. An ethic of toleration would protect groups from loss of identity if that loss is owing to intentional harm. For instance, blacks or gays are victimized if their being is systematically attacked, because they cannot live as usual under such attack. They “lose” identity, so to speak, because the particularity of their membership is denied as a valid form of expression and attachment. By recognizing the security needs of communal selfconceptions, a society or political system reduces the incentives toward intolerance. This basically takes issue with the neutralist view that the pursuance of identity claims inevitably leads to balkanization. If the political community understands those claims as resulting not from a desire to reject the terms of mutuality but as a desire to make those terms just ones, then the claims cannot trigger a zero-sum scramble for exclusionary rights. Furthermore, trying to circumvent identity by denying its articulation actually exacerbates the negative impulses of identification. However, if loss is interpreted as the dissipation of an identity as group membership— Quebec is the ubiquitous example—a politics that maintains membership as its overarching logic and then institutionalizes identity claims increases the chances that struggles for power will only be about this. On the issue of cultural survival, an ethic of toleration would not automatically require a culturalist or a neutralist position, but it would require a debate articulating the value to the whole from the survival of the presumably threatened groups.

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The Dynamic Base of Politics and the Self From this very cursory description of the question of group harm and survival, I believe we can draw a link between the reconceptions of politics and of the self, which the early modern thinkers have helped to bring about. At the beginning of this book, I asked how it is possible to view the world from a perspective both particular and nonparticular. Toleration implies that persons are able to maintain strong identities as well as engage in common life with persons radically different from themselves. The possibility of this being true rests upon an ideal and a will toward its realization. At a public, social level, toleration always begins with a political settlement in which the terms of the relationship between persons are openly confronted. In order both to protect those who see their particularist attachments as fundamentally politically motivating and to prevent a political society’s disintegration into groupism, liberal political principles must be more conscious about expressing the means toward a common good, not passively as the inadvertent result of laissez-faire procedures. As I have emphasized, to maintain a language and conscious value of toleration, one must accept a level of community—a commitment to continued interaction for common goals. In addition, if the ethical transformation of toleration constitutes the aspiration to be able to respond across boundaries of communities, then the nature of a consciously tolerant political community is the central question. Specifically, the common good must be viewed not as a static endpoint but as a dynamic and explicit process of construction. The political community—however constructed—is oriented toward purposes rather than self-assertion. Thinking of the self as engaged first in addressing particular political problems rather than first in ratifying its own nature implies that persons must be able to think from within their own perspective yet outside their inherited locations. How is this possible? The perspective an individual develops depends upon a person’s capacities of self-critique and selftransformation in response to outer changes. A public language in and of itself is part of creating a psychology that is able to do this. To maintain the moral justifiability of the standards by which a person appraises or transforms herself, a polity and a culture must instill habits of reflectiveness within individuals and at the social level. One of the resources of a morality is the power of human consciousness to look at itself and explain to itself how to act and what to believe: Through the force of reflection we need to see ourselves as embodying something more than self-satisfaction, exclusive identities, or maximizers of power. Because reflectiveness is a capacity

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that all persons in all cultures, even the most closed and traditional, possess, this can be a source of toleration in any culture. Literature and art are primary ways in which a culture produces its looking back on itself. Iranian and Chinese films and fiction—to take two cultures Western rhetoric does not normally associate with the value of toleration—are examples of this potential source. Instead of supporting identity as focused on the preservation of communal membership, toleration should emphasize the reflectiveness with which one approaches the self. Any minimal reflection makes the multiplicity of attachments within the self obvious. This in turn leads to the need to make sense of the diverse levels of commitment/community located in and outside a person. And it must also indicate that the self is never exhausted by a specified delineation of identities. Identity is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently sacred. For purposes of toleration, we can think of identity as activity rather than as a suit of clothes or a mask that one puts on (though for psychological reasons, we would want to look at this dimension as well). The cultural motifs capable of bridging boundaries of otherness accentuate the values of politics, the body, and its embeddedness in time (hence a respect for time), the human need for dignity and social recognition, and the potential of individual creativeness. They are the underpinnings of toleration—the correlative values to it. If one seeks toleration, then these are its buttresses. Therefore, if we hold toleration to be a desirable way of life, political leaders and public thinkers will have to make the outer circumstances conducive to it: Persons must believe that the risks to some of their commitments and understandings of themselves are either worth it because continuing in the path of intolerance is too destructive, or that they can rethink themselves as maintaining a particularity that is alive to change. Practically speaking, the public language and institutions used to construct common visions are central—they provide the overarching terms in which persons will be motivated to conceive of themselves— which particular attachments, interests and activities they will find themselves drawn to. The solutions the historical writers offered did not set up toleration in a canonical form, once and for all. In establishing the power of the idea and in laying out conditions of politics and of the self, they build a framework we can continue to use. The study of politics prides itself on its realism. Yet, what we learn from history is that ethical aspirations have a real effect on the world and on power. As E. H. Carr remarked: “If, however, it is utopian to ignore the element of power, it is an unreal kind of realism that ignores the element of

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morality in any world order.”2 Through creative and traditionalist conceptions of the self, humans make their way among social forces confronting them. Our moral ideals are actualized in ethical language that gives us a means for living with each other on terms that we might all accept. In this book, I have taken the concept of toleration and explored it historically and conceptually in order to unearth the assumptions and possibilities that exist for using it now. The standard assumption about what it means— freedom of belief, individual rights—are a pale indication of the resources it holds for thinking about what needs to be done to respond to changes of political allegiance, obligation, and conceptions of the self in a global, interdependent world. What I have tried to show as well is that ideals of morality must always begin and remain a workable ethics. The (re)building of toleration begins in acknowledging our implicatedness in one another—our basic condition of mutuality—as well as our otherness. We must then go on to the further work of imagining and constructing new languages and institutions to enact power and justice for a mutual good. But recognizing our implicatedness—as a first step—often takes great leaps of invention, some acts of which I have traced. The world requires our continuing efforts to take those steps.

Notes Chapter 1 1New

York Times, July 20, 2000, p. A8. The speaker was Tito’s granddaughter, which is what made her comments seem noteworthy to the NYT, but many others expressed similar sentiments. 2For the early moderns, the competing allegiances were religion versus political membership in a consolidating nation/state. For many now, the competing obligations are experienced as deriving from nation/state allegiance versus international commitments, or specific group commitments (racial, religious) as opposed to collective citizenship commitments. 3See for example, John Horton’s entry in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (1991), p. 521; also Newey, 1999, p. 18ff. 4And to assume that the attitudes of citizens toward each other in such a society are those of indifference and therefore no longer exemplify the work of toleration means that one overlooks the sources of that peaceful interaction and seemingly easy accommodation. Walzer (1997) makes the same point when he says: “But even people who don’t experience this difficulty [i.e., finding it hard to live with someone who has a particular difference] are properly called tolerant: They make room for men and women whose beliefs they don’t adopt, whose practices they decline to imitate; they coexist with an otherness that, however much they approve of its presence in the world, is still something different from what they know, something alien and strange” p. 11. 5Note Mill’s discussion of Mormonism, “they have been chased into a solitary recess in the midst of a desert” (Mill, 1989, 91)—hardly an example of toleration. I thank Andy Altman for mentioning this example. 6See Sandel’s critique of Rawls (1982) for a classic development of these views. 7See particularly Brown, 2001, for a critique of tolerance discourse as the perennial liberal trick: “a tolerant posture is neither a neutral nor a respectful one . . . tolerance carries within it the domination, the permanent antagonism toward alterity, as well as the capacity for normalization that we sensed in it intuitively” (p. 102). 8Other writers on toleration have underlined a more positive interpretation of this dimension as well. Bernard Crick begins his important essay by defining tolerance “as the degree to which we accept things of which we disapprove” and ends it

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with this observation: “To be tolerant is never to accept fully; it is simply not to reject utterly. Such an attitude is never enough, but it is the only civilized beginning in the world as we face it” (Crick, 1971, 144, 169). Crick does not dwell at length on the nature of common identity in circumstances of pluralism but defends toleration as the necessary precondition for a just society (see Crick, 1971, 169–171). Rainer Forst indicates a related consideration when he defines toleration as requiring both an objection component and an acceptance component, but his interpretation of “acceptance” is in terms of “reasons.” Acceptance “does not remove the negative judgment but gives certain positive reasons which trump the negative ones in the relevant context. According to these reasons it would be wrong not to tolerate what is wrong . . . the said practices or beliefs are wrong, but not intolerably wrong” (Forst, 2001). One might reinterpret what I am attempting to do as specifying types of reasons that pertain to social unity, order, or peace. But it is not only reasons that trump other ones that we can designate as functioning to make toleration work. Acceptance also relies on seeing oneself, having ways to understand one’s identity as connected to others. We, as observers of the process by which toleration comes about, might want to classify these factors as “reasons” but I believe it is also the case that they are experienced by the persons in situations of conflict as attachments, as possible ways of identifying themselves, and not just as a balance of reasons. 9I want to note that my interpretation of toleration as implying a more positive or proactive stance of interaction does not necessarily imply that it is only through identity change that a proactive, bridging stance can come about. Nevertheless, and this is true especially in communal conflicts, it often is the case that the establishment of toleration as a response to these situations will require some element of identity change or creation. And as I discuss at length in the following, the conflicts in the early modern period were essentially communal conflicts, though we have shrunken them to fit into the category of conflicts of “religious beliefs.” 10Charles Taylor, 1994, esp. pp. 26–37, discusses the modern conditions that led to a much more problematized relation of the person to identity. His Sources of the Self is a lengthy examination of the origins of the modern identity. 11The conditions of the wars of religion in which liberalism first took shape left their mark in liberalism’s aspirations toward universalism and/or individualism— both strategies conceived of the self as beyond the snares of identity. Kantian universality transcends them by tying persons together on a basis all can share—our being as free and rational creatures, members of the universal human species. From the other angle, emphasis on the individual does not so much supercede identities as dissolve the collective power of any one in particular. Each person is a unique subject, unlike any other, a distinct nexus of cross-cutting attachments and a holder of interests and plans of life that are specific to her. A politics that assumes and promotes these interpretations of the self, as a member of the “kingdom of ends” and as a unique autonomous individual, insures that the destructive forces of identifying with groups are circumvented. Toleration here is the political principle that restrains persons from engaging concrete identities and insists on our universal or individual status.

Notes 12For

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more discussion about plurality of the self, see among many others Walzer, 1997, 87ff; Walzer, 1994, 85ff on the divided self; Kristeva, 1993; contributions in Benhabib, 1996, and Anthony Appiah’s excellent essay on race (1996). 13He writes: “A doctrine of contingent identity and ambiguous responsibility sits well with an idealization of politics, then. Politics now becomes a medium for the enunciation of suppressed alternatives and the contestation of entrenched commonalities. It becomes a means by which unequivocal practices or responsibility are compromised and confounded” (1991, 121); and “An antagonism in which each aims initially at conquest or conversion of the other can now . . . become an agonism in which each treats the other as crucial to itself in the strife and interdependence of identity/difference” (1991, 178–179). 14In contemporary debates, the notion of identity has mainly been used for normative or critical purposes rather than descriptive or explanatory ones. It was initially employed to criticize liberalism as the embodiment of individualism, from the communitarian or post-modern, multicultural perspective. Identity politics in contrast referred to groups’ demanding representation as groups because of the harm and suffering persons experienced as members of those groups, a harm that rights and representation within a liberal system, interest group politics, and individual assimilation could not address. Examples include Phillips, 1995, Young, 1990, among others. Critics of liberalism from a “post-modern” standpoint are not only interested in advancing identity politics, but they generally share a criticism of what they consider its attempt to transcend identity; see Brown, 2001; Connolly, 1991, 1999; Forst, 1999; and McClure, 1990. The communitarian position (Sandel, 1982) holds that liberalism (hence toleration) makes identity a set of distanced attachments like beliefs—things we can hold at arm’s length and choose among. In response to the critique of liberalism that identity connotes, defenders of liberal institutions and values have denied the importance or even reality of identity “in some objective sense” (Hardin, 1995, 6). Brian Barry’s Culture and Equality (2001) is the most sustained critical treatment of multiculturalist, identity politics from a liberal universalist position. Others have attempted to interpret the phenomenon of identity in rational choice terms. Many political philosophers have reaffirmed the values of universality and neutrality in opposition to the divisiveness they see inherent in identity politics, see Sen’s recent criticisms of identity language (2000a and 2000b). Alternatively, many liberal theorists have taken the multicultural, postmodern critique seriously and incorporated it into a reassessment of the nature of liberalism, arguing that cultural rights within liberal politics can accommodate the demands of identity, see esp. Habermas, 1998; Kymlicka, 1995; Tully, 1995, and two recent collections directly addressing toleration/identity: Toleration, Identity and Difference (1999) ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus, and Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration (1993) ed. John Horton. Jacob Levy, 2000 is also useful. 15The specification of this “reality” is a question for psychologists and cognitive science and for sociologist and cultural anthropologists. My use of the term “identity” is inevitably vague when compared to the more developed terminology and characterizations coming out of these more positivistic traditions of study. Never-

