On toleration as the origin story of liberalism

Today’s post is only for my paid subscribers. It revisits an argument in my comments (recall here) delivered on 10 March, 2023 Celebrating the Lee Kong Chian Chair Professorship of Chandran Kukathas. This received wide circulation thanks to my friends at Liberal Currents on April 18 (here). I have made the argument more scholarly, but also added some bells and whistles, including a new criticism of Rawls, with an eye toward writing a liberal manifesto. Anyway here it is.

The first version of the origin story of liberalism presents its origin as a reaction to the European religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. This account generally foregrounds Locke’s advocacy of mutual toleration and sometimes includes Bayle’s or Spinoza’s defense of free thinking as originating moments. In America the narrative sometimes includes the early colonist Roger Williams.[1] Many of liberalism’s characteristic institutional forms—the division of powers, the separation between Church and State, and freedom of speech and press freedoms—are interpreted as resulting from the need to accommodate mutual disagreement over religious truth.

As Katrina Forrester has noted, the story is incredibly popular.[2] A characteristic example is offered by Chandran Kukathas in The Liberal Archipelago: [the liberal] “tradition itself emerged in its modern form out of the European wars of religion in a philosophical attempt to assert the importance of liberty of conscience. The critical works here are Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration and, more importantly still, Bayle's Philosophical Commentary. Liberalism's original concerns were not with justice, or social unity, but with securing a regime of mutual toleration.”[3]