Paradoxes of Religious Toleration in Early Modern Political Thought

John Christian Laursen, Maria Jose Villaverde

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2012
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780739172186
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

In today's developed world, much of what people believe about religious toleration has evolved from crucial innovations in toleration theory developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thinkers from that period have been rightly celebrated for creating influential, liberating concepts and ideas that have enabled many of us to live in peace. However, their work was certainly not perfect. In this enlightening volume, John Christian Laursen and María José Villaverde have gathered contributors to focus on the paradoxes, blindspots, unexpected flaws, or ambiguities in early modern toleration theories and practices. Each chapter explores the complexities, complications, and inconsistencies that came up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as people grappled with the idea of toleration. In understanding the weaknesses, contradictions, and ambivalences in other theories, they hope to provoke thought about the defects in ways of thinking about toleration in order to help in overcoming similar problems in contemporary toleration theories.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1 Spinoza’s Paradoxes
• 2 Spinoza on Lying for Toleration and His Intolerance of Atheists
• 3 Jansenist Fears and Huguenot Polemics
• 4 “The General Freedom, which All Men Enjoy” in a Confessional State
• 5 A Leibnizian Way to Tolerance
• 6 Toleration in China and Siam in Late-Seventeenth-Century European Travel Literature
• 7 Toleration in Denis Veiras’s Theocracy
• 8 David Hume on Religious ToleranceThis article is part of a research project entitled “Criticism of Religion, Views of Alterity and Cosmopolitanism. A New Reading of Enlightenment Thought and a Defense of its Validity,” financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (reference: FFI2008–00725/FISO).
• 9 Rousseau, A False Apostle of Tolerance
• 10 Intolerance of Fanatics in Bayle, Hume, and Kant
• 11 Tolerance and Intolerance in the Writings of the French Antiphilosophes (1750–1789)
• 12 Immanuel Kant
• Index
• About the Contributors