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Among the most influential writings in the history of Western political thought, John Locke'sTwo Treatises of GovernmentandA Letter Concerning Tolerationremain vital to political debates today, more than three centuries after they were written. The complete texts appear in this volume, accompanied by interpretive essays by three prominent Locke scholars.Ian Shapiro's introduction places Locke's political writings in historical and biographical context. John Dunn explores both the intellectual context in which Locke wrote theTwo Treatises of GovernmentandA Letter Concerning Tolerationand the major interpretive controversies surrounding their meaning. Ruth Grant offers a comprehensive discussion of Locke's views on women and the family, and Shapiro contributes an essay on the democratic elements of Locke's political theory. Taken together, the texts and essays in this volume offer invaluable insights into the history of ideas and the enduring influence of Locke's political thought.

Religious liberty is one of the hallmarks of American democracy, but the principal architects of this liberty believed that it was only compatible with a certain form of Christianity-namely, a liberal, rational, Christianity. Conservative and postliberal champions of the freedom of religion often ignore this point, sometimes even arguing that orthodox Christianity was, or should be, at the root of democratic liberty. Everyone Orthodox to Themselves , John Colman's close study of the religious views and political theologies of John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, shows otherwise. Colman demonstrates that Locke and his three American students specifically took aim at the idea of orthodoxy, which they argued continuously tempted its believers to try to impose an artificial uniformity upon the religious diversity that naturally exists in society and thought it necessary to advance a more rational, nondogmatic Christianity given the threat they saw religious orthodoxy posed to a free, liberal society. While recent arguments have endorsed the idea that there is a crisis of liberalism that can only be met by the revival of more orthodox forms of religious devotion, Colman argues that, according to some of the most prominent American Founders and their philosophic predecessors, such orthodoxy is incompatible with religious freedom and the right to free inquiry. Everyone Orthodox to Themselves demonstrates that only a nondogmatic, rationalist Christianity could be made a friend rather than an adversary to the inalienable right of religious liberty. Colman's work reveals how the reform of Christianity, and with it the inculcation of a particular theological disposition, is necessary to secure religious liberty and the right of free inquiry. The book also establishes the importance of Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity for his larger argument for toleration.

In Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness, Jenny Davidson considers the arguments that define hypocrisy as a moral and political virtue in its own right. She shows that these were arguments that thrived in the medium of eighteenth-century Britain's culture of politeness. In the debate about the balance between truthfulness and politeness, Davidson argues that eighteenth-century writers from Locke to Austen come down firmly on the side of politeness. This is the case even when it is associated with dissimulation or hypocrisy. These writers argue that the open profession of vice is far more dangerous for society than even the most glaring discrepancies between what people say in public and what they do in private. This book explores what happens when controversial arguments in favour of hypocrisy enter the mainstream, making it increasingly hard to tell the difference between hypocrisy and more obviously attractive qualities like modesty, self-control and tact.

John Locke is often thought of as one of the founders of the Enlightenment, a movement that sought to do away with the Bible and religion and replace them with scientific realism. But Locke was extremely interested in the Bible, and he was engaged by biblical theology and religion throughout his life. In this new book, K.I. Parker considers Locke's interest in Scripture and how that interest is articulated in the development of his political philosophy. Parker shows that Locke's liberalism is inspired by his religious vision and, particularly, his distinctive understanding of the early chapters of the book of Genesis. Unlike Sir Robert Filmer, who understood the Bible to justify social hierarchies (i.e., the divine right of the king, the first-born son's rights over other siblings, and the \"natural\" subservience of women to men), Locke understood from the Bible that humans are in a natural state of freedom and equality to each other. The biblical debate between Filmer and Locke furnishes scholars with a better understanding of Lockes political views as presented in his Two Treatises. The Biblical Politics of John Locke demonstrates the impact of the Bible on one of the most influential thinkers of the seventeenth century, and provides an original context in which to situate the debate concerning the origins of early modern political thought.