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theless, precisely because we use the term identity as a loaded normative term, we should try to gain a more generalizable perspective on it. It exists as a reality in part because it is a reference for us that explains how we think and act. 16The concept is not included in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (1987, 1991), though one of the editors of that volume is William Connolly who has written an important book on the subject. A useful collection from a psychological perspective is Self, Ego, and Identity (1988), eds. Daniel K. Lapsley and F. Clark Power. Anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology have devoted large parts of their disciplines to a consideration of issues related to identity, but most scholarship on politics and government has until recently not taken the subject on directly. One reason may be that the terms of political philosophy were set by a universalistic rhetoric beginning with Plato and then extended by the Enlightenment. The aim was to find a language that could capture the timeless essence of political justice, the good, or the right for all persons regardless of particular characteristics. Questions of nationalism and other concrete movements or demands could be subsumed under empirical political analysis (“comparative politics” for instance). The terms of political morality were constructed as a way to supersede divisive (identity/belief) attachments. This gap in political philosophy and science is now being filled. 17This is the feature Connolly emphasizes most: “An identity is established in relation to a series of differences. These differences are essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences it would not exist in its clarity and solidity” (1990, 59). 18Recall the joke about two Jews on a desert island who build three synagogues. Why three? One for each to pray in, and one neither would be caught dead in. 19I do not mean by outer here simply how one looks to a stranger, but rather that one can classify oneself according to socially recognized designations (gay, Catholic, black, etc.). 20Some might argue against using the term identity as a blanket designation for these diverse categories. If the problem for toleration is violence, conflict, and disagreement, this can be explained only through grasping particular motivations in each case. We should talk rather about causes specific to each type of conflict: nation, race, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, language, and so forth. True enough, nevertheless, the fact is that the language of identity has gained its own momentum and now serves as a designation of a type of politics and as a motivation that we should attempt to understand. 21If a community of scientists came to regard themselves as worth preserving for the sheer sake of their social grouping as scientists, not directly for the activity of science, then this category would become similar to the communal identity categories. This fact demonstrates why language and attacks on the category of communal membership groups can be seen as concretely harmful. If creationists attack scientists (ideologically, verbally), scientists are not victimized as a community so long as the activity of science can proceed as usual. However, if gays, Muslims, etc. are attacked for being gay or Muslim, they are victimized because they cannot live

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as usual under such attack. They have to hide who they are and are therefore denied freedom. 22We could construct a “sociobiological” or socio-psychological account of how this might have arisen. The original archetype of the tribe serves the functions of both protection and meaningful cohesion: The need for protection (hence power) against other potentially threatening groups and natural disasters forged the meaningfulness of the community. Subsequently, this meaning gives power itself. One might also believe that a deep feature of human nature harbors an element of selfloathing in the following way: Identity is a necessary, basic psychological quality of being a person—one cannot be a self without the other—and yet, simultaneously the impulse to destroy or harm the other in terms of whom one defines one’s self is also irresistible. This pathology no doubt happens to some, but does not explain most of human interaction through difference. 23The resurgence of ethnic conflict, as well as the gaps in rational choice explanations, have led some to question the limitations of a narrow self-interest explanation for human motivation and to turn to the notion of identity. See, Fearon, 1999; Fearon and Laitin, 2000; Monroe, 1998, 2001, for examples of broader theoretical treatments of the subject, rather than specific analyses of cases. One possibility is that differentiation and otherness cause or at least incline persons to be fearful of and project evil onto what is different, thus providing a reason for coercion and animosity. For a recent discussion that focuses on blame as the psychological motive for group hatred, see Cunningham, 1999. 24Many contemporary discussions about religion in particular (because of resurgent fundamentalism) fail to situate the power of religion within larger political contexts. Thus, Thomas Cahill (New York Times, February 3, 2002) suggests that if Islam would change to embrace tolerance as Christianity did during the long centuries after the Reformation, then it too could find a religious path from within to live peacefully with those who do not share its specific beliefs. This characterization of where change needs to occur is misleading. For one, believers in Islam have lived peacefully among other believers throughout Islamic history. Furthermore, neither “Islam” nor “Christianity” is a unified dogma that can be reformed in this way. This approach to “religion” is similar to the Enlightenment condemnation of “religious” belief in that both fail to pay attention to the context in which religion takes on different orienting functions, be they Tocquevillian enabling functions or fundamentalist antagonistic functions, among others. Public moral life is framed by political forces, and is not locked in a deterministic direction by the independent features of culture and religion, even granting these latter real force. The political realm, through political leadership, public rhetoric, and political will-formation sets the tone and can structure how religion serves to guide individuals. Normatively, this leads to the conclusion that politics cannot abdicate ethical responsibility to provide a distinctive sphere of mutuality and justice. 25For the second half of the twentieth century, the history of toleration was presented in W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (1932, 4

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volumes); Lecler’s Toleration and the Reformation (1955, 1960); and Kamen’s The Rise of Toleration (1967). The most authoritative contemporary work by historians is that of Grell, et al., eds., 1991; and Grell and Scribner, 1996. There has been a welcome regrowth of interest in the historical issues among political philosophers. See for instance, Richard Dees, Trust and Toleration, manuscript, 2001; Alan Levine, Early Modern Skepticism and the Origins of Toleration,1999, the volumes by Laursen and Nederman, 1998, 1999, 2000. Rainer Forst is completing an historical study. 26The relation between identity and the ethical transformation toward toleration is a double one. First, all ethical transformations require identity change at some level: Persons must be able to see themselves as inhabiting new roles, beliefs, and practices. But an idea of toleration raises issues of identity more directly, because toleration itself requires that persons be able to live with conflicts or differences of communal identities. 27Quoted in Hadari, 1986, 514.

Chapter 2 1Mill,

describing the calcification of beliefs, wrote that, “They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed” (1989, 43). For Mill, one virtue of freedom was precisely to stir up these platitudes. It is certainly not the case that toleration is not discussed, but it is almost always within this set parameter of terms. 2The question of “language” is a vast one and within recent political theory and the history of political thought has been a primary subject for Derrida, Foucault, and other “post-modern” scholars, on the one hand, and historians such as Pocock and Skinner, on the other. 3See Raz, 1986, 401–402. 4See for a recent example the work of Karen Stenner, 2002, manuscript. 5See Grell, 1996; Grell, Israel, and Tyacke, 1991; Tuck, 1988, 35. 6There are many examples of treatments of this sort: For one good collection see Heyd, 1996. 7Heyd takes this ambiguity in toleration to be a difficulty: “with tolerance, it seems that we can find hardly a single concrete case that would be universally agreed to be a typical object of discussion” (1996, 3). 8Heyd, 1996; Horton, 1993; Ricoeur, 1996, among others. 9Macedo, 1990, for instance. Along these lines, Kymlicka writes: “Rawls is right to worry about the existence of ethnic and religious minorities that reject the value of autonomy, but his response is misguided. In the face of such minorities, Rawls has become less willing to defend comprehensive liberalism but is still willing to impose liberal political institutions. A more appropriate response, I believe is to continue defending comprehensive liberalism based on autonomy as a general

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value, but become more cautious about imposing the full set of liberal political institutions on nonliberal minorities” (1996, 96). 10An example of a persistent question in this literature is the “paradox” that toleration represents. How is it that one could fundamentally believe a practice to be wrong and yet not stop it? Why would restraint be virtuous? If one disapproved too strongly, one could not tolerate at all (child pornography, for instance). But if one does not disapprove or reject enough, why call the attitude or act toleration? One is then merely indifferent or alternatively even welcoming of difference. This proverbial paradox calls attention to the limits of this line of thought in two ways: Clearly toleration is a persuasive norm for citizens in plural societies, so it must be the case that our way of thinking about ourselves as moral persons is more complex than the perspective of moral logic alone can capture. Again, because we conceptualize toleration in terms of an individual moral logic, we are led to such moral conundrums, which contradict the intuitive sense we have that toleration is a necessary value. The inadequacy of a moralized version of toleration also appears from the opposite angle, when we think of it in the most intimate of settings. When we teach our children how they ought to interact with persons different from themselves, our first instinct is not to tell them—“be tolerant”—which strikes us as too removed and unempathetic a response to persons whom they meet in daily life. 11Williams also suggests another option: “It may be that the best hopes for toleration as a practice lie not so much in this virtue and its demand that one combine the pure spirit of toleration with one’s detestation of what has to be tolerated. Hope may lie rather in modernity itself and in its principal creation, international commercial society. It is still possible to think that the structures of this international order will encourage skepticism about religious and other claims to exclusivity and about the motives of those who impose such claims” (Williams, 1996b, 26). The current structures of international order seem to be generating not a skepticism but more retrenchment into communalist or nationalist enclaves. Furthermore, we have to ask, what do we say to each other in the meantime? Is there silence or continued imposition with no justifications at all? He implicitly addresses this, as I show. 12Such accommodation is neither specifically modern nor liberal. See Bartlett, 1993, esp. pp. 197–242 for example, where he describes the frontier areas in medieval Europe as exemplifying an openness to diverse linguistic, ethnic, and racial groups. See Sen 2000(a) for his discussion of the existence of arguments for toleration and liberty in other traditions: Ashoka (third century BC) and Akbar (1590s). I would argue, however, that defenses of liberty are not equivalent to defenses of toleration. See also Kamen, 1997; Kymlicka, 1992; Walzer, 1997, whom I discuss in the following. 13I shall generally use the word toleration, but it might be helpful to “tolerance” when referring to practices—unarticulated or non-conscious allowance for difference—and toleration when referring to consciously recognized, reflected upon, and elaborated responses to differences/conflict.

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terms of its religious character, the Roman Empire can roughly be divided into two major periods: pagan and Christian. The Romans were on the whole tolerant while paganism constituted the state religion. There have been alternative accounts of pagan Rome as a tolerating power. MacMullen refers to the Empire during roughly the first two centuries AD when Rome sat at the height of power and prosperity, as “complete, and completely tolerant, in heaven as on earth” (MacMullen, 1981, 2), though Garnsey (1984, 25) dismisses MacMullen’s description as a misuse of terminology. North (1979) focuses on the earlier Republican period, the two hundred years preceding. Finally, Garnsey and Saller claim that “Roman receptiveness to alien religions is a feature of the early and middle Republic and of no other period” (1987, 170). The precise years are not crucial; it is only necessary to establish some agreement among historians that something like tolerance was indeed a feature of Roman religious policies. We can cautiously claim that for approximately four centuries (200 BC to 200 AD) a presumption of tolerance existed among pagan sects. The salient historical point separating the pagan from the Christian periods is Constantine’s Edict of Milan (AD 313), which recognized the Church as a corporate body and ended state persecution of Christians. The relation between the Church and the Roman state was transformed further into a relation of mutual support rather than tolerance with the promulgation of the edict under Theodosius in 380, which made Catholic Christianity the official religion of the state. These two historic acts in the fourth century established the intimate link between the Christian Church and the state that persisted until the late eighteenth century in the West, at which time “religious freedom” came to be interpreted institutionally as the complete separation of church and state. The Edict of Milan is justifiably seen as protecting a regime of tolerance. However, as Christianity came to be adopted more extensively, eventually assuming the complete powers of government, tolerance declined, and persecution became the policy of the state toward pagan sects (see MacMullen, 1984) and Jews (see Linder, 1987, 76–77). See Brown, 1963, 1964; Garnsey, 1984; Garnsey and Saller, 1987; Liebeschuetz, 1979; MacMullen, 1981, 1984; and North, 1979. 15Peter Garnsey considers the case of the Jews whom the Romans officially allowed to exist as a separate religion: For them, a senatorial decree signifying a “declaration of friendship” was produced. He gives a number of reasons why these documents should not be taken as an indication of a norm of toleration: “The documents regularly acknowledge that the Romans are extending privileged treatment to the Jews because of services rendered. And that is all. No further motivation or justification is offered. There is an absolute lack of any apologia for religious pluralism or religious freedom. The Jewish right to their ancestral customs is not built up into a general principle applicable to every ethnos (people) let alone every individual” (Garnsey, 1984, 11). 16Walzer is not primarily engaged in a descriptive project. What he cares about is the vitality of associational life. Previous regimes of toleration could take that vitality for granted, but he indicates there is something about America in particular

