Andrew Murphy’s new book marks his triumphant return to the seventeenth century and the transatlantic debates about religious toleration that inspired his first book, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (2001). Published more than fifteen years ago, that text remains a touchstone for political theorists and intellectual historians of tolerance and toleration, both for its conceptual acumen and historical rigor. In it, Murphy pioneered a distinctive, “historically-informed” approach to political theory, one that built upon the intellectual history of the Cambridge School while exceeding it, eschewing Whig history and emphasizing the distance of early modern theories and practices from our own, while nevertheless mining them for insights into contemporary challenges.

Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration displays the same masterful balance of historical judgment and theoretical incisiveness while diving deeply into the life and works of one of Conscience and Community’s central characters. This is the first of Murphy’s two planned works on William Penn, the second being a long-awaited intellectual biography. It begins by reminding us of the curious absence of the latter in the densely populated fields of early modern intellectual history and Quaker studies. Trying to understand exactly why Penn’s life and works have been neglected by scholars motivates much of Murphy’s argument throughout. Still, the book in hand is something else: a contextual account of Penn’s political thought organized around the key “episodes” (p. x) in which he was involved. These include just about every notable controversy about religion and politics in England after the Restoration, including one or two of Penn’s own making. Most memorable is Penn’s account of his own trial for “causing a riot” (and his subsequent imprisonment for contempt, along with the jury), The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (1670). This shining example of what Murphy calls “performative political theorizing” (p. 62), in both form and content, turned Quaker persecution and jury independence into causes célèbres for a century.

Murphy easily establishes Penn’s story as a rich, varied, and ultimately tragic tale worth recovering in its own right. Born into aristocratic notability, with a front-row seat to the coronation of Charles II, Penn took a path to notoriety that led him—via Quaker “convincement” in Ireland while managing his father’s estates, multiple imprisonments, and celebrity dissent—to renewed royal favor and the gift of his own colony, before anti-Catholic backlash against the tolerationist efforts of James II, discord and schism in Pennsylvania, and financial difficulties (including a stint in debtor’s prison) brought him crashing back down to earth. But Penn’s eventful life also led him to cross paths with some of the key actors and intellects of the period—not only James, but also George Fox, Margaret Fell, Benjamin Furly, Algernon Sidney, and especially John Locke, with whom Murphy draws illuminating comparisons throughout his book. Indeed, the contrast between Locke and Penn (who both spent time at Christ Church College, Oxford, along with John Owen, famed schismatic and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell) guide much of Murphy’s analysis and serve as a helpful shorthand in establishing Penn’s significance for political theorists, for whom Locke’s 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration remains the first and final word on toleration and the early modern origins of something they call “liberalism.” Yet as Murphy reminds us, Penn’s writings in defense of liberty of conscience contained all of the same arguments, while offering a more inclusive toleration and predating Locke’s Letter significantly. Moreover, while Locke denied authorship of all of his controversial writings on religion or politics during his lifetime and rose to bureaucratic respectability as a member of the Board of Trade, Penn put his theory into practice and his reputation on the line by founding a tolerant society himself.

Given the fascination with capital-F “Founding” in our discipline, political theorists’ neglect of Penn and of the other founding figures associated with the colonies of British North America cries out for explanation. The relatively cursory involvement of canonical thinkers like Locke (in Carolina) and even Hobbes (in Virginia) has caught the attention of scholars, especially those eager to indict them and the “liberal” tradition for founding crimes in the New World. Still, as Murphy notes, the often frustrating experiences of an earlier generation of colonial founders on the ground, as it were, like Penn has been obscured by hagiographic and teleological accounts written in the long shadow of their romantic successors, the so-called “Founding Fathers” of the American republic. (As an example, Murphy cites a 1977 book entitled William Penn’s Legacy, which begins only 25 years after Penn’s death.) But the messy and inevitably “hybrid” constitutions (as Vicki Hsueh puts it) produced in these contexts is in stark contrast with the achievements of mythical figures like Moses, Theseus, and Romulus, or the semidivine “Lawgivers”—Lycurgus, Solon, Numa—valorized by Machiavelli and Rousseau. If politics is the slow boring of hard boards, founding in Penn’s experience was the thankless and frenetic herding of uncooperative cats, mostly at a distance. He visited his colony only twice during his lifetime, and while he was an enthusiastic lawgiver—he followed his Frame of Government with 90 proposed laws—his fellow Quakers enacted only 71 (pp. 144–45), and their receptivity to his counsel went rapidly downhill from there.

