ABSTRACT
John Locke is widely considered a foundational thinker within the liberal tradition, and one of the seminal sources of a distinctly liberal conception of toleration. But Locke began his intellectual career as a vigorous opponent of toleration in matters relating to religion. Indeed, this chapter shows how toleration, in matters of religion, remained a “problem” for Locke, in two distinct ways, throughout his intellectual career. Locke was only able to become the ardent advocate of toleration, that he is so widely identified as being, by consistently engaging with these “problems”. By focusing on the discursive content of Locke’s key writings on toleration, from the origins of his intellectual career to its culmination, this chapter seeks to explain how Locke managed to come to terms with these “problems” of toleration and overcame them sufficiently to affirm toleration as both a means to ensure the outward expression of individual liberty and also a basis for ensuring civil peace and state security. Locke is therefore interesting as an early theorist of toleration for two reasons. Firstly, he had to work out, within the framework of his own political writings, a justification for his volte-face on the matter of toleration – championing and defending what he had castigated only a few years before. Secondly, the arguments that Locke does advance for toleration in this context are multiple and plural, involving both normative and pragmatic considerations. Yet it is with this heterogeneous justification of toleration that Locke provides the foundation for much subsequent thought on this subject within the liberal tradition.
