Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America By Andrew R. Murphy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. 337p. $45.00.

Abstract

Political theorists interested in liberalism often fall into one of two quite different camps. There are those (call them the “analytic” school) who engage in arguments designed to justify or criticize various accounts of justice, legitimacy, and the like, and on the other hand, there are those (call them the “historical” school) who aim at providing a rich historical account of the processes through which such concepts developed in the modern age. Rawls and Dworkin as opposed to Pocock and Skinner, if you will. In my view, the most interesting and ultimately fruitful work in political theory is done by those who practice a mixture of the two approaches. Two prime examples would be Jeremy Waldron and Charles Taylor. Andrew Murphy's first book is a highly interesting and very promising exemplar of this mixed approach. I have no doubt but that “pure” historians will question the novelty of his account of arguments over toleration in the seventeenth century, or that “pure” analysts will question the relevance of that account to the more analytical positions with regard to the contemporary concerns he stakes out in the latter portion of the book. But I found it to be one of the great strengths of his book that he does try to look at contemporary issues with an eye toward the historical context out of which they emerged. I found my own understanding of contemporary normative arguments about toleration, religious freedom, and liberal public reason enriched and deepened by a reading of Murphy's clear and lively account of the seventeenth-century arguments.