The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After

Evan Simpson, a philosophy professor, is Dean of Humanities, McMaster
University and the editor of Anti-foundationalism and Practical
Reasoning: Conversations between Hermeneutics and Analysis.

John Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration” evoked an anonymous
response from a chaplain (Jonas Proast) at All Souls College, leading
back and forth over 15 years to Locke’s “Fourth Letter for
Toleration,” which remained incomplete on his death in 1704. In his
letters, Locke argued that beliefs cannot be compelled by force,
suggesting that the persecution of people for their beliefs is
irrational as well as cruel.

In The Career of Toleration, Richard Vernon pursues the grounds and
implications of this view with analytical rigor, showing how questions
of political legitimacy can be distinguished from questions of truth,
leaving no justification for forcing people to adopt “correct”
opinions.

This book will surprise unsuspecting readers who think they’re about
to encounter a 17th-century intellectual debate, because its central
issues are strikingly contemporary. Vernon shows how Locke’s argument
can lead to relegating the liberal value of toleration to the past in
favor of a right to participate in democratic deliberation. Liberalism
is then replaced by a form of democracy in which the public collectively
determines and revises its beliefs. However, reaching such conclusions
is limited by a society’s need to remain open to its individual
members’ opinions, so that something like liberal constraints remain.

There is much that is still alive in the debate between Locke and
Proast, and Vernon’s fine account conveys this liveliness exceedingly
well.