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that threatens this. Centrifugal forces spin off groups from one another and of individuals from groups, so there is a tendency toward radical individualism. Yet, taking account of the resources of toleration as evidenced in the multiple types of regimes, and recalling resources of American associational life itself, we should not conclude that peaceful coexistence must be reduced to either multiculturalism/communitarianism or alternatively liberalism/individualism: “It is necessary to aim at a balance of the two . . . [we] must be now one, now the other, as the balance requires” (111–112). 17Many would argue that an explicit moral language is generally not what leads persons to act tolerantly toward one another. Some empirical research on attitudes of tolerance would seem to imply pessimistically that the morality of toleration presented as a set of reasonable arguments will have little effect because persons can reinterpret the threats they perceive in such a way that it does not seem “reasonable” to them to accept the conclusion of the moral argument in favor of toleration. But unless we hold the extreme position that language has no causal power over human action—which is untenable—then we ought to decipher in what form it can have an effect: How we conceive the conscious terms of toleration will have practical, not just philosophical implications. 18Though the Stoic idea of freedom would seem to exemplify freedom through the mind; this is one of Berlin’s main criticisms of it. 19In this regard, Barry Barnes’ work on tolerance as a primary virtue is also helpful in carving out the distinctiveness of the language of toleration. Barry Barnes (2001) describes how tolerance (the term Barnes uses) works at a microscopic level as an implicit practice of everyday life in all societies, even within highly traditional uniform communities. This is so because moral/ethical action is always an individual person’s accommodation to a community’s standard, to a “shared tradition” of acceptable action and judgment that is constantly being challenged by members of the community and also being adjusted in the shared version. Contrary to the view of moral action as fitting one’s act to the universal rule, there is no such thing as an action that is exactly the same as the standard, or that simply duplicates the moral ideal. All action must be accomplished by particular persons in particular times and places, and there can never be exact uniformity in the enactment of a community’s moral norms. Something is moral, therefore, labeled as good or right, to the extent that it is acceptable by others in a shared tradition. Being moral inescapably requires a certain amount of flexibility in order for there to be “mutual intelligibility”—this in turn requires tolerance—“that peculiar kind of indifference to formal consistency.” Tolerance makes living a moral life—that is sharing minimal ethical community—possible in any society, no matter how cohesive or how differentiated. The qualities distinctive of a tolerant liberal regime are, according to Barnes, universal qualities of moral sociability. Barnes’ point is to defend toleration as a primary virtue, in contrast to the secondary or functional virtue that it ends up being in much philosophical analysis. Although highly illuminating, his defense of toleration does not tell us anything about the emergence of a more

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explicit rhetoric of toleration. To locate tolerance in morality itself, even in the moralities of highly “intolerant” societies, obfuscates what is distinctive about social orders and behaviors that we label tolerant in contrast to repressive or intolerant ones. At this more macro level, we may not want to lose the possibility of making such distinctions, even if using those distinctions is not done with moral approbation but is a descriptive exercise. 20Some useful references are: Goldie, 1980; Guggisberg, 1983; Russell, 1967; Spurr, 1989; and Turchetti, 1991, among others. 21As Guggisberg has put it: “Wherever there was opposition of religious minorities against established church orders the same basic question arose: ‘Is it possible that a subject who differs in religion from the magistrate can still be a loyal subject?’” and then “in the course of such practical developments the theoretical justification of religious toleration had to be based upon new foundations” (1983, 39, 40). It is these new foundations that I focus on in this book. But these foundations were truly innovative in that they could be applied more broadly than just to religious differences. 22This point is clearly brought out when we consider Aquinas’ remarks on coercion and belief. His answer to the question, “Are Unbelievers to be forced to accept the faith?” is that for those who were never part of the Christian faith, such as Muslims and Jews, “these should in no way be forced to believe.” But “there are other unbelievers such as heretics and all apostates who once accepted and professed the faith. These are to be compelled, even by physical force, to carry out what they promised and to hold what they once accepted” (Sigmund, 61). Again the significance of the fact of the previous community of belief is indicated by Locke’s discussion of the difference between heresy and schism at the end of A Letter Concerning Toleration. It is not beliefs in and of themselves that are risky or dangerous but the sundering of the jointness or community of the beliefs. 23See note #14. It should be remarked that while Roman emperors also aligned themselves with the divine, the protection of the gods did not depend upon the protection of a set of true religious beliefs. Dogmatic truth was not integral to divine majesty for them. 24Medieval “unity” must be taken in an expansive sense. The “truth” was a large umbrella under which diverse lines of thought and practices could be incorporated. As long as the divergences could be absorbed within a modified orthodoxy, as movements like those of St. Francis had been in the early thirteenth century (see Ozment, 98ff), an institutionalized unitary truth was maintained. If not, alternative sects meant alternative truths, a situation that essentially challenged the paramount authority of the Church. As Leff explains, so long as inquiry did not impinge upon revealed truth, it could be carried on independently (Leff, 1976, 23). The Church allowed diversity within a catholic unity if one made the necessary theoretical acknowledgment of the supremacy of the orthodox vision. As Nederman aptly puts it: “Beneath the veneer of religious singularity, European Christendom during the Middle Ages struggled endlessly with manifestations of difference” (2000, 4).

Notes 25Over

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the space of the two hundred years that spanned the beginning of the sixteenth century through the end of the seventeenth there were fewer than 14 complete calendar years during which no wars were fought between European states (Parker and Smith, 1978, 57). 26I address the question of skepticism in Chapters 3 and 4. 27Grell offers a similar statement: “where and when some form of religious toleration was granted, it was never offered as a policy of choice but as a pragmatic, ‘politique’ solution” (1996, 10). 28They could have cast their net even wider. We can find commentaries on the issue of religious freedom in the first four centuries AD. Tertullian in his Apologeticus uses the term libertas religionis as well as optio diuinitatis, the latter meaning choice of one’s deity. Others attempting to persuade Roman authorities to allow freedom of worship are the Jewish historian Josephus, first century AD and Lactantius, a Christian from Africa writing about a century after Tertullian and elaborating the latter’s position (see Garnsey, 1984, 13–16 for commentary on these arguments). One can also find non–Western arguments for freedom of religion; J. B. Bury in his A History of Freedom of Thought (1913) notes that in the third century BC the Indian king Asoka declared that two hostile religions under his dominion— Brahmanism and Buddhism—ought to be equally “privileged and honoured” (p. 92). Sen also stressed this point, as I mentioned previously. 29Lecler opens his definitive work on the Reformation and toleration with this sentence: “Since the end of the Second World War much has been written and there has been much discussion, both among Christians and among disunited Christians, on the subject of religious freedom or tolerance” (1960, v). Rawls as well elides the differences between the two. He writes in his introduction to Political Liberalism: “the historical origin of political liberalism (and of liberalism more generally) is the Reformation and its aftermath, with the long controversies over religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Something like the modern understanding of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought began then” (1993, xxiv). In contrast, see Crick, who also insists that freedom and toleration are quite distinct values (Crick, 1971, 160–161 ff). 30For analyses of some of the arguments during the early modern period that support the view of toleration as a radical option of political reconstitution, see Russell, 1967; Spurr, 1989; and Tooley, 1968. Rawls also refers to this innovation: “the success of liberal constitutionalism came as a discovery of a new social possibility: the possibility of a reasonably harmonious and stable pluralist society” (1993, xxv), citing Hume as a reference here. 31Variations of this liberal self are presented, e.g., by Kateb (1992), Macedo (1990), and Raz (1986). 32The question of why this complex language of the self and identity has been reduced in the standard histories of liberalism is one I shall not address in this study but is interesting in its own light. An example of this current shrinkage of the language to the dichotomy between public and private is found in the work of

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preeminent liberal theorists such as Charles Larmore (1987, x): “For a liberal . . . negative freedom may . . . remain all that should be politically relevant, since more substantial aspects of freedom belong at the heart of controversial ideals of the good life. What has thus been too often missed or misunderstood is the good reasons for the differentiation between the private and the public, homme and citoyen, or as I shall also say, between personal and political ideals.” Another recent definition emphasizing this feature is expressed by Gutmann and Thompson (1996, 61): “Toleration requires majorities to let minorities express their moral views in public and practice them in private.” My purpose is not to assert that these categories do not apply but to understand how it is that persons can move within and between these “spaces” when important political and moral questions arise. 33The “nonparticular” attachment or identification is not necessarily equivalent to a universalistic point of view. It is nonparticular in relation to the more specific particular position that one holds.

Chapter 3 1This

dating is taken from Franklin (1992), but Kuntz (1975) gives the completion date as 1588. 2Both as a writer and as a member of the Estates General, Bodin had a public presence and left a profound mark on French political thinking. He was considered essential reading by Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, and Rousseau, to name only a few. One contemporary authority on him (Pasquale Pasquino) says Bodin was “the John Rawls of his time,” and Rabb calls Bodin’s works “the first monuments of modern political theory” (Rabb, 1975, 53). 3Two points have been suggested to me in regard to this distinction: (1) that there might in fact be three types of religious beliefs rather than the two I distinguish, the third being the epistemological-ontological beliefs about the nature of religious truths. Are beliefs about the status of religion, “religious beliefs” themselves? Because it would be sinful and blasphemous not to believe in the absolute nature of one’s beliefs about God, we might want to include this as another type of religious belief. This further refinement is useful, but I will retain the dual nature of religious belief that I outlined in the text because, for the mass of ordinary Christians, the epistemological status of their beliefs was wrapped up in membership in the community of believers. In fact, the problem of skepticism is precisely the undermining of this third type of belief, and I would contend that it was the existence of various religious confessions/groups that made skepticism a reality for the great majority of people, not the existence of various religious beliefs in and of themselves (the umbrella of the unitary medieval Church had found a way to allow varieties of belief to coexist). (2) It has also been pointed out that some propositions such as the compelle intrare doctrine, which Augustine used to justify physical compulsion (Luke 14:23: the master at a feast tells his servant “Go out to the highways and hedges, and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled.”) are both

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a substantive dogma and a belief about how truths are to be realized. One of my points is exactly that these two types of belief are interwoven in pretoleration religious thinking. However, it is misleading to suggest that this scriptural story directly spells out how belief is to be realized on earth. As Lecler emphasizes: “it should not be necessary to add that the compelle intrare of the parable of the supper (Luke 14:23) has nothing to do with the use of compulsion either to bring pagans to the faith or to bring schismatics and heretics back into the Church” (Lecler, I, 24). 4As Levine notes: “there is no necessary connection between skepticism and toleration” (1999, 5), a point also emphasized by Tuck as I note in the study of Montaigne. 5William Connolly specifies conquest and conversion as the “two authorized responses to otherness.” He sees tolerance as a less interfering and oppressive response but still perhaps only a tactical move, a “detour on the way to conversion” (1991, 43). 6This principle gave the secular ruler the power to decide what religion should be observed within his territory, but there must be only one religion within each territory. 7I have used the McRae edition of the 1606 English translation by Richard Knolles, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale and have modernized the punctuation and spelling. All citations are to the book, chapter, and page number of this text. 8Translated by Marion L. D. Kuntz as Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime, 1975. 9Articles directly addressing Bodin’s position on toleration are: Bellussi, 1985; Holmes, 1988, 1995; Horowitz, 1985; and Roellenbleck, 1973. 10Bodin’s treatment of toleration in the République appears to be sparse and unsystematic, drawn out by consideration of other problems. He concentrates on it in Book III, Chapter 7—during the course of his analysis of corporations, colleges, and other forms of communities; and Book IV, Chapter 7, where he discussed factions. This categorization indicates that the problem of religious conflict was seen primarily as a question of maintaining order given the mobilization of highly conscious political groups. But in fact toleration is core to the project. N. Keohane writes about the République: “he wrote his treatise partly to convince his countrymen that they must obey even a prince whose religious views were different from their own” (1980, 72). 11Which has been called “the completest statement of a philosophy of religious toleration that was given in the sixteenth century” see Sabine, 1931, 308; see also Roellenbleck, 1973, 53, and Skinner, II, 246. 12This phrase is from Wolin’s discussion of Machiavelli (1960). 13Which Bodin recommended prudentially, not as one of the juridical limits on royal power. 14This interpretation of Bodin supports the observations made in Fearon and Laitin, 2000, about the causal effect the instigation of violence has on the dynamics of identity formation and the extension of conflict. McRae notes as well: “To at-

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tribute sovereignty to whoever could obtain physical mastery in competition against all comers was clearly no solution to the problem of social order” (in Bodin, 1962, A17). 15Bodin cannot be classified among those irenic theologians, like Acontius, who stood for a religiously-inspired nonviolence. His stance against physical coercion did not derive from a religious faith in the eventual triumph of the truth, as his Colloquium makes clear. 16Korsgaard (1996), for example, argues: “It is the conceptions of ourselves that are most important to us that give rise to unconditional obligations. For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and to no longer be who you are” (102). 17See Colloquium, Book IV, 169. 18See Book IV, 540 in the République for the twin passage. 19The issue of nondiscussion deserves a much longer treatment than I have given it here, considering its centrality to the concept of “public reason” that Rawls and Habermas put at the center of their normative political prescriptions. I acknowledge this while noting that the concept of public reason would not entail an airing of any and all subjects. 20See Shattuck’s Forbidden Knowledge, about the knowledge that we (often rightly) consciously and unconsciously suppress for fear of its disruptive power. Nagel’s “Concealment & Exposure” (1998) is also an exploration of aspects of this question.

