Andrew R. Murphy's Liberty, Conscience and Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn reexamines a figure familiar to every student of early American history. American historians have long been fascinated by Pennsylvania as an experiment in religious pluralism. Like Roger Williams of Rhode Island, William Penn is associated with “toleration” and thus for generations of American historians offered a link between the conflicts of the early colonial world and the liberties associated with the United States. Murphy shows that this is not the best way to approach Penn's life and thinking, however. He argues that Penn is underappreciated as a political theorist. Unlike such seventeenth-century figures as John Locke or James Harrington, Penn wrote no formal theoretical treatises. However, a reconsideration of how we define political theory and its relation to political practice reveals new things about this familiar figure.

What is political theory? Murphy locates Penn's theory in a variety of sources created during specific moments of late seventeenth-century English history—Penn and William Mead's trial for disturbing the peace in the wake of the Quaker and Conventicle Acts, for example. In this instance, we see theory articulated through performance: through their actions, Penn and Mead both create and perform the concept of a “Dissenter,” in particular the dissenter's relationship to civil authority, engaging the jury and other onlookers in the process—it is a performance of a particular view of English laws and liberties, designed to evoke sympathy. Political theory is formulated and articulated through public action rather than through texts alone. Murphy makes a related argument for the founding of Pennsylvania. The documents reveal a series of exchanges and adjustments rather than a single moment of transference followed by difficulty and disappointment. Here we do not see a performance like the earlier trial, but again, theory is something that emerges in the context of doing and interacting.

The effect of this approach to political theory is to ground Penn's theorizing firmly in its Restoration context. Focusing on the social and intellectual world of the late 1600s has two effects. One, toleration or liberty of conscience in its late seventeenth-century context is distinct from religious disestablishment as it later emerged in the United States. Murphy describes the arguments offered against toleration in the 1600s—an important question worthy of more extended discussion—in order to focus his discussion of toleration, or liberty of conscience, on the points at issue for Penn and his contemporaries. What Penn's opponents feared was the disintegration of the bonds that held society together. After all, if the state allowed its subjects to refuse to obey laws directing religious observance, what other laws might they choose to disobey? If religious observance was not enforced, what would happen to morality? The two sides often argued past one another—while supporters of religious liberty argued that coercing individuals into religious activity to which they could not in conscience assent only created hypocrites, opponents argued that everyone was already free to believe, in the privacy of their own consciences, whatever he or she liked—they were merely being asked to observe a set of forms and observances designed to maintain public order. Penn's response to these criticisms was to insist on the regulation of morality—while his ideal state was less intrusive on the individual in terms of church attendance, he did not link religious liberty with the liberty to order one's private life as one sees fit. For Penn, society was held together not by religious interest, but by civil interest: every subject had had an interest in a well-regulated and peaceful society; this interest was distinct from the specifics of religious observance.

Two, the trajectory of Penn's career makes more sense when seen from this angle. Historians have struggled to reconcile Penn the advocate of law and the ancient constitution in 1670 with Penn the advocate of the controversial politics of the soon-to-be-deposed James II. Murphy argues that Penn's emphasis on the fundamental nature of the right to religious liberty never wavered, and he pressed for a parliamentary confirmation of James II's declarations. This was consistent with his earlier thinking, which had always emphasized the importance of parliament in securing English liberties. Although the environment had changed, his case for toleration remained essentially the same.

How does this change our understanding of religious liberty and its social expression in early Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania's proprietor emerges from Murphy's analysis as an individual very much of his time—like other seventeenth-century colonial proprietors, he clashed with his assembly over the limits of his power and their role in government. The concept of “founding” itself is more complex than it appears, Murphy argues: rather than a single moment of transmission, what takes place is a fluid sequence of theorizing, implementation and re-theorizing (242). Moreover, the effect of Penn and his ideas themselves on the shape of the colony was surprisingly limited. Penn visited Pennsylvania only twice, briefly, and his influence on its society and government was not as great as his position might suggest: by the early eighteenth century “William Penn had been eclipsed in his own colony” (229). The European society that emerged there by the early 1700s took the form it did at least as much in spite of Penn as because of him.

Murphy distinguishes his book from current scholarship on Penn and Pennsylvania through his focus on the Restoration context of Penn's political thought. He makes ample use of the current scholarship on politics and religion in late seventeenth-century England, and he also puts the book in conversation with scholars writing about political theory and constitutions in the early modern English Atlantic world. As a work focusing on Penn himself and the interplay between theory and practice, it will not be as useful for readers interested in analyses of toleration on the ground in early America. However, Liberty, Conscience and Toleration offers a fine contribution to the growing literature advocating a closer relationship between the study of seventeenth-century English politics and the early English Atlantic and imperial world.