John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture by John Marshall (review)

103 More than once, Mr. Pettit suggests that it was somehow inconsistent of Hobbes to use ordinary words in extraordinary ways. Mr. Pettit ascribes a ‘‘strategy of redefinition’’ to Hobbes’s early training in rhetoric. Hobbes’s contemporaries did complain about the redefinitions , but it is a bit unexpected to hear similar strictures echoed now when we are used to investigators from Freud to Peirce to Derrida deploying technical terms without apology. Hobbes had reason to employ words for novel concepts. Chapter Four explains how words ‘‘personate,’’ and Chapter Five, how they ‘‘incorporate.’’ Mr. Pettit has little tolerance for the Hobbesian position that persons and social bodies are made through language. He invents examples that mock the seriousness of the linguistic program. No authentic Hobbesian could personate with the sentence ‘‘Aunt Sally is an alien .’’ In a similar vein, the possibility of establishing corporate bodies imposes heavy obligations on the speakers. Close reference to Austin’s important How To Do Things With Words (1962) would be needed to see how sophisticated Hobbes’s analysis is. The final three chapters on the limitations of words are more consonant with Mr. Pettit’s reservations. Chapter Six reviews Hobbes’s awareness that words have affective dimensions; the ‘‘voluntary significations’’complicate the use of words like good or bad. The intrusion of pleasurable and painful emotions is as unavoidable as the sensing of bodily desires. The last two chapters examine plans for overcoming the defects of language. Although there are no sure guarantees in language, one way out is through agreements on civil contracts that confirm meanings, and essential for these is the threat to defectors, provided by what Hobbes calls ‘‘the sovereign.’’ The last chapter discusses the hope that ‘‘the sovereign’’ might establish the ideal order of a ‘‘commonwealth.’’ While Mr. Pettit has admirably collected and marshaled Hobbes’s thought, there are regrettable gaps. The most serious is the decision to exclude ‘‘a separate treatment of the effects of words on belief because this would have required an investigation of Hobbes’s views on religion’’ as well as ‘‘questions of a somewhat more arcane kind.’’ At one stroke the exclusion of religion makes Hobbes, the son of a minister, a thinker who lived in a century of religious controversy, largely incomprehensible to us. It flatters Hobbes to be credited with linguistic innovation. English fascination with neo-stoicism, however, gets brushed aside; the evidence of extensive interest in Cicero and in ancient rhetoric points in the opposite direction. And due to the importance of the mathesis universalis for Descartes, Hobbes’s use of geometric paradigms needs closer scrutiny. There is much more to be learned about and from Hobbes, such as his translations from Homer. Nevertheless, Mr. Pettit helpfully reminds us that without the seventeenth century, the eighteenth would be much shorter and less important. Arnd Bohm Carleton University JOHN MARSHALL. John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2006. Pp. viii ⫹ 762. $129. Mr. Marshall explores the roots of the Enlightenment within Christianity. Re- 104 ligious toleration and religious liberty, its central themes, are related. Toleration is the accommodation of diverse religious beliefs and the communities that profess them within a society, secular or religious; religious liberty is the right of individuals to practice their religion. Location of their roots within Christianity requires explanation. From its beginnings , Christianity has been neither institutionally nor ideologically disposed to practice toleration internally or externally , and its appeals to religious liberty have generally arisen from self-interest rather than from principle. The change in attitude, no doubt motivated by the religious wars that ravaged Europe during the first half of the seventeenth century , is what this book attempts to explain . Necessarily, therefore, the first two parts of the book are devoted to Catholic and Protestant intolerance during the seventeenth century up through the period under review (Part I) and to the long history of intolerance that preceded it, its practice and justification from late Antiquity through the Middle Ages to 1700 (Part II). Given this long unbroken history of intolerance punctuated with violent, even savage persecution by Christians against other Christians and against pagans, Jews, Muslims , and others, that a remarkable spirit of toleration should have...