Chapter 4 1Schneewind

(1984, 174) says of Montaigne that it is he who “opens up the modern era of moral thought” and more recently, “His moral skepticism was the starting point of modern moral philosophy. We have been concerned with Montaigne’s questions ever since he asked them” (1998, 45). 2Popkin describes Montaigne as “the most significant figure in the sixteenth century revival of ancient scepticism” (Popkin, 42), and his revival of Pyrrhonism as “one of the crucial forces in the formation of modern thought” (Popkin, 54). See also Levine, 1999, 2001, for a recent interpretation with important modifications of Montaigne’s skepticism as the basis of toleration. 3All quotes are from the Screech edition (1991) of Montaigne’s Essays. Sebond’s Theologia naturalis sive liber creaturarum first published in 1484 in France was an attempt to defend orthodox religious beliefs on the basis of reason. Was such a natural theology possible? Montaigne’s answer in the Apology, although constructed as a defense of Sebond, was in fact a demolition of human reason. 4Skinner maintains that “there can be no question . . . that Montaigne believed very strongly in the necessity of upholding religious uniformity and traditional religious observances,” and he refers to “the conservative outlook voiced by Montaigne throughout the Essays on the need for religious uniformity and on the rights

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of the Church authorities” (Skinner II, 280, 281). Montaigne’s pragmatic toleration is rooted in an understanding of the nature of social conflict and change, and is therefore seen as a necessity. Instead of viewing Montaigne primarily in political terms as a conservative, however, I would paint him as a pragmatist here and derive his apparent conservatism from this more fundamental predisposition. 5Schaefer writes “If there is one point on which practically all interpreters of the Essays can be said to agree, it is the centrality of the ‘self ’ (moi) as the object of Montaigne’s investigations” (1990, 312). 6This is one of Keohane’s (1980, 98–99, 116) and esp. Schaefer’s (1990, 395) principle critiques of Montaigne. 7Note, as discussed in the Introduction, that the usual definition of toleration includes negative judgment followed by a restraining of oneself from repressing what one judges negatively. Many do not believe that an act can be called toleration if it is not premised upon the initial negative response—otherwise, one describes the allowance or nonrepression as indifference or approval, not toleration. It would be misconceived to dismiss Montaigne as irrelevant for thinking about the sources of toleration because he is already inherently open: What he presents to us is the good of a world that is collectively created when its members do not insist upon uniformity. 8W. G. Moore observes about Montaigne’s last essay “On Experience”: “Montaigne attacks one of the hardest problems of morals, the subject of Nature. In none of his essays is this so firmly grasped. The test of living is not conformity with any model of conduct thought out by men, it is conformity with laws and constitutions of the creature we call man. This conformity we can each of us find within ourselves, and more surely than by listening to any outside authority. This is no new note in Montaigne’s writing . . . but we should be at a loss to account for the frequency of this appeal to nature throughout the essay on Experience were it not plain that for Montaigne Nature and Experience are, as it were, obverse and reverse of the same medal. In other words, he writes about experience because he is aiming at a more direct contact with nature than books or systems or the opinions of others can give him” (Moore, 1952, 46). 9In the Machiavellian Moment, Pocock writes: “the late medieval and Renaissance intellect found the particular less intelligible and less rational than the universal” (1975, 4). He then goes on to explore the transformation in the understanding and valuation of time and history. I would suggest that a parallel transformation and indeed linked to it is that of the significance of the body, of the physicality and particularity of the human being in time. 10Others have analyzed the importance Montaigne places on the body (e.g., Moore, 1952; Screech 1983; Starobinski, 1985). Screech (1983) notes Montaigne’s debts to Aristotle and Sebond among others along these lines. Note Sayce’s comment about why Montaigne is not usually considered a philosopher: “It is not just that he argues in the abstract the influence of bodily processes on thought, which is what materialists and even perhaps existentialists may be held to do, but that his own thinking is at every point vivified or contaminated (whichever one prefers) by the pressure of sheer physical life” (1972, 180–181).

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version of this attitude is found here: “Sometimes we must make a loan of ourselves to those we love: even when we should wish to die for ourselves we should break off our plans on their account. It is a sign of greatness of mind to lay hold of life again for the sake of others, as several great and outstanding men have done” (II, 35, 849). And in Book III, 10, “he who does not live a little for others hardly lives at all for himself: “Qui sibi amicus est, scito hunc amicum omnibus esse.” [Seneca: Know that a man who feels loving friendship for himself does so for all men.] (1138). 12“A polity is like a building made of diverse pieces interlocked together, joined in such a way that it is impossible to move one without the whole structure feeling it” (I, 23, 134). 13The concluding words of II, 19 are: “And yet I prefer to think, for the reputation of our kings’ piety, that having been unable to do what they would, they have pretended to will what they could.” 14Starobinski (1985) explores the extreme complexity of Montaigne’s thoughts on this subject. 15The chapter “On Solitude” in particular elaborates this desire for being able to withdraw self-approval from the standards set by the crowd. 16As one of his biographers has noted, Montaigne was “aware that hatred of self is a mortal enemy to love of others” (Frame, 1965, 320–321). 17This theme is repeated throughout the book: “I certainly do not have a mind so distended and flatulent that I would go and swap a solid flesh-and-marrow joy like health for some fancied joy all wind and vapour. . . . Health! For God’s sake!” (II, 37, 887) or later in remarking on his old age, “Since it is the privilege of the mind to escape from old age I counsel it to do so with all my might: let it meanwhile sprout green and flourish, if it can, like mistletoe on a dead tree. But it is a traitor, I fear: it is so closely bound in brotherhood to the body that it is constantly deserting me to follow my body in its necessity” (III, 5, 951). 18Montaigne calls philosophy “this hollow and fleshless bone” (II, 12, 376). “Boast that you have found the bean in the cake, when you consider the clatter of so many philosophical brains!” (II, 12, 383), he later remarks after listing a string of conflicting interpretations of the nature of God from classical authors. 19Montaigne’s critique of glory is another constant theme in the Essays, and one that sets him apart from the classical culture he admired. 20The frame of mind that Montaigne stresses here—empathizing with others as sentient beings—would seem to reduce us to the level of animals, which raises the question of whether humans must then also approach animals in a similar way. A striking part of the chapter “An Apology for Raymond Sebond” is his lengthy discussion of the capacities of animals to feel and communicate, a comparison he uses to denigrate human arrogance, which believes itself to be superior to other creatures. “I make men feel the emptiness, the vanity, the nothingness of Man, wrenching from their grasp the sickly arms of human reason” (II, 12, 500–501). He continues: “How can he [i.e., man], from the power of his own understanding, know the hid-

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den, inward motivations of animate creatures? What comparison between us and them leads him to conclude that they have the attributes of senseless brutes? When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her? . . . Why should it be a defect in the beasts not in us which stops all communication between us? We can only guess whose fault it is that we cannot understand each other: for we do not understand them any more than they understand us” (II, 12, 505, 506). There follows a discussion of the many nonverbal forms of communication: eyes, hands, head, eyebrows, shoulders, silence, etc. The point is that we come to understand one another and “work purposefully together” (II, 12, 507) because we are able to grasp the meaning of physical movements. Being animals, our sentience is a profound basis for our communication. 21In his chapter “On restraining your will” he writes about how we ought to limit our desires to “accessible and contiguous pleasures”: “Any action carried through without such a return on itself—and I mean a quick and genuine one—is wayward and diseased: such are those of covetous and ambitious men and of so many others who dash towards a goal, careering ever on and on” (III, 10, 1143). 22Starobinski describes Montaigne’s valuation of the present in this way: “In many places in the Essays Montaigne speaks of the present as the slimmest of moments, sustained solely by the evidence of its instantaneity and receiving no support at all from the past. And when he discovers that the present—his own and society’s—is subject to the general decline that affects all things, his only recourse, paradoxically, is to turn his mind exclusively to the here and now, to everything that coexists with him in this moment of time” (1985, 283). 23And yet remembering that death is always around the corner. Death also sits in the shadow and often is brought out into broad daylight in the Essays. I will merely note that at the beginning of his writing, Montaigne took a more classical Stoic attitude toward death “To practice death is to practice freedom” (I, 20, 96) where the mind’s overcoming fear of death taught it how to live detached from the concerns of the world and thereby free itself. But at the end of the Essays he pretty much rejects this earlier position: “If we have not known how to live, it is not right to teach us how to die, making the form of the end incongruous with the whole. If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way. They may bluster as much as they like, saying that ‘tota philosoforum vita commentatio mortis est’ [the entire life of philosophers is a preparation for death]; but my opinion is that death is indeed the ending of life, but not therefore its End; it puts an end to it; it is its ultimate point; but it is not its objective. Life must be its own objective, its own purpose” (III, 12, 1190–1191).

Chapter 5 1By

which Huguenots who had previously been granted religious toleration by the French state in 1598 were stripped of official protection in the practice of their religion.

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which Charles II’s illegitimate son, Monmouth, had attempted with the support of radical dissidents in England and in exile on the continent to overthrow James II because of his Catholic sympathies and hence, in their eyes, intolerant and absolutist intentions. 3Which would have rescinded that act of Parliament of 1673 obliging those coming into office to take an oath renouncing the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, an act obviously meant to exclude all Catholics from office-holding. 4To name just a few of the approaches (though within any single analysis, a commentator often combines various perspectives): (1) the religious nature of Locke’s thought—his defense of toleration as founded upon particular Christian beliefs and preoccupations (Dunn, 1991; Mitchell, 1990); (2) the political nature of Locke’s thought—his definition of toleration focused on the extent and nature of sovereign power (Abrams, 1967; Kraynak, 1980; Waldron, 1988); (3) the development and changes in Locke’s views over the course of his writing career on this topic (Abrams, 1967; Kraynak, 1980); (4) the historical context of Locke’s thought—exploring how his ideas were shaped by the exigencies of the time as well as the discourse in which Locke consciously played a part (Dunn, 1991; Marshall, 1994; Tully, 1993); (5) the concepts of modern liberal politics found in Locke’s thought on toleration—rights (Tully, 1983), freedom of speech, thought, and conscience (Dunn, 1991), or an empiricist epistemology of the modern state (McClure, 1990). This cataloguing is obviously not exhaustive; I mean only to list distinctive types of important analysis and particular examples. 5See for a careful treatment, Ian Harris, The Mind of John Locke, 1994, e.g., 253–254. 6I use William Popple’s translation, edited by Tully, 1983. All references to the Letter are to this text. 7I use Philip Abrams (1967) edition of the work. All references to the Two Tracts are to this edition. 8See Abrams’ Introduction, esp. 17ff and 36ff for a description and analysis of the details of the debate. 9Compare the opposite conclusions reached about absolute and arbitrary power in for example, Second Treatise, ¶135. 10See Abrams footnote on p. 218: “it is in his remarkable development of and emphasis on human partiality and the bias instilled by custom, education, and interest that Locke’s treatment of his subject, so conventional hitherto, begins to show originality.” 11Furthermore, according to Locke, it made no difference if one carved out a space called the religious, because the civil authority had a rightful power within this sphere as well. This characteristic of political power was sanctioned by God himself. Because God did not expressly command specific forms of religious worship, they were subsumable under the rule of the state. In the Latin text, he elaborated a hierarchy of law (divine/moral; political/human; fraternal/laws of charity; monastic/private, see 221ff), within which all issues of morality are comprised, and

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argued that the proper matter of the human law “is indifferent things which are not comprised within the limits of a higher, that is, of the divine, law, and are to that extent not already bound up and determined” (223). Although it is sanctioned by God, the power of the magistrate does, nevertheless, function autonomously. 12Because he was involved, in this particular argument, in a debate about indifferency and sought to underline the difference between what was inside and what was outside a person, he did not focus on the diversity of beliefs in the world as well. That problem remained, ultimately, a fundamental problem for Locke and the one to which he turned his attention most fully in An Essay. “We have our Understandings no less different than our palates” (8 in Nidditch edition) he wrote in his introduction. See also Book I, Chapter 3, ¶21 and ¶22. 13Locke’s ambivalence toward conscience results from his seeing it both as a justified source of normative justification when “true” and, at the same time, as an unreliable pretext for individual motivations and bias. 14See Tully, 1993, 48–50, for a discussion of how Locke accentuated the difference between erroneous and true Christian beliefs in his discussion of the possibilities for toleration. 15Dunn has emphasized this (compelling though limited) reading of Locke. Harris, 1994, provides a corroboration. 16See Passmore’s article, “Locke and the Ethics of Belief,” where he examines how Locke’s definition of belief on a purely intellectual basis, on a model of the acquisition of knowledge, brought him insurmountable difficulties. Locke was then led, particularly evident in his concluding chapters on “Enthusiasm” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to compare belief more closely to the operation of desire than of knowledge, hence recognizing its emotional nature. “There can be no doubt, I think, that Locke would have liked consistently to maintain two theses, the first that rational human beings will regulate their degree of assurance in a proposition so that it accords with the evidence—the ideal of an objective science, the Enlightenment ideal. The second, that human beings are so constituted as naturally to do this, were created rational, that they go wrong only when some of the evidence is not before them. But he finds it impossible to reconcile this second thesis with his experience of the actual irrationality of human beings, brought home to him with peculiar sharpness by the Civil War and more particularly, by the ‘enthusiasm’ of the Puritan sectaries. . . . And so he is gradually driven into a new picture of belief, in which it is no longer a weaker form of knowledge, but rather, like desire in Locke’s second-edition account of desire, an attempt to remove uneasiness, to satisfy our inclinations” (Passmore, 1978, 207–208). 17Note this passage: “if the believer and unbeliever could be content as Paul advises to live together, and use no other weapons to conquer each other’s opinions but pity and persuasion, if men would suffer one another to go to heaven every one his one way, and not out of a fond conceit of themselves pretend to greater knowledge and care of another’s soul and eternal concernments than he himself, how much I say if such a temper and tenderness were wrought in the hearts of men our

