In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience by Jeffrey R. Collins (review)

Many years ago, professors used to teach their students that Locke wrote the Two Treatises of Government to refute Hobbes. The demolition of this thesis by Peter Laslett and others had one curious result: scholars ceased to pay much attention to the relationship between the two greatest English philosophers of the seventeenth century. This trend was perhaps reinforced by an understandable suspicion of Leo Strauss’s thesis that Locke was really a closet Hobbesian. It thus came to be accepted that it was somehow intellectually disreputable to suppose that there was any meaningful dialogue between Locke and the author of Leviathan.

A serious reassessment of the relationship between the two philosophers is long overdue, and Jeffrey Collins’s In the Shadow of Leviathan goes some way toward meeting this need. As the subtitle suggests, Collins is not really concerned to examine all aspects of the relationship; he focuses largely on their approach to the issue of religious toleration so prominent in seventeenth-century thought. Collins helpfully reminds the reader that Hobbes’s thought in this area is not nearly as heavy-handed as it is often supposed to be: toward the end of Leviathan, Hobbes praises the experiment with Independent congregations that was conducted during the Interregnum. Hobbes thus makes the case for what Collins calls politique toleration under the watchful eye of the sovereign. Collins convincingly charts the development of Locke’s thought away from the Hobbesian position towards the mature theory of the Epistola de Tolerantia: toleration is to be enjoyed not as the gift of the sovereign but on the basis of natural rights. Collins makes a strong case for the importance of Locke’s unpublished “Answer” to Edward Stillingfleet’s Unreasonableness of Separation as the text in which he pivots toward the mature position for which he is famous: here, Locke writes of people’s having “a natural and Evangelical right of takeing care of their owne salvation” (236).

In one way, then, the focus of Collins’s book is narrower than the overall relationship between Locke and Hobbes; in another way, however, it is much broader. The book is nothing less than a survey of the whole pamphlet warfare over toleration in the period between Leviathan (1651) and Locke’s death in 1704. Collins’s scholarship here is truly magisterial; he seems to have read almost every tract for and against religious toleration that was published in these years, as well as many unpublished ones. Sometimes Collins seems in danger of moving too far away from his central topic. Thus he arguably devotes excessive space to the often wearisome diatribes against Hobbes by orthodox clerics and others; this is territory that has already been amply covered by such scholars as Samuel Mintz and Jon Parkin. Nonetheless, Collins’s coverage of the pamphlet warfare does succeed in illuminating features of Locke’s Epistola de Tolerantia whose significance might otherwise escape us. He thus shows how when Locke writes of the “empty and deceptive distinction” between the Court and Church of Rome, he is alluding to a polemical move that was familiar to many of his readers from Catholic apologists (308). Similarly, Locke’s use of the Mufti as a stand-in for the Pope was a common literary device among his contemporaries (279).

There is no doubt that Collins has an important story to tell about Locke’s gradual emancipation from a Hobbesian approach to the issue of religious toleration. In my view, however, in the interlocking spheres of politics and religion, the most striking point of contact between the two thinkers is to be found, not in their explicit theories of toleration, but rather in their shared commitment to the doctrine of the minimal creed: the one essential article of the Christian faith is that Jesus is the Messiah. The fact that there is scarcely a hair’s breadth between the two philosophers in this area was acutely noticed by...