ABSTRACT
There are a number parallels in the life and work of Spinoza, Locke, and Bayle. Their pioneering works concerning freedom and tolerance were all written in Holland where they were exiles, with Spinoza an ‘internal’ exile, having been cut off from his Jewish community, and the other two forced to flee their countries for fear of incarceration or death. Their thinking about different aspects of tolerance took place in the context of a century of unprecedented religious conflict and cruelty towards those holding different beliefs.
All three thinkers displayed the increasing emphasis on the role of reason in making judgments about human affairs, which in due course was to become the watchword of enlightened European thought in the eighteenth century. It was on their shoulders that thinkers such as Voltaire would chart new territory in the fight against intolerance and injustice, and being still relevant today, they have provided key elements of the modern liberal approach to tolerance, with the assumption that people pursue different goals and maintain different beliefs and that these differences should be respected. We no longer claim that disagreements about religious and political issues are evidence of error, sin or treason. Yet the tendency to condemn those with differing beliefs and ways of life remains a constant possibility, as is the use of powerful external authority to impose beliefs on individual citizens, and thus new reasons for maintaining intolerant attitudes constantly arise.