John Locke's theory of personal identity underlies all modern discussion of the nature of persons and selves--yet it is widely thought to be wrong. In his new book, Galen Strawson argues that in fact it is Locke's critics who are wrong, and that the famous objections to his theory are invalid. Indeed, far from refuting Locke, they illustrate his fundamental point. Strawson argues that the root error is to take Locke's use of the word \"person\" only in the ordinary way, as merely a term for a standard persisting thing, like \"human being.\" In actuality, Locke uses \"person\" primarily as a forensic or legal term geared specifically to questions about praise and blame, punishment and reward. In these terms, your personal identity is roughly a matter of those of your past actions that you are still responsible for because you are still \"conscious\" of them in Locke's special sense of that word. Clearly and vigorously argued, this is an important contribution both to the history of philosophy and to the contemporary philosophy of personal identity.

This book discusses Locke’s theory of property from both a critical and an interpretative standpoint. The author first develops a comprehensive interpretation of Locke’s argument for the legitimacy of private property, and then examines the extent to which the argument is really serviceable in defense of that institution. He contends that a purified version of Locke’s argument--one that adheres consistently to the logic of Locke’s text while excluding considerations extraneous to his logic--actually does establish the legitimacy of a form of private property. This version, which is both defensible in contemporary, secular terms and is, essentially, egalitarian, should provoke a reassessment of the nature of Locke’s relevance to contemporary discussions of distributive justice.

John Locke's theory of toleration is generally seen as advocating the privatization of religion. This interpretation has become conventional wisdom: secularization is widely understood as entailing the privatization of religion, and the separation of religion from power. This book turns that conventional wisdom on its head and argues that Locke secularizes religion, that is, makes it worldly, public, and political. In the name of diverse citizenship, Locke reconstructs religion as persuasion, speech, and fashion. He insists on a consensus that human rights are sacred insofar as humans are the creatures, and thus, the property of God. Drawing on a range of sources beyond Locke's own writings, Pritchard portrays the secular not as religion's separation from power, but rather as its affiliation with subtler, and sometimes insidious, forms of power. As a result, she captures the range of anxieties and conflicts attending religion's secularization: denunciations of promiscuous bodies freed from patriarchal religious and political formations, correlations between secular religion and colonialist education and conversion efforts, and more recently, condemnations of the coercive and injurious force of unrestricted religious speech.

In this engaging book David Rosen offers a radically new account of Modern poetry and revises our understanding of its relation to Romanticism. British poets from Wordsworth to Auden attempted to present themselves simultaneously as persons of power and as moral voices in their communities. The modern lyric derives its characteristic complexities-psychological, ethical, formal-from the extraordinary difficulty of this effort.The low register of our language-a register of short, concrete, native words arranged in simple syntax-is deeply implicated in this story. Rosen shows how the peculiar reputation of \"plain English\" for truthfulness is employed by Modern poets to conceal the rift between their (probably irreconcilable) ambitions for themselves.With a deep appreciation for poetic accomplishment and a wonderful iconoclasm, Rosen sheds new light on the innovative as well as the self-deceptive aspects of Modern poetry. This book alters our understanding of the history of poetry in the English language.

InNatural Rights and the New Republicanism, Michael Zuckert proposes a new view of the political philosophy that lay behind the founding of the United States. In a book that will interest political scientists, historians, and philosophers, Zuckert looks at the Whig or opposition tradition as it developed in England. He argues that there were, in fact, three opposition traditions: Protestant, Grotian, and Lockean. Before the English Civil War the opposition was inspired by the effort to find the \"one true Protestant politics--an effort that was seen to be a failure by the end of the Interregnum period. The Restoration saw the emergence of the Whigs, who sought a way to ground politics free from the sectarian theological-scriptural conflicts of the previous period. The Whigs were particularly influenced by the Dutch natural law philosopher Hugo Grotius. However, as Zuckert shows, by the mid-eighteenth century John Locke had replaced Grotius as the philosopher of the Whigs. Zuckert's analysis concludes with a penetrating examination of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the English \"Cato,\" who, he argues, brought together Lockean political philosophy and pre-existing Whig political science into a new and powerful synthesis. Although it has been misleadingly presented as a separate \"classical republican\" tradition in recent scholarly discussions, it is this \"new republicanism\" that served as the philosophical point of departure for the founders of the American republic.