In presenting the full scope of Penn’s writings against a richly drawn contextual background (informed by excellent recent work by historians like Jane Calvert, Alexandra Walsham, Evan Haefeli, and Scott Sowerby), Murphy offers a master class in how to write engaged and engaging intellectual history. Still, his interest in Penn is not simply historical. Throughout, Murphy remains first and foremost a political theorist, drawn to Penn’s life and works mainly as an opportunity for reflection on deeper themes—not only about toleration and the continuing power of arguments for persecution, but also about genre in political theory, the (un)importance of “originality,” and the complex relationship between theory and practice, of which founding is only one example. As presented by Murphy, William Penn’s political thought offers us food for thinking about all of these questions. Still, a further question niggles: Is it worth reviving in its own right? That is, does Penn provide arguments or approaches that might enrich or improve our own thinking about the pressing challenges of coexistence in our own day?

Murphy never explicitly addresses this question, but it is begged by the extended comparison with which he concludes the book, between Penn and another neglected founding figure, Roger Williams. Penn was born in 1644, the year that a middle-aged Williams published his epic pro-toleration “dialogue between Truth and Peace,” The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution. Williams published this and other works while in London seeking a patent to (retrospectively) legitimize the colony that he had accidentally founded when fleeing deportation back to the Old World by Massachusetts Bay: Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. If all of Locke’s arguments can be found in Penn, all the same, more, and better besides are already there in Williams, who, as Murphy notes, worked “backwards” from practice to theory in his own thinking about the constitution of a tolerant society. Still, while acknowledging Williams’s priority, Murphy argues that such efforts to denominate an historical figure “first” or “best” fall victim to the “originality” fallacy (p. 246)—originality does not equal influence or excellence, after all. Nevertheless, I would argue that originality can signal the existence of alternatives, historical paths once offered but not taken for whatever reason—perhaps because no one saw the chaotic and discordant disestablishmentarian “latrine” of Rhode Island as particularly worthy of emulation.

In my own work on Williams, I have argued that his significance for contemporary political theory should be seen as inversely related to his historical influence. The efforts to domesticate and co-opt him for secular liberalism by Martha Nussbaum and others have obscured the degree to which his theory and practice of toleration were different—so different, in fact, that they constitute a practical refutation of many of our fundamental assumptions about what coexistence requires at least since Rousseau—assumptions, it so happens, that Penn shared. As presented by Murphy, in Penn we find the same pernicious aspiration to unity, harmony, and fraternity as the bond of tolerant societies as in Locke, aspirations that I argue actually undermine the establishment of a maximally inclusive and stable tolerationist polity. (Incidentally, this perhaps explains why Penn, like Locke, never called explicitly for disestablishment [p. 183]; an established church has long been an institutional expression of this ideal of foundational unity). This ideal, I submit, accounts for much of Penn’s disillusionment with his own polity, which, he concluded, must be a failure because riven by controversy and sectarian discord. Williams had no love for Quakers (as Murphy admits, p. 246). Still, one suspects that had he lived, he would have recognized Penn’s colony (albeit grudgingly) for what it was: an incredible success.

So, indeed, is Liberty, Conscience and Toleration. It now joins Murphy’s previous works as required reading for political theorists who want something more from intellectual history and value a kind of originality made possible only by serious engagement with the theories and practices of the past.