A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) by John Locke

A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) by John Locke

Locke argued that religious belief ought to be compatible with reason, that no king, prince or magistrate rules legitimately without the consent of the people, and that government has no right to impose religious beliefs or styles of worship on the public. Locke's defense of religious tolerance and freedom of thought was revolutionary in its time. Even today, his letter poses a challenge to religious intolerance, whether state-sponsored or originating from religious dogmatists.

Based on both Locke's original Latin and the seventeenth-century English translation of William Popple, this edition offers a reader-friendly version that remains loyal to the original text. In addition to a forty-page introduction that situates the Letterin its historical and philosophical contexts, this edition includes excerpts from writings on religious toleration by William Penn, Baruch Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, and Samuel von Pufendorf, as well as generous selections from the famous Locke-Proast debates on religious toleration.

John Locke was the son of a land steward and was educated at Westminster School and Oxford. He was born in Wrington, near Bristol, and was the son of a land steward. Locke became a lecturer in Greek in 1660, Rhetoric in 1662, and Secretary to an Embassy in Brandenburg in 1664. He studied Descartes and Bacon as a student. Then, drawn to experimental research, he studied medicine and practiced for a short time in Oxford. In 1667, he authored his Essay on Toleration, which was inspired by his thoughts on morals and government. If not a particularly clever or unique philosopher, Locke was a calm, intelligent, and reasonable writer, and his publications had a significant impact on both English and French philosophy in the following century.