- Title
- Locke, rationality and persecution
- Creator
- Tate, John William
- Relation
- Political Studies Vol. 58, Issue 5, p. 988-1008
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2009.00808.x
- Publisher
- Wiley-Blackwell Publishing
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- Over the past years the pages of Political Studies have featured much discussion of John Locke’s theory of toleration. In 2003, Paul Bou-Habib of the University of Essex published an article in Political Studies entitled ‘Locke, Sincerity and the Rationality of Persecution’ (Bou-Habib, 2003) which focused on Locke’s argument for toleration in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) (Locke, 1993, hereafter the Letter). Bou-Habib’s article was itself a response to Jeremy Waldron, and his account of Locke’s argument in the Letter, which Waldron first presented at the University of York in 1983. And then in 2006, Timothy Stanton of the University of York also availed himself of these pages to consider the religious foundations of Locke’s Letter (see Stanton, 2006). This article is a response to Waldron and Bou-Habib. It argues that Waldron has provided a thoroughly mistaken account of Locke’s argument in the Letter, and that Bou-Habib, far from revealing these mistakes, has participated in them, accepting much of Waldron’s account at face value, in particular Waldron’s conception of the ‘main line of argument’ that Locke provides in the Letter. Waldron’s account of Locke’s theory of toleration has in many respects become an ‘orthodoxy’ within the Locke literature, with various Locke scholars attesting to its influence. The fact that it is, in my opinion, a mistaken ‘orthodoxy’, whose fundamental errors are compounded rather than exposed by Bou-Habib, makes it necessary to revisit the views of these two commentators, not least in order to articulate, clarify and defend important elements of Locke’s theory of toleration that are either dismissed, elided or ignored in their accounts. Further, as we shall see, even Waldron’s more recent writing on Locke, where he seeks to advance a specifically religious foundation for Locke’s political philosophy (and so move beyond the more ‘secular’ focus that characterises his presentation of Locke’s ‘main line of argument’ above), still repeats the errors of his earlier account and so does not move beyond these at all.
- Subject
- John Locke; theory of toleration; Jeremy Waldron; Paul Bou Habib; critique
- Identifier
- uon:9549
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/922354
- Identifier
- ISSN:0032-3217
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