The continuities between the two preeminent English political philosophers of the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, have been both overstated and understated. As prototypical “bourgeois” thinkers or as fellow workers in the jus naturalist tradition, their names are indelibly linked. As exponents of the absolutist state, they are invariably opposed. Jeffrey R. Collins's magnificent study In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience invites us to set aside these familiar configurations in a favor of a more nuanced set of intellectual and political affiliations and disaffiliations. By treating Hobbes and Locke as ecclesiological thinkers, preoccupied with questions of conscience and religious governance, Collins is able to unearth a more tangled, but ultimately a more illuminating genealogy. Indeed, Locke's trajectory, as it were, up from Hobbism, in Shadow of Leviathan, provides a through-line with which to reconsider the broader ecclesiastical politics of the entire late Stuart era.

In the background of the present work is the recent re-characterization of Hobbes (to which Collins's previous study The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes made a major contribution) as a subtle proponent of prerogative toleration, rather than as the bluntly Erastian confessional absolutist of scholarly tradition. For Hobbes, the management of religious pluralism, whether coercive or permissive, was a function of sovereignty, answerable ultimately to the politique imperative of civil peace, rather than either the demands of orthodoxy or the defense of rights. In this light, it is not surprising that Collins finds the young John Locke of late Interregnum Oxford attracted to models of state-managed religious difference increasingly associated with the magisterial ecclesiology of Hobbes. For the young Locke, “fed by the Hobbesian currents of the Interregnum” (21), the key to religious peace was the overweening religious authority of the sovereign state. Accordingly, his early writings on the Restoration ecclesiastical settlement disallow both an individual right to religious liberty and a theory of ecclesiastical autonomy that might serve as limits to that authority. Locke's early writings, Collins insists, must be located within the “sovereigntist revolution” of seventeenth century political thought, and as such, they share the hostility to independent religious authority, whether individual or ecclesial, that was a signal feature of that tradition (54–55).

Both Hobbes and Locke would become proponents of the Stuart monarchy's royal supremacy over the Church of England as the bulwark against the revanchist sacerdotalism of the Restoration Anglican clergy. And Collins places the immensely important political partnership between Locke and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury, within the context of an emerging “court Hobbism” (123) that sought to use the prerogative powers of the monarchy to establish a prudential toleration and rein in clerical pretensions. Collins suggests that both Locke and Shaftesbury were engaged with Hobbes's writings in the early years of their association. Indeed, he puts the three men in tantalizingly close political and intellectual proximity during the years of Shaftesbury's ascendancy in the Cabal ministry, when it was hoped that the latter might serve as Hobbes's court patron. These affiliations informed the Cabal's religious policies, culminating in Charles II's prerogative Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, and beyond that, even more radically Erastian and anticlerical proposals such as making Shaftesbury lay vicar general over the established church. To Restoration churchmen, Collins shows, the religious policies of the Cabal had all the earmarks of the Hobbesian “pincer”: Erastian domination of the church from above and denominational pluralism from below.

The remainder of In the Shadow of Leviathan concerns the evolution of Locke's thinking away from the prudential tolerantia of Thomas Hobbes and toward the more substantive account of religious freedom he would espouse in the 1680s. As the politique tolerationism of the Cabal gave way to the persecutory politique confessionalism of the Danby ministry, Locke began to discern the limitations of state-managed civil religion. In France, the unmistakable erosion of the Edict of Nantes at this time similarly exposed “the vulnerability of prerogative indulgence” (179). Beginning with his unpublished “Answer” to Bishop Stillingfleet and culminating in his celebrated Epistola de Tolerantia, Locke came to see confessional uniformity and prerogative indulgence as alternative applications of the same sovereigntist ecclesiology, the two faces of civil religion. The task going forward, as Locke would famously write in the Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), would be “to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion” (Locke, 6). In his mature tolerationist writings, Locke posited an inviolably free interior conscience and an external obligation to public worship as genuine limits to the sovereignty of the state, spheres of spiritual life over which the magistrate simply had no cognizance. Indeed, the absence of any serious discussion of toleration in Locke's Two Treatises underscores, for Collins, the extent to which religious questions had been effectively emancipated from the logic of politics.

But Collins discovers more than simply a “rights-oriented” account of religious liberty in the Letter Concerning Toleration. Collins reads the Letter, not wholly convincingly, as a full-blown ecclesiological treatise. Locke famously distinguished religion from politics by defining churches as voluntary societies, morphologically similar to trading companies and clubs for claret. But Collins insists that Locke did not intend churches to “be equated with mere civil voluntary associations” (260) as politically benign as anything else in the associational world. For Collins, applying language from the contemporary Anglican theologian Oliver O'Donovan, Locke conceived