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author’s [i.e., Bagshaw’s] doctrine of toleration might promote a quiet in the world, and at last bring those glorious days that men have a great while sought after the wrong way, I shall leave everyone to judge. But it is like to produce far different effects.” (161) 18Locke’s picture of the sovereign as the sole judge, in the absence of specific divine commands, of the means to achieve order and peace within a justly founded community was repeated throughout the Tracts: “The magistrate indeed ought not to be troublesome by his injunctions to the people, but he alone is judge what is so and what not” (150); “the lawmaker alone is the judge of that necessity and its urgency in those laws that he establishes and therefore from thence we can take no rise to question the equity of his injunctions” (152). Tuck claims that Locke “always believed that it is possible to argue about the reasonableness of any policy and to convict the sovereign of a mistake in his judgment” (Tuck, 1990, 168), but these passages in the Tracts do not support this observation. Later indeed, this position came to be a distinguishing characteristic of Locke’s views, in contrast to Hobbes’, on the limits of sovereign power. Locke’s theory of limited government in his later works argued directly against his earlier view about the inviolability of the sovereign’s judgment, but the importance of this stipulation at the earlier stage is clear. A central point of the Tracts was to argue for the supremacy of one judgment for the common good. 19See Marshall, 1994, 62ff, for a careful consideration of various reasons why Locke may have been lead to his “dramatic volte face between the Two Tracts and the ‘Essay on toleration of 1667.” Abrams, 1967, attempts to be comprehensive in his explanation as well. See 30ff and 84ff where he discusses the historical and personal experiences that contributed to Locke’s early conservatism and the factors that may have influenced the alteration in his views: “his political experience of the effects of intolerance; . . . his unsatisfactory struggle with the theory of natural law; . . . his growing commitment, confirmed by his scientific inquiries, to empiricism; . . . his escape from the academic conventions of Oxford to the more pragmatic circle of Shaftesbury” (84). Some commentators have maintained that there was no dramatic change at all. It can be denied from one of two perspectives. Along one line, Locke’s mature, liberal view of politics can be traced back to this earlier work, and conversely, this work is reinterpreted as being not so profoundly authoritarian as might at first appear. Thus, Gough writes that Locke’s “basic principles, on political power, the nature of a church, and toleration, were substantially unchanged throughout his life” (Klibansky and Gough, 1968, 12). Or, the inverse of the liberalizing view emphasizes instead the attenuated nature of Locke’s support for toleration all along. Kraynak provides the clearest example of this approach when he proposes “to explain Locke’s development by showing that absolutism and toleration are the same in principle despite their great differences in practice” (Kraynak, 1980, 53). Kraynak points to a complex dimension of toleration—that for it to exist, it must be intolerant of those who would deny it. A major problem with his argument is that he seems to equate strength and the enforcement of limits with absolutism. A tolerant regime must be a strong regime, yet its strength is not essentially one of absolutism. An abso-

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lutist political system might be tolerant (Bodin) but a tolerant regime is not necessarily absolutist, as Kraynak would have it. To collapse the two is to ignore obvious differences in what it means to govern (absolutely or within limits) and what the experience is for those living in various types of political systems. 20According to Kraynak, Locke’s rejection of toleration began to be modified a year after he had written the Two Tracts (Kraynak, 58). If this chronology is correct, it would indicate that these particular new experiences were not the most influential catalysts for his change of mind. 21The two true Christian beliefs being: “that god tolerates each man to worship him in the way he sincerely believes to be right (over and above a few plain and simple essentials: the existence of Christ, heaven and hell and the core Christian ethics); and that Christianity should be upheld and spread by love and persuasion only, not by force and compulsion” (Tully, 1993, 49). 22For example, he observes that the natural law Locke espoused in his political theory in the Two Treatises could not be reconciled with the empiricist epistemology of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 23See Ashcraft, 1986, 98–99, for evidence of “Locke’s cool acceptance of the Dissenters’ enmity toward one another.” 24Locke in the Letter (51) used the argument that the excitability of the people to act on the basis of factions was exaggerated, and that therefore this line of attack on the rights of the people was nothing but a subterfuge. This same type of argument was used in the Second Treatise as well when he maintained that people will not revolt for any particular offense but require long trains of abuses to be moved to action (see e.g., ¶168, ¶208, ¶209). In fact, the more liberty they are given, the more law-abiding they will be because they will have nothing to complain about in a principled way. 25In his introductory remarks to the reader of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke described how he conceived of the task he set for himself: “‘tis Ambition enough to be employed as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge” (Essay, 10). Locke may have conceived of his objectives in these modest terms (though it’s hard to imagine he really did) but the reason we still read him is because he did construct a markedly new way of thinking about certain problems in modern life. The manner in which he did it is evidence of the kind of gestalt switch that was slowly taking place in the seventeenth century and that Locke aimed at and in part helped to further. As Maurice Cranston states in the concluding sentence of his biography of Locke: “Locke did not merely enlarge men’s knowledge, he changed their ways of thinking” (Cranston, 1957, 482). 26Locke makes the point near the beginning of the Letter that civil power cannot control the inner beliefs of a person and therefore should not be used in this way. “The care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate, because his Power consists only in outward force; but true and saving Religion consists in the inward perswasion of the Mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And

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such is the nature of the Understanding, that it cannot be compell’d to the belief of any thing by outward force” (27). 27He asserts: “what one misses above all in Locke’s argument is a sense that there is anything morally wrong with intolerance, or a sense of any deep concern for the victims of persecution or the moral insult that is involved in the attempt to manipulate their faith. . . . Addressed as it is to the persecutors in their interests, the argument has nothing to do with the interests of the victims of persecution as such,” Waldron, 1988, 85. 28This way of setting out the basis for Locke’s support of toleration raises the question of Locke’s individualism versus his majoritarianism/collectivism, posed most sharply by Kendall. Locke made statements supportive of both sides and I shall make no claims about which was ultimately his “deepest” position or whether he was just hopelessly inconsistent. Rather, this much makes sense: the text of the Letter was written to persuade a wide audience of the rightness of toleration. As I discuss, he appeals, among other things, to each reader’s inner experience to accomplish this. If this is true, Locke must assume that there is an inner private sphere that is separate from the dictates of the majority, normatively powerful and politically significant. 29Locke neither invented these dualisms, nor is he responsible for the subsequent way in which they have been interpreted as straightjackets in much of Western society and culture. Inevitably, these boundaries, then and now, are contested, as they should and always will be. By underscoring the separations that he did, Locke is an example of someone who facilitated cultural shifts. We need to keep in mind the historicity of the ideas as well as the possibilities of freedom that they may have offered at that particular point in time. 30See Schouls, 1980, for a comparison of Descartes and Locke on their respective methods. He finds a “striking similarity” between their methodologies. Contrast the position taken by Bracken, 1984, esp. Chapters 3 and 5, in which he argues for the diametically opposed methods of Locke and Descartes. The upshot of his position is that where Lockean empiricism makes racism and intolerance likely, Cartesian dualism would have provided some theoretical guards against them. 31Locke pressed this point later in reference to speculative beliefs as well: “If a Roman Catholick believe that to be really the Body of Christ, which another man calls Bread, he does no injury thereby to his Neighbour. If a Jew do not believe the New Testament to be the Word of God, he does not thereby alter any thing in mens Civil Rights. If a Heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to be punished as a pernicious Citizen. The Power of the Magistrate, and the Estates of the People, may be equally secure whether any man believe these things or no” (46). 32Thus I disagree with Waldron’s statement: “Because the in-principle argument [i.e., that it is irrational for the state to be intolerant] has collapsed, the sharp functional distinction between church and state that Locke was arguing for goes with it” (Waldron, 1988, 84). The dichotomy between church and state is only one of numerous ways in which Locke established boundaries. These served a far more important role in Locke’s Letter than Waldron admits.

Notes 33Note

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Locke’s use of boundaries as central in other discussions of religion: “In matters of religion it might be well if anyone would tell how far we are to be guided by reason and how far by faith . . . setting down a strict boundary between faith and reason . . . ought to be the first point established in all disputes of religion” Journal, 24 August 1676, MS.f.1. Quoted by Ashcraft in Yolton, 1969, footnote, p. 215. 34Another prominent debate in which this public/private paradox is exploited is in that of gender roles and differences. 35It is interesting to note that Locke clearly subsumed the church under the rubric of “voluntary societies” comparing it to other ones like those of “philosophers of learning, of merchants for commerce, . . . of men of leisure for mutual conversation and discourse” (Letter, 28). Like other secular organizations, the church was seen in primarily private terms. 36See Ariès and Duby, A History of Private Life, V. III—Passions of the Renaissance, R. Chartier, ed., 1989. 37One could interpret Locke’s injunctives to worship God in public as an indication of the limits of his toleration. Obviously, Locke did not believe that atheists could be tolerated, nor Catholics, and these stipulations on his part have been used to demonstrate that Locke was in fact much less tolerant than the Enlightenment image of him suggests. We should readily admit that Locke was not the equivalent of today’s ACLU defender or even of J. S. Mill. Indeed, we cannot excuse Locke’s anti–Catholicism and his fear of atheism completely as being the inevitable products of his age: Others (e.g., Henry Stubbe and Pierre Bayle) had not excluded Catholics or atheists from toleration. To conjecture as to what led Locke to adhere so closely to these common prejudices may be an interesting psychological exercise, but his commonness on these accounts should not cancel out the underlying implications of his defense of toleration. 38My analysis here parallels Don Herzog’s discussion of liberal neutrality in his Happy Slaves. A liberal society/polity is one in which roles and spheres of life are differentiated. This differentiation allows for freedom, autonomy, and individuality in ways that a more cohesive community does not. Where Herzog focuses more on the form of liberal institutions and the way in which this form supports specific normative ideals, I have been more concerned with the psychologies that undergird and are created by different political forms (and that I believe were in the back of Locke’s mind in much of his writing). 39An Israeli politician at the beginning of the peace process years ago said (as I recall it): The fact that most Israelis are divided within themselves about the process will help to make the peace agreement a reality—one part of themselves will allow the other to temporarily take a risk on peace. For those people adamantly opposed who felt no conflict within themselves, an option for peace would find no ground at all. Unfortunately, events now (2002) have hardened the sides and created undivided minds on both sides. 40Locke acknowledged that he had not solved problems of conflict at the margins and that jurisdictions would come into conflict: “A Good Life, in which

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consists not the least part of Religion and true Piety, concerns also the Civil Government: and in it lies the safety both of Mens Souls, and of the Commonwealth. Moral Actions belong therefore to the Jursidiction (sic) both of the outward and inward Court; both of the Civil and Domestick Governor; I mean, both of the Magistrate and Conscience. Here therefore is great danger, least one of these Jurisdictions intrench upon the other, and Discord arise between the Keeper of the publick Peace and the Overseers of Souls” (46). Ultimately, when the confrontation was insurmountable on the basis of respect for boundaries of action, Locke came out in support of the individual. “But what if the Magistrate believe that he has the Right to make such Laws, and that they are for the publick Good; and his Subjects believe the contrary? Who shall be Judge between them? I answer, God alone. For there is no Judge upon earth between the Supreme Magistrate and the People. . . . But what shall be done in the mean while? I answer: the principal and chief care of every one ought to be of his own Soul first, and in the next place of the publick Peace: tho’ yet there are very few will think ‘tis Peace there, where they see all laid waste” (49). See his reiteration of this in the Second Treatise, ¶168, ¶241.

Chapter 6 1Much

has been written about the use of art by fascists and totalitarian governments but much less on the need of liberal, tolerant, and open societies for artistic forms and expression. Defoe is an example of how the vehicle of art can be supportive of pluralist politics. 2The term public judgment is related to but not the same as the concept of “political judgment,” which has now become, inspired by Hannah Arendt’s unfulfilled intention to study the phenomenon of judgment, an important topic in political theory. The idea of public judgment stands somewhere between public opinion and political judgment—it is neither simply whatever happens to be the collective whim nor the notion of a normative collective stance based upon reason or a standard of justice. Rather, it refers to the collective convictions that appear to persons living in the society as normatively constraining them. 3My source for discussion of Defoe’s life is Backscheider’s superb biography (1989). I will quote from it frequently and therefore note it in the text as “B” with the page number following. 4Furbank and Owens, 1988, dispute the traditional attribution of over 550 items to Defoe, remarking that “if Moore’s Checklist [the best-known twentieth century bibliography of Defoe] is to be trusted, we must believe that Defoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe and the other great novels and who, in his Review (writing twice or thrice weekly, sometimes under the most trying circumstances) produced prose of great verve, intellectual grasp, and polemical edge, would also compose pamphlets of unfathomable dullness or asininity, incompetent and bungling historical narratives, and quite characterless hackwork compilations” (1988, 5–6).

Notes 5From

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the beginning of their relationship in 1703, Defoe took a lead in shaping Harley’s ideas as well. Backscheider notes: “With characteristic rash confidence, he appointed himself Harley’s adviser. Although his letters included extravagant gratitude, fawning compliments, and melodramatic pleas for money or a secure position, his self-assurance dominated. He wrote papers not only on controlling the ministry and queen, on winning the loyalty of various groups of Englishmen, and on influencing elections, but also on how to manage Poland, Hungary, and Sweden. His effrontery extended to repeating highly personal, insulting remarks to Harley” (159). 6Daniel Bruhlmeier (1999) considers Defoe’s defense of toleration for economic reasons. 7Curtis (1979) notes that though Defoe held a complex series of positions on various toleration issues, they were not inconsistent: “Defoe preferred civil toleration for Dissenters, but was willing to settle for religious toleration alone if the public were not ready to be generous” (15). 8With the passage of the Act of Uniformity in 1662 (the second statute of the Clarendon Code which effectively ended the religious freedom enjoyed by non– Anglicans under the Protectorate of Cromwell: clergymen and all others instructing youth were, among other provisions, to promise non-resistance to the king, to adhere to the creed of the Church of England, and to use the Book of Common Prayer in all services) Defoe’s family chose to follow their pastor and become Dissenters or Nonconformists, thereby cutting off access for their son, who was then only 1 or 2 years old, from a university education and a civil or military career. He did, however, receive an excellent, though not “classical” education from Charles Morton, which emphasized history, modern languages, geography, and science. Morton became vice president of Harvard College, and the textbook he wrote for his students in England was used at Harvard for over 35 years (B15–17). 9The Corporation Act (1661) was the first of four statutes that comprise the Clarendon Code. It required that all persons holding municipal office take Anglican communion and reject the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. The act effectively excluded all Nonconformists from office. The Test Act of 1673 excluded from military or civil public office all who refused the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, who refused communion according the Church of England or who refused to renounce belief in the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Although it was mainly directed at Catholics, it excluded Protestants Dissenters as well. 10The controversy over occasional conformity centered on the acceptability of Dissenters’ “occasionally” taking communion in the Anglican Church in order to qualify to hold office. Defoe criticized the practice as a sell-out, too much a compromise of one’s Dissenting principles for worldly gain. But in the fall of 1702 a bill to prevent occasional conformity was introduced in Parliament and it was seen by many including Defoe as an attack on Nonconformity. The bill was defeated in 1703. 11It is interesting to note that Defoe had famously used the notion of mixture in his defense of William’s accession to the throne in his The True-Born Englishman (one of the greatest literary triumphs of his life and a famous declaration of tolera-

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tion) jabbing at a pure English identity: English blood was essentially a mixture beginning with the Norman conquest. Here is a passage: Thus from a Mixture of all Kinds began, That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman: The Wonder which remains is at our Pride, To value that which all wise Men deride. For Englishmen to boast of Generation, Cancels their Knowledge, and lampoons the Nation. A True-Born Englishman’s a contradiction, In Speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction. (42–42) 12See

Backscheider’s discussion of the Shortest Way episode pp. 84–135. That Defoe’s intention was to elicit in his reader’s a response of revulsion against the speaker’s position is clear. He had used this strategy earlier (spring, 1701) in his Legion’s Memorial and been highly successful with it. 13Schonhorn insists that the political Defoe has been lost from modern discussion, and he argues that the essence of Defoe’s politics is focused on the image of the warrior king, which for Schonhorn indicates not a modern but a basically traditional orientation toward political power. He is clearly right to emphasize the political nature of Defoe’s work, but I believe it is misleading to conclude that Defoe’s politics are more traditional than modern. Napoleon—certainly a warrior king— carried forward modern ideals of freedom and human rights, as Hegel recognized. Symbols are re-appropriated and put to use in different ways in new times. Moreover, Defoe was adamant in his support of Protestant succession and equally vehement in his criticism of “Jacobites”—those opposed to the revolution men who in the “Allegiance Controversy” defended the right of William and Mary to ascend the English throne after James in 1689. Finally, one of Defoe’s most frequently quoted lines, written in his last issue of the Review, “Writing upon Trade was the Whore I really doated upon” testifies to his fascination with the new economy and its microscopic workings. Defoe was a “modern” as Pocock has emphasized (1975, 1985), though this classification does not preclude recognizing in him components of traditional political ideals as well. 14The spirit of faction and partisanship that pervaded political life during the last years of the seventeenth and first decades of the eighteenth century were constant themes in his work. On the accession of King George in 1714, he wrote “thousands of words in his periodicals and pamphlets” urging national harmony just as he had done on William’s accession to the throne 25 years earlier (B387). One notable passage in which Defoe quotes Scripture reads as follows: “Wherefore to encourage ourselves also, on a yet surer and stonger [sic] Foundation, I conclude this Part in the word of the faithful Spies to the children of Israel, when the wicked Spies terrified the People with the Multitude and Strength of their Enemies, Fear ye not the People of the Land for thy are but Bread for us, their Shield is departed from them, and the Lord is with us, FEAR THEM NOT” (B351). However one may want to in-

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terpret this passage, it clearly designates a distinction between faithful and wicked “spies”—secret witnesses to events. The latter would emphasize and stir up fear among the people by depicting others as implacable, mortal enemies. One can think of nationalist leaders today who seek to personify other people as threatening, thereby bringing on Hobbesian cycles of fear and violence. 15I am well aware of the deep and murky waters into which I am wading by making such bald claims about Defoe and the novel. Nevertheless, I do think his distinctly new type of writing, which is generally now accepted as at least a protonovelistic form, exemplifies certain features that make it conducive to political use in the way I hope to show. The study of the transformation of literary forms during this time is an extensive field in which I stake no claims. Among the many issues of this debate, literary scholars dispute the causes of the “rise of the novel” (capitalism/materialism; Protestant inwardness; individualism; changes in conceptions of truth/reality/experience; etc.); the linked questions of when the novel actually can be said to have come into its own and which authors to include (Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, 1615); more often Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding; or only beginning with Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Dickens, etc.); and which features are truly essential to the novel as a literary form. 16Richetti’s definition of the novel is “a long prose narrative about largely fictional if usually realistic characters and plausible events” (1996, 1). The claim about the novel’s “realism” is a source of contention in literary analysis (see for example Warner, 1998, and Richetti, 1996, for discussions that challenge the view that “realism” characterized the early modern novel form). But I will stick with this description because I think it serves as a useful indicator of the feature of writing that in broad outlines can serve to distinguish the novel from the more heroic perspectives of myth, poetry, and romance. 17The third volume is entitled Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 18It seems a bit ironic that this high accolade was bestowed by a communist critic, Ralph Fox in his The Novel and the People in 1937, see Green, 1990, 21. And André Malraux wrote that for those who had seen prisons and concentration camps, only three books retained their truth: Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, and The Idiot (Watt, 1960, 133). 19Some analyses of Defoe’s transformation of literary genres are Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1960; J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim, 1966; E. Zimmerman, Defoe and the Novel, 1975; M. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, 1987; and Novak, Max, 1996. 20The text cited for Robinson Crusoe (RC) is the Norton Critical Editions, edited by Michael Shinagel, 1975. As Novak writes: “Robinson Crusoe is a work of prose fiction that lends itself to the kind of multilayers analysis that Roland Barthes provides in his S/Z, a fiction that resonates simultaneously on many levels, providing the reader with divergent codes of significance and leading him forward with a variety of enigmatic questions that demand answers. The variety of structures—spiritual autobiography, traveler’s narrative, do-it-yourself utopia, political and eco-

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nomic allegory—fuse into a unity under the realist surface of the narrative but provide a text that opens itself to a myriad of possible readings” (Novak, 1996, 49). 21Rogers in his analysis of the book asserts that “his greatest single work, RC1 (i.e., volume I of Robinson Crusoe), ignores sexual as it does social relations—the stuff of later fiction” (1979, 89). In contrast, my interpretation of Defoe is that the writing of the book was a social and political act and that the seeming dearth of society in the book is not an indication of lack of interest but a moral point to be interpreted. Regarding the lack of sex, Defoe takes up this subject with relish in Moll Flanders. Robinson Crusoe is a more directly political book than Moll Flanders. Nevertheless, if Robinson Crusoe were only a political novel or one didactically so— it would fail to have the attraction it did and still does. 22His comments about solitude in many places sound almost identical to passages of Montaigne’s on solitude and the self in his Essays, including Montaigne’s own chapter entitled “On Solitude.” In II:17, Montaigne wrote “I turn round and round in myself ” and Defoe writes “Every Thing revolves in our Minds by innumerable circular Motions, all centring in our selves” (263). And in “On Solitude,” “So we must bring her back, haul her back into our self. That is true solitude. It can be enjoyed in towns and in kings’ courts” (Montaigne, Essays, 269), and then “We have a soul able to turn in on herself; she can keep herself company . . . ‘in lonely places, be a crowd unto yourself ’” (ibid., 270). Defoe writes: “All Reflection is carry’d Home, and our Dear-self is, in one Respect, the End of Living. Hence Man may be properly said to be alone in the Midst of the Crowds and Hurry of Men and Business” (263–264). Though there is no direct quotation from Montaigne in Defoe’s work, it would have been possible and even natural according to Backscheider for Defoe, who was a voracious reader in any case, to have read him as a student at Morton’s academy. Morton often had his students including Defoe “write refutations of modern texts. They read them in various languages, including French, and wrote their refutations in English (an unusual practice at that time). Montaigne would be a natural!” Another possible connection between Montaigne and Defoe would have been through Defoe’s reading of Gassendi, who it is known Defoe read Morton’s. Gassendi’s own thinking on moral and philosophical questions was based on Charron who had systematized Montaigne’s scepticism. I thank Backscheider for her conversations in which these connections and possible influences were laid out. The latter interpretation might explain some features of Defoe but not the strikingly similar language with which he dwells on solitude. Nevertheless, it is often the case that some perennial existential experiences can be expressed in remarkably similar language and words without there having been direct borrowing. (Backscheider in personal correspondence) 23Novak in his analysis of Defoe’s concept of the state of nature, claims that three opinions about solitary natural man were prevalent during this time. “The majority of writers . . . argued that man was a social animal, that the bestial life of the solitary savage was insecure, and that so far from being happy, the isolated natural man lived in constant fear of death. Although most modern critics have re-

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garded Crusoe as an embodiment of the enterprising, fearless economic man, Crusoe clearly belongs to the third category. He survives his solitude, but he is always afraid, always cautious” (1963, 23). But clearly it is not only fear that provokes Defoe to utter cries for human companionship. 24Backscheider argues that Robinson Crusoe “dramatizes Defoe’s position on the very recent Salters’ Hall controversy. His novel illustrates deliberately and in great detail that Scripture and revelation without dogma are sufficient” (417). 25In Moll Flanders, Defoe voices a tolerant point of view when he depicts Moll’s response to her beloved Jemy’s religion: “I presently learn’d to speak favourably of the Romish Church; particularly I told them I saw little, but the prejudice of Education in all the Differences that were among Christians about Religion, and if it had so happen’d that my Father had been a Roman Catholick, I doubted not but I should have been as well pleas’d with their Religion as my own” (MF, 111). 26Quoted in MacFarlane, 1978.

Chapter 7 1As discussed in Chapter 1, that persons categorize one another and are moved by group loyalties are facts of human psychology and social-psychology. But no inborn psychological drive toward intolerance enables us to explain specific outbreaks of repression: The pursuit of violence toward others is a result of a convergence of conditions resulting from both politics and existing forms of identification. Conversely, there is no natural drive toward toleration or openness in respect to individuals or groups. (These claims would not contradict the work of psychologists of the “authoritarian” personality like Stenner, because even if we could say that some people tend to be more naturally open to diversity and others threatened by it, this individual level conclusion does not translate into a political psychology. To explain the collective state of openness or closedness, we would have to look at the traditions, institutions, and habits carried by the collective as a whole.) Appealing to a psychological level or some presumed Procrustean logic of the human mind is not sufficient for understanding or predicting how persons pursue conflict, and conversely, mutuality on a broader scale. Certain psychological traits always in conjunction with political logic do lead more naturally toward justifications of intolerance than toward the pursuit of toleration as a general principle. Hobbes memorably described how a propensity toward fear of others in certain contexts would lead to mutual destruction. 2E. H. Carr, 1964, p. 235. I thank Deborah Avant for this apt citation.

