Leibniz’s Doctrine of Toleration

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is not usually regarded as a thinker who had a substantive theory of toleration. This chapter pieces together the scattered evidence to suggest otherwise. It is argued that Leibniz did have a doctrine of toleration, which operated on philosophical, theological, and pragmatic levels as part of his project for religious unification. The structure of Leibniz's philosophical arguments reflected his dependence on an idea of natural law that acted to support conceptions of toleration, in some ways far more inclusive than those of contemporaries such as Pufendorf and Locke. By reference to the primary, inalienable moral qualities of human beings, Leibniz was able to suggest that the coercion of individuals for almost any form of sincere belief was fundamentally illegitimate. There were limits to Leibniz's toleration — doctrines against natural law were emphatically not to be tolerated — but their effect was to create an unusually wide doctrine of toleration.

The Tolerationist Programmes of Thomasius and Locke

This chapter argues that historical accounts of toleration should not be based in philosophical conceptions of religion and politics — as grounded in individual rational choice — but, rather, in historical investigations of the political-religious regimes that tolerationist programmes were designed to attack and undo. It develops a contrast between John Locke and the Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), Professor of Natural Law at Leipzig University. In being directed at different kinds of confessional state, the tolerationist programmes of Thomasius and Locke differ in unexpected ways, ways which are clarified in this chapter.

Natural Rights or Political Prudence? Francis Hutcheson on Toleration

Francis Hutcheson is commonly seen as a theorist of natural rights, including the right to a free conscience. However, his notion of conscience is of a moral faculty that is subject to education and, under certain circumstances, to political control. By distinguishing between the possession and the exercise of a right, Hutcheson is able to argue that the right to toleration of the individual's conscience is dependent upon social and political circumstances and is, in fact, a matter of prudence, not of transcendent status. This argument coheres with Hutcheson>'s emphasis on the fundamental role of the common good in the moral life, with his aesthetic and providentialist idea of morality, and with his Erastian view of the church in general and of the Scottish Kirk in particular. This chapter shows that these ideas made Hutcheson the centre of contemporary controversy.

Toleration as Impartiality? Civil and Ecclesiastical Toleration in Jean Barbeyrac

Jean Barbeyrac is a seminal figure in the history of natural law doctrine and one who, as a Huguenot refugee, had much to say on the topic of toleration. For Barbeyrac, natural law offered a secular rationalist principle of morality that could be used in the battle against Catholic persecution. Barbeyrac took from his seventeenth-century predecessors the natural law idea that the state was an essentially secular body and used that idea to license a much more thoroughgoing form of toleration. If the state had no religious competence then even atheism could be permitted, because it did not constitute an injury to the civil peace. This chapter shows that Barbeyrac's radical account of natural law and toleration made substantial modifications to the arguments of his predecessors, and in doing so moved natural law beyond the theological constraints that structured the defining work in the genre.

John Locke and Natural Law

The standard modern view of Locke portrays him as a simulacrum of John Stuart Mill or John Rawls. This chapter decisively shifts the terms in which Locke is understood away from this standard view. It shows that with Locke religious worship is neither private nor optional, and is a matter of duty rather than right primarily — a duty prescribed by natural law. Natural law led Locke to jurisdiction, and, more precisely, to two corresponding jurisdictions, the eccesiastical and civil. The different ends implied in these two jurisdictions and the different ways in which they were established made church and state free from each other's direction. Worship is not tolerated by the state, for the state has no jurisdiction over it; rather, it is free. Conversely the state is required to coerce religious or irreligious groups, whether Roman Catholics or atheists, who undermine the possibility of independent civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions.

Samuel Pufendorf and Religious Intolerance in the Early Enlightenment

This chapter examines the German jurist and philosopher Samuel Pufendorf as a theorist of religious intolerance. Usually, Pufendorf is associated with the defence of some degree of religious toleration. He was a strong critic of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV, and it is often argued that Pufendorf intended to deconfessionalize politics by using his natural law theory to separate secular affairs of state from theological controversies over revealed religion. At the same time, however, Pufendorf has seemed a very inconsistent advocate of religious toleration, one who, on occasion, was willing to endorse religious intolerance. The chapter shows that Pufendorf's views are not as inconsistent as they might appear to be. He did not intend to deconfessionalize politics. He was not a principled defender of religious toleration. And the importance of his theory of natural law for his ideas on religious toleration is actually very limited.

Religious Commitment and Secular Reason

This chapter suggests that a nuanced account of early Enlightenment natural law theory may have something to offer modern debates that swing between a liberal emphasis on individual rights and a communitarian emphasis upon group rights. An examination of Pufendorf's work reveals that his natural law theory embraces two connected ways of thinking about toleration. One the one hand, his theory underpins the power of the magistrate to tolerate pragmatically for reasons of state. On the other, his account of natural religion defines a sphere that cannot be invaded legitimately by the state. Pufendorf's distinction between churches (as voluntary associations) and states (as guarantors of individual rights) offers resources for rethinking contemporary discussions that struggle to balance claims by religious communities to maintain their identities with the claims of their vulnerable members not to be oppressed.

Natural Law, Nonconformity, and Toleration

This chapter identifies two significant stages in the development of Locke's mature position about toleration and explains the connections between them. At each stage, Locke made a series of conceptual moves whose combined effect replaced one understanding of the relations between church and state with another, and one upon which the argument of his Epistola de tolerantia/A Letter concerning toleration depended. Locke's ‘Defence of nonconformity’ (1681–2) is shown to be a pivotal text, which looks forward to the conclusions of Two treatises of government as well as Epistola, and which provides pressing reasons to doubt the adequacy of most modern treatments of Locke's view of toleration and the assumptions they embody about his wider moral and political theory.