-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Jonathan Israel, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and ‘Early Enlightenment’ Europe, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXII, Issue 498, September 2007, Pages 1042–1044, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem233
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
THIS important book, a richly documented and nuanced examination of the question of toleration in the early Enlightenment context, is to be welcomed on various accounts. It is, first of all, a notable instance of a sustained effort to combine the history of ideas with general political and social history; materially helping to draw intellectual history out of its traditional isolation, an isolation which in the past has been disastrous for intellectual history, certainly, but also (and this is something to which general political and social historians arguably often fail to respond) very damaging to general history. Secondly, it is to be welcomed because it is a yet further demonstration of something Paul Hazard forcefully pointed out in his famous classic, Crise de la conscience européenne (1935) (but which has only rarely been taken to heart since), namely that some of the most crucial developments shaping the Enlightenment occurred towards the end of the seventeenth century rather than in the middle of the eighteenth as so many accounts claim. Thirdly, this hefty 762-page book stands out because it is a successful demonstration of how closely the key intellectual developments in France, England and the Netherlands were intertwined with each other and, within that interaction, how crucially pivotal was the role of the Dutch Republic. ‘Most of the writers defending universal religious toleration in the 1680s’, as Marshall aptly expresses the point, ‘were based in the Netherlands’; some ‘were Dutch, but most were refugees’ (p. 9).