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Bobbio, Norberto, “In Praise of La Mitezza,” in Tolerance between Intolerance and the Intolerable, Paul Ricoeur, ed. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996, pp. 3–18. Bodin, Jean. Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis, Marion Daniels Kuntz, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. ———. The Six Books of a Commonweal, Richard Knolles, trans., Kenneth D. McRae, ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bossy, John. The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. ———. Christianity in the West, 1400–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Bourne, Henry Richard Fox. The Life of John Locke, Vol. 1. Darmstadt, Germany: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1969; reprint, London, 1876. Bracken, Harry M. Mind and Language, Essays on Descartes and Chomsky. Dordrecht: Foris, 1984. Brown, Homer O. “The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe,” in ELH, Vol. 38, December 1971, pp. 562–590. Brown, Peter. “Religious Coercion in the Later Roman Empire: The Case of North Africa,” in History, Vol. XLVIII, October 1963, pp. 283–305. ———. “St. Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion,” in The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. LIV, 1964, pp. 107–116. Brown, Wendy. “Reflections on Tolerance in the Age of Identity” in Democracy and Vision, Aryeh Botwinick and William E. Connolly, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Brühlmeier, Daniel. “Daniel Defoe: Dissent, Economics and Toleration” in Religious Toleration: “The Variety of Rites” from Cyrus to Defoe, ed. by John Christian Laursen. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Burns, J. H., ed. The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bury, J. B. A History of Freedom of Thought. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1913. Butterfield, Herbert. “Toleration in Early Modern Times,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 38, 1977, pp. 573–584. Carr, E. H. The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919–1939. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Chartier, Roger, ed. A History of Private Life, Vol. III: Passions of the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Cranston, Maurice. John Locke. London: Longmans, 1966. Crick, Bernard. “Toleration and Tolerance in Theory and Practice,” in Government and Opposition, Vol. 6, Spring 1971, pp. 144–171. Connolly, William E. “Identity and Difference in Liberalism,” in Liberalism and the Good, R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson, eds. New York: Routledge, 1990.

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———. Identity/Difference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. ———. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Cunningham, Frank. “Group Hatreds and Democracy,” in Liberalism and Its Practice, Dan Avnon and Avner de-Shalit, eds. New York: Routledge, 1999. Curtis, Laura Ann, ed. The Versatile Defoe. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975. Dees, Richard H. “Moral Conversions,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LVI, September 1996, pp. 531–550. ———. “Establishing Toleration,” unpublished paper, 1997. ———. “Trust and the Rationality of Toleration,” in Noûs, Vol. 32, No. 1 1998, pp. 82–98. ———. Trust and Toleration. Manuscript, St. Louis University, 2002. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. ———. Robinson Crusoe. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. ———. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702). Shakespeare Head edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974. ———. The True-Born Englishman (1700). Shakespeare Head edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974. Delumeau, Jean. Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire. London: Burns & Oates, 1977. Denzer, Horst, ed. Verhandlungen der internationalen Bodin-Tagung in München. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1973. De Ste Croix, G. E. M. “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?” in Studies in Ancient Society, M. I. Finley, ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Diefendorf, Barbara. Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Ark Paperbacks, 1966. Downie, J. A. Robert Harley and the Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Dubiel, Helmut. “Cultivated Conflicts,” in Political Theory, Vol. 26, April 1998, pp. 209–220. Dunn, John. The Political Thought of John Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. ———. Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———. “The Claim to Freedom of Conscience: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Worship?” in From Persecution to Toleration, Ole Peter Grell et al., eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 171–193. Dunn, Richard S. The Age of Religious Wars, 1559–1715. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.

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Elliott, J. H. The Old World and the New, 1492–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Elster, Jon, ed. The Multiple Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Erikson, Erik H. Identity, Youth and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968. Faltenbacher, Karl Friedrich. Das Colloquium Heptaplomeres, ein Religionsgespräch zwischen Scholastik und Aufklärung: Untersuchungen zur Thematik und zur Frage der Autorschaft. Frankfurt: Peter Lange, 1988. Fearon, James D. “What Is Identity (As We Now Use the Word)?” unpublished manuscript. Stanford University, 1999. Fearon, James D. and David D. Laitin. “Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity,” in International Organization Vol. 54, No. 4, Autumn 2000, pp. 845–877. Figgis, John Nevill. Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907. Fish, Stanley. “Almost Pragmatism: The Jurisprudence of Richard Posner, Richard Rorty, and Ronald Dworkin,” in Pragmatism in Law and Society, Michael Brint and William Weaver, eds. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. Fletcher, Anthony and John Stevenson, eds. Order and Disorder in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Forst, Rainer. “Toleration, Justice, and Reason,” conference paper delivered in Exeter, England, April 2000. ———. “The Limits of Toleration,” conference paper delivered in Washington, D.C., March 2001. Frame, Donald. Montaigne. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965. Franck, Thomas M. “Is Personal Freedom a Western Value?” in American Journal of International Law, Vol. 91, No. 4, October, 1997, pp. 593–627. Frankfurt, Harry. The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. ———. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. ———. John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. ———, ed. On Sovereignty, by Jean Bodin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Fulbrook, Mary. “Legitimation Crises and the Early Modern State: the Politics of Religious Toleration,” in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, Kaspar von Greyerz, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984, pp. 146–156. Furbank, P. N. and W. R. Owens. The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.

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Garnsey, Peter. “Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity,” in Persecution and Toleration, W. J. Sheils, ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Garnsey, Peter and Richard Saller. The Roman Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Goldie, Mark. “The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83, Winter 1980, pp. 473–563. ———. “The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England,” in From Persecution to Toleration, Ole Peter Grell et al., ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 331–368. Gough, J. W. John Locke’s Political Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Government and Opposition, Vol. 6, Spring, 1971 (issue on toleration). Graff, Harvey J., ed. Literacy and Social Development in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Grant, A. J. “The Problem of Religious Toleration in Sixteenth-Century France,” in Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1925, pp. 154–172. Grant, Ruth W. John Locke’s Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Green, Martin. The Robinson Crusoe Story. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. Greenleaf, William H. “Bodin and the Idea of Order,” in Internationale Bodin Tagung, Horst Denzer, ed. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1973. Grell, Ole Peter, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds. From Persecution to Toleration, The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Grell, Ole Peter and Bob Scribner, eds. Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Guggisberg, Hans R. “The Defence of Religious Toleration and Religious Liberty in Early Modern Europe: Arguments, Pressures, and Some Consequences,” in History of European Ideas, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1983, pp. 35–50. Gutmann, Amy and Dennis Thompson. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Habermas, Jurgen. The Inclusion of the Other. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Hadari, Saguiv. “Persuader Sans Convaincre”: A Rousseauan Approach to the Insoluble Problem of the Social Contract,” in The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, September 1986, pp. 504–519. Hanlon, Gregory. Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Hardin, Russell. One for All. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Harris, Ian. The Mind of John Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Herrin, Judith. The Formation of Christendom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

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Herzog, Don. Happy Slaves: A Critique of Consent Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Heyd, David, ed. Toleration: An Elusive Virtue. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Holmes, Stephen. “Gag Rules or the Politics of Omission,” in Constitutionalism and Democracy, Jon Elster, Rune Slagstad, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988(a), pp. 19–58. ———. “Jean Bodin: The Paradox of Sovereignty and the Privatization of Religion” in Religion, Morality, and the Law, J. Roland Pennock, John W. Chapman, eds. New York: New York University Press, 1988(b), pp. 5–45. ———. Passions and Constraint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Horowitz, Maryanne. “La religion de J. Bodin reconsidérée: Le Marrane comme modèle de la tolérance,” in Actes de Colloque Interdisciplinaire d’Angers, “Jean Bodin,” 1985, pp. 201–213. Horton, John, ed. Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Horton, John and Susan Mendus, eds. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus. London: Routledge, 1991. ———. Toleration, Identity, and Difference. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Hunter, J. Paul. The Reluctant Pilgrim. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. Ignatieff, Michael. The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997. Jones, J. R. The Revolution of 1688 in England. New York: WW Norton & Co, 1972. Jordan, W. K. The Development of Religious Toleration in England, Vols. I–IV. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1932. Kamen, Henry. The Rise of Toleration. New York: World University Library, 1967. ———. “Toleration and the Law in the West 1500–1700,” in Ratio Juris, March 1997. Kateb, George. The Inner Ocean. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Kendall, Willmoore. John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965. Keohane, Nannerl O. Philosophy and the State in France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. King, Preston. The Ideology of Order. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974. Kingdon, Robert M. Myths about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacres, 1572–1576. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. ———. Church and Society in Reformation Europe. London: Variorum Reprints, 1985. Klibansky, Raymond and J. W. Gough. Introduction to Epistola de Tolerantia, by John Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

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Roellenbleck, Georg. “Der Schluss des ‘Heptaplomeres’ und die Begrüdung der Toleranz bei Bodin,” in International Conference on Bodin in Munich. Munchen: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1973, pp. 53–67. Rogers, Pat. Robinson Crusoe. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979. Rose, Paul Lawrence. Bodin and the Great God of Nature. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1980. ———. “Bodin’s Universe and Its Paradoxes: Some Problems in the Intellectual Biography of Jean Bodin,” in Politics and Society in Reformation Europe, E. I. Kouri and Tom Scott, eds. London: Macmillan Press, 1987, pp. 266–288. Rosenblum, Nancy L. Membership and Morals. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Russell, Conrad. “Arguments for Religious Unity in England, 1530–1650,” in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 18, 1967, pp. 201–226. ———. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Sabine, George H. A History of Political Theory. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961. Salmon, J. H. M. The French Wars of Religion. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1967. ———. “Bodin and the Monarchomachs,” in Internationale Bodin Tagung. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1973. ———. Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. Sandel, Michael J. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Sayce, R. A. The Essays of Montaigne. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972. Schaefer, David Lewis. The Political Philosophy of Montaigne. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Schneewind, J. B. “The Divine Corporation and the History of Ethics,” in Philosophy in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. ———. The Invention of Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Schonhorn, Manuel. Defoe’s Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Schouls, Peter A. The Imposition of Method. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Screech, M. A. Montaigne and Melancholy. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1983. Sen, Amartya. “East and West: The Reach of Reason,” in New York Review of Books, July 20, 2000(a). ———. “Beyond Identity” in The New Republic, December 18, 2000(b). Shapiro, Barbara J. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

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Tuck, Richard. “Scepticism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century,” in Justifying Toleration, Susan Mendus, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ———. “Hobbes and Locke on Toleration,” in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, Mary G. Dietz, ed. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990, pp. 153–171. ———. Philosophy and Government 1572–1651. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Tully, James. Introduction to A Letter Concerning Toleration, by John Locke. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983. ———. An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. Strange Multiplicity, Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Tully, James, ed. Meaning and Context, Quentin Skinner and His Critics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Turchetti, Mario. “Religious Concord and Political Tolerance in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France” in Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1991, pp. 15–25. Van Engen, John. “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review, Vol. 91, 1986, pp. 519–552. ———. “Faith as a Concept of Order in Medieval Christendom,” in Belief in History, Thomas Kselman, ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991, pp. 19–67. Waldron, Jeremy. “Locke: Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution,” in Justifying Toleration, Susan Mendus, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 61–88. Walzer, Michael. Thick and Thin. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. ———. On Toleration. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Warner, William B. Licensing Entertainment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960. ———. Myths of Modern Individualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Wells, Charlotte C. Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Wieseltier, Leon. “Against Identity,” in The New Republic, November 28, 1994. Williams, Bernard. “Toleration, a Political or Moral Question?” in Tolerance between Intolerance and the Intolerable, Paul Ricoeur, ed. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996a. ———. “Toleration: An Impossible Virtue”? in Heyd, Toleration. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996b.

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Williams, Garrath. “Hobbes, Toleration and Institutions” unpublished paper presented April 2000, University of Exeter. Wolff, Robert Paul, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse. A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Wolin, Sheldon. Politics and Vision. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1960. Wood, Neal. The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Wootton, David. “John Locke: Socinian or Natural Law Theorist?” in Religion, Secularization and Political Thought, James E. Crimmins, ed. London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 39–67. Yolton, John W. John Locke and the Way of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Yolton, John W., ed. John Locke: Problems and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Zimmerman, Everett. Defoe and the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Index absolutism, 39 accommodation: to difference, 10 justification of, 32–33 minimal, 49 and public judgement, 125 and war, 45–46 adiaphora, 96–98 agency as purpose of identity, 8–9 anarchy, 100–103, 111, 155 Anne, Queen, 128–29 Ashcraft, Richard, 109–10 atheism, 51 attitudes, cluster of, 21, 25–27 Augustine, Saint, 30–31 authority: civil vs. religious, 97–100, 104–9 and the sovereign, 45–47 Backscheider, Paula R., 129 Bagshaw, Edward, 92–93, 97 balkanization, 159 basic legitimation demand, 23 belief: and action, 102–3, 110 and coercion, 112–13 boundaries in toleration of, 21–23, 132 freedom of, 26, 36, 104–7, 162 and identity, 40–41, 61, 105 judgement of, 125–26 reconceptualizing, 98–99 and truth, 43–45, 105 unity vs. diversity in, 16 Bill of Rights, 27 Bodin, Jean: and absolutism, 39 and identity, 16, 155–57

and inward self, 44–45 and Locke, 124, 154–55, 157–58 and Montaigne, 90 on neutrality, 39–40, 46–47, 49, 52–58, 63–64 on nondiscussion, 39–40, 46–47, 49, 58–64 on nonviolence, 39–40, 46–47, 49–51, 64 normative language of, 19–20, 46–47 on power, 48–49, 52–54, 65, 155–56 on sovereignty, 47–49, 154 and threshold conditions, 17, 36–38 body, the: injury to, 116–17 and mind, 83–90, 112, 115–17 as moral orientation, 70–73 and social world, 73–83 and time, 83, 88–90, 157–58, 161 boundaries: between spheres, 92, 94, 110, 114–15, 118–24, 154–55 within persons, 92, 112–18, 122–23 Brown, Homer, 135 capitalist markets, 15, 157 Catholic Church: in England, 93–124, 150–51 in France, 47–64; medieval, 30–32, 42 and Reformation, 31–32, 40–47 Catholic League, 45, 68–69 Charles II, 96, 108–9 Christendom, 42, 57 Christian liberty, 98–100, 103–4 Christianity, early, 30–31 Church of England, 109, 130–31 church/state relations, 31, 36, 42, 114–16

