We cannot verify your location
Browse Book and Journal Content on Project MUSE
OR
Browse > Social Sciences > Political Science > Political Theory
title

A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings

John Locke

Publication Year: 2012

ALetter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings brings together the principal writings on religious toleration and freedom of expression by one of the greatest philosophers in the Anglophone tradition: John Locke. The son of Puritans, Locke (1632–1704) became an Oxford academic, a physician, and, through the patronage of the Earl of Shaftesbury, secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations and to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina. A colleague of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton and a member of the English Royal Society, Locke lived and wrote at the dawn of the Enlightenment, a period during which traditional mores, values, and customs were being questioned.This volume opens with Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) and also contains his earlier Essay Concerning Toleration (1667), extracts from the Third Letter for Toleration (1692), and a large body of his briefer essays and memoranda on this theme. As editor Mark Goldie writes in the introduction, A Letter Concerning Toleration "was one of the seventeenth century's most eloquent pleas to Christians to renounce religious persecution." Locke's contention, fleshed out in the Essay and in the Third Letter, that men should enjoy a perfect and "uncontrollable liberty" in matters of religion was shocking to many in seventeenth-century England. Still more shocking, perhaps, was its corollary, that the magistrate had no standing in matters of religion. Taken together, these works forcefully present Locke's belief in the necessary interrelation between limited government and religious freedom. At a time when the world is again having to come to terms with profound tensions among diverse religions and cultures, they are a canonical statement of the case for religious and intellectual freedom.This Liberty Fund edition provides the first fully annotated modern edition of A Letter Concerning Toleration, offering the reader explanatory guidance to Locke's rich reservoir of references and allusions. The introduction, a chronology of Locke's life, and a reading guide further equip the reader with historical, theological, and philosophical contexts for understanding one of the world's major thinkers on toleration, who lived and wrote at the close of Europe's Reformation and the dawn of the Enlightenment.This book is the first volume in Liberty Fund's Thomas Hollis Library series. As general editor David Womersley explains, Thomas Hollis (1720–1774) was a businessman and philanthropist who gathered books he thought were essential to the understanding of liberty and donated them to libraries in Europe and America in the years preceding the American Revolution.John Locke (1632–1704) was an English philosopher and physician.

Mark Goldie is Reader in British Intellectual History, University of Cambridge and is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 and editor of John Locke: Two Treatises of Government and John Locke: Political Essays.

David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Divinity and State.

Published by: Liberty Fund

Title Page, Copyright

pdf iconDownload PDF (685.2 KB)
pp. 1-3

Contents

pdf iconDownload PDF (1.1 MB)
pp. 4-5

The Thomas Hollis Library

pdf iconDownload PDF (803.2 KB)
pp. 6-7

Introduction

pdf iconDownload PDF (1.4 MB)
pp. 8-23

Further Reading

pdf iconDownload PDF (836.5 KB)
pp. 24-27

Notes on the Texts

pdf iconDownload PDF (905.7 KB)
pp. 28-39

Chronology of Locke’s Life

pdf iconDownload PDF (849.1 KB)
pp. 40-45

Acknowledgments

pdf iconDownload PDF (1.2 MB)
pp. 46-51

To The Reader

pdf iconDownload PDF (1.3 MB)
pp. 52-55

A Letter Concerning Toleration

pdf iconDownload PDF (1.8 MB)
pp. 56-117

Excerpts from A Third Letter for Toleration

pdf iconDownload PDF (991.4 KB)
pp. 118-153

An Essay Concerning Toleration

pdf iconDownload PDF (1.4 MB)
pp. 154-189

Fragments on Toleration

pdf iconDownload PDF (1.5 MB)
pp. 190-239

Index

pdf iconDownload PDF (1.5 MB)
pp. 240-262

Publication Information

pdf iconDownload PDF (528.3 KB)
p. 263-263


E-ISBN-13: 9781614878254
E-ISBN-10: 1614878250
Print-ISBN-13: 9780865977914

Page Count: 258
Publication Year: 2012

Edition: None

Research Areas

Recommend

UPCC logo

Subject Headings

  • Toleration -- Early works to 1800.
  • You have access to this content
  • Free sample
  • Open Access
  • Restricted Access

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the Search box at the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the results page. Use the Browse box to browse a selection of books and journals.

Connect with Project MUSE

Project MUSE | 2715 North Charles Street | Baltimore, Maryland USA 21218 | (410) 516-6989 | About | Contact | Help | Tools | Order

©2013 Project MUSE. Produced by The Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Milton S. Eisenhower Library.