Paradoxes of Religious Toleration in Early Modern Political Thought
Contributions by Joaquín Abellán, Jonathan Israel, Henri Krop, Gerardo López Sastre, Cyrus Masroori, Rolando Minuti, Concha Roldán, Luisa Simonutti Edited by John Christian Laursen, Maria Jose Villaverde
Not available to order
Publication date:
21 June 2012Length of book:
230 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739172186
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.
The greatest intellectual virtue of the essays contained in the present volume is their collective commitment to exploring the diverse and sometimes paradoxical ways in which ideas of religious toleration were deployed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This approach, announced by the editors in their introduction, permits the inclusion of a variety of fresh voices into the discussion of a fraught yet singularly important issue. An eminent group of international scholars explodes many of the myths and misunderstandings that have shrouded the historical roots of religious toleration, contributing innovative insights of direct relevance to twenty-first century debates about how, when, and to whom tolerance should be extended.