207

208 civil sphere, 110, 116 Clarendon Code, Anglican, 109 coercion: and belief, 112–13 and the body, 86–89 justification of, 30–33, 68 coexistence definition, 26–27 collective identity: forms of, 9, 11 individual in, 93–96, 154–62 understanding of, 26 Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis (Bodin), 39, 47–64 communitarian critics, 4–5 community: Christian, 30–33, 41–42 commitment to, 125–26 enforced membership in, 11–12, 118–20 political, 160–62; and self, 4–5, 158–59 truth in, 42–44 voluntary, 120–22 condescension, 5-6 conflict: Bodin on, 48–49 early modern, 40–47 ethnic, 1 and identity, 10–11, 45–47, 50–51, 158–59 range of responses to, 17 simultaneous with mutuality, 4–5 conscience, 44, 103–5, 110 cruelty, 67–68, 72, 87, 147–48 culture: change in, 127–32, 151–52, 161 and creation of identity, 9–11 habit/custom in, 75–77 interaction practices in, 21, 25–26 invention in, 65–66 moral perspective in, 18 Defoe, Daniel: on Catholicism, 150–51 fiction of, 131–52 imprisonment of, 128, 131 and identity, 16, 92 on the individual, 18, 126–27, 136–43 and Locke, 127–29, 152 and Montaigne, 157–58

Index and negotiation condition, 17, 36–38 polemics of, 127–33, 152 political engagement of, 125–26, 128–32, 152 psychological language of, 19–20 and public judgement, 125–27 Diefendorf, Barbara, 40 difference: accommodation to, 10, 154–57 binding together of, 17 and conflict, 158–59 nondiscussion of, 62–64 reflected in language, 27–28 unbridled, 102 differentiation as purpose of identity, 8–9 disagreement, justifiable, 3–4 Dissenters, the, 95, 102, 106, 108–9, 113, 128–31 dogma, 40–42 domination idea, 45 Edict of Nantes, 93 English Civil war, 96 English political conflict: eighteenth-century, 125–32, 137 seventeenth century, 91–124 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 105, 111, 113 Essays (Montaigne), 65–91, 147 ethics: and the political, 24–25, 33 transformation in, 2–3, 14–18, 20–21, 158–62 factionalism problem, 59–63 fiction, ideas developed through, 125–52 First Letter to the Corinthians, 30 Fish, Stanley, 158–59 Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Skinner), 54 freedom: and anarchy, 100–103 of belief, 26, 112–13, 162 of conscience, 68, 150 individual, 78–83, 94, 113–14 of mind, 87 of press, 128–29 of religion, 104, 129, 133 search for, 140 of speech, 61

Index of thought, 70 vs. toleration, 17, 28, 34, 36 French wars of religion, 17, 36, 39, 65, 68, 84–87 Glorious Revolution of 1688, 91 good, common, 50–51, 161–62 Great Question Concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship, The (Bagshaw), 92–93, 97 group harm and survival, 158–62 habit, as constraint, 75–76 Harley, Robert, 128 Harris, Ian, 110 heresy, 30 history of origins of toleration concept, 3–4, 13–18, 30–35 Hobbes, Thomas, 56, 100–101 homo economicus, 135 Huguenots, 49–50, 62, 93 human rights movements, 156 ideas, change in, 15–18 identity: agency in, 8–9 vs. belief, 40–41, 61 change in, 127, 137–40, 143, 151–52, 154–62 and conflict, 10–11, 45–47, 50–51, 158–59 definitions of, 6–9 inner and outer, 44–45, 50, 63–64 language modifying, 28–38 Locke on, 104–8 loss of, 158–62 moral, 93–96 and politics, 9–13 reconceptions of, 92–93, 154–62 religious, 104–8 and toleration, 2 and violence, 50–51 Ignatieff, Michael, 10 individual, the: autonomy of, 21–23 Defoe on, 18, 126–27, 136–43, 158 interest of, 7–8 as limited notion, 37–38 moral authority of, 93–96 and public/private dichotomy, 17 relation with others, 81–82

209

rights of, 25–26 and social world, 73–83 individuality as conceptualization of self, 12–13, 81–82 integrity, personal, 18 interaction, social/cultural practices in, 21, 25–26 James II, 93 Jones, J. R., 91 judgement, public, 125–27, 132–33, 136–38, 141–42, 147, 149–52, 161–62 Julian the Apostate, 68 justice: and politics, 64, 154–57 sovereign and, 17, 54 Kriegel, Blandine, 54 language: and ethical change, 20–21 and identity, 19–38 political, 53–54 public, 161–62 and reflection, 25–29, 161 of toleration, 28–38 law: and conscience, 104–6 and custom, 75–78 natural, 85–86 and politics, 64 Letter Concerning Toleration, A (Locke), 34, 58, 94–96, 98, 108–24 liberal tradition: alternatives possibilities in, 18 boundaries in, 21–23 critique of, 154–57 and identity, 7–8, 36 individual in, 82 legitimation of state in, 23 toleration in, 14, 161–62 life, value of, 72–73 Locke, John: on adiaphora, 96–98 and Bodin, 124, 154–55, 157–58 on boundaries, 92, 94, 110, 112–24, 154–55 and Defoe, 127–29, 152 early rejection of toleration, 94, 96–108 embrace of toleration, 94, 108–24 and Hobbes, 100–101, 155

210

Index

Locke, John (continued) and identity, 16, 92, 104–8, 155–57 inconsistancies of, 110–11 political engagement of, 92–93, 109, 111 and negotiation condition, 17, 36–38, 91–92 normative language of, 19–20, 34 on privacy, 58 psychology of, 94–96, 101–5, 118–24 Machiavelli, 49–50 medieval Western society, 31–32 membership as purpose of identity, 8–9 Mill, John Stuart, 34 mind/body relationship, 83–90, 112, 115–24 mobilization of groups, 152, 156 modus vivendi, toleration as, 14, 21, 32–34 Mohammad, 60 Moll Flanders (Defoe), 128, 132 Monmouth’s Rebellion, 93 Montaigne, Michel de: and Bodin, 90 on the body, 70–90, 157–58, 161 and Defoe, 147, 157–58 and identity, 16, 65–66 prevalent views of, 66–70, 86 and privacy, 58, 69–70 psychological language of, 19–20, 70–73, 79–83, 89 on self, 69–70 as skeptic, 66–68 and threshold condition, 17, 36–38, 65 moral appeals, 19–25, 33–34, 56, 70–73, 83–91, 139, 161–62 mutuality, 4–5, 12–13, 27–28 Myths of Modern Individualism (Watt), 140 neutrality, 39–40, 46–47, 49, 52–58, 63–64, 159 Newgate prison, 128 “new tribalism,” 156–59 noblesse oblige, 5-6 Nonconformists, the, 129 nondiscussion, 39–40, 46–47, 49, 58–64 nonviolence, 39–40, 46–47, 49–51, 64 normative thinking, 19–20, 33–34, 46–47 novel, the, 18, 125–52 On Liberty (Mill), 34 other, the, 46, 138, 143–46, 154–59

particularity, 73–83, 158 Paul, Saint, 30–31 Peace of Augsburg, 45 person, the: boundaries within, 92, 112–18, 122–23 as individual, 78–83 political activity of, 157–58 public/private layers of, 63–64, 117–18 as socially embedded, 73–78 personality, characteristics of, 21, 25 persuasion, 55–58, 128–33, 152 pleasure, rightfulness of, 84–91 polis, the, 119, 156–57 politics: and changing belief, 98–99 and conflict, 17, 42 and identity, 9–13 and justice, 64, 154–57 and mobilization of groups, 152, 156 and moral appeals, 19–25, 33–34, 56 and power, 53–54, 152, 154–57 reimagining, 154–62 vs. religion, 47–64, 112–24 and the self, 153–54 Politique party and position, 47, 68–69 Popple, William, 93 post-modernism, 7 power: asymmetry of, 5-6 Bodin on, 48–49, 52–54, 65 justification of use of, 23 vacuum of, 10 reimagining, 154–62 practical necessity vs. central belief, shift between, 14–18, 19–21, 25–26, 32–34, 47–48, 68–69 Protestantism: in England, 93–124, 129, 132–35, 151–52 in France, 47–64, 68–69 in Reformation, 40–47 in rise of toleration, 34 privacy concept, 58 Proast, Jonas, 93 public opinion, 128–33, 152 “public privacy,” 118–25 public/private dichotomy, 17, 37–38, 63–64, 69–70, 94, 112, 117–21, 161–62 purification idea, 45 Puritanism, 135

Index Rawls, John, 14, 32–33 realms, division of world into, 114–15 Reasonableness of Christianity, The (Locke), 105 reflection: and judgement, 125–27 and language, 25–29 and power, 160-62 self-, 79–83, 158 and skepticism, 43–44 Reformation, the, 31, 34, 40–47 regimes of toleration, 26–27 religion: and civil authority, 97–100, 104–5, 116–17 freedom of, 68–69 and identity, 30–33, 35, 40–42, 104–8 nondiscussion of, 58–64 vs. the political, 47–64, 112–24 Renaissance, the, 15 Restoration, the, 96, 108–9 Review, Defoe’s, 128–29 rights: of group, 36, 159 of individual, 25–26, 58 of state, 54 Robespierre, 68 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 125–27, 131–32, 134–52 role-based identity, 9 Roman Empire, 25–26, 32, 60, 68 savage, image of, 143–49 Scholastics, the, 85–86 Schonhorn, Manuel, 131, 135 self: and belief, 61, 106–7, 125–26 and community, 4–5, 42–43, 125–26, 158 conceptualizations of, 12–13 Defoe on, 137–52, 158 diversity within, 79–80 inward, 44–45, 47, 50, 63–64, 80 and integrity, 18 Locke on, 94, 118–24, 158 loss of, 158–59 Montaigne on, 69–70, 158 and pluralism, 36, 122–24 and politics, 12–13, 153–62 recreation of, 42–47 and violence, 17 self-creation, 137–40, 158

211

self-expression, 103, 119 self-interest, 69–70, 94–95, 104 self-knowledge, 79–80 self-repression, 84–86 Shklar, Judith N., 67, 90 Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, The (Defoe), 130–32 Six livres de la république (Bodin), 39, 47–64 skepticism, 23, 43–44, 66–68, 77 Skinner, Quentin, 32, 54 social identity: as conceptualization of self, 12–13, 137–38 Defoe on, 137–52 and realms idea, 114–15 social/individual dichotomy, 73–75, 143–44 solitude, 138–43 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 113 sovereign, the: authority over religion, 99–100, 104–8, 116 Bodin on, 47–50, 54–56, 154 and justice, 17 nonreligious, 42 and neutrality, 52–56 and toleration, 46 and violence, 50–51 Spanish Conquistadors, 72 standards: of action, 53 internal, 79–80 of judgement, 125–27 state: authority over religion, 104–5 good of, 50–51 legitimation of, 23 neutral between groups, 55–58, 63–64 rights and powers of, 54 State and the Rule of Law (Kriegel), 54 Stoicism, 78 subjective rights theories, 34–35 symbols, psychology of, 101–2 terrorism, 155, 157 Test Act, the, 93, 129 threshold vs. negotiation conditions of conflict, 17, 36–37, 65, 91–92 time/body relationship, 83, 88–90, 157–58, 161

212 toleration: as activity of living, 12, 25 boundaries of, 21–23, 132 current interest in, 1 definitions of, 3–4, 26–27 as “fighting creed,” 128–34 language of, 28–38 as practice vs. value, 25–26 rebuilding, 153–62 regimes of, 26–27 and skepticism, 43–44 structure of, 3–6 as virtue, 21–23 Toleration Act, 34, 129 torture, 72, 149 Tory party, 129, 131 truth: and belief, 105 in fiction, 132–35 interiorization of, 47 model embodied in community, 42–44 and skepticism, 67 Tuck, Richard, 33, 68–69 Tully, James, 32, 109, 122–23 Two Tracts on Government (Locke), 92–93, 96–109, 113, 122 unity and diversity, simultaneous, 16

Index value: acquiring status of, 58, 159 vs. practice, 25–26 sources of, 85–86 violence: and the body, 71–73 “economy of,” 49–50 and identity-formation, 50–51, 63–64 and politics, 72, 147–49, 155, 157 and religion, 42, 45–47, 72 and the self, 17 Voltaire, 66–67 Waldron, Jeremy, 112–13 Walzer, Michael, 26–27 war: and abstract ideas, 84–86 discussion leading to, 60–61 and identity, 36, 45–47 leading to toleration, 31–32 religious, 17, 36, 39, 50, 65, 68, 84–87 resolution of, 15, 17, 45–46 Watt, Ian, 127, 135, 140 Whig party, 34, 129, 131 Williams, Bernard, 22–23 witchcraft persecutions, 72 Wootton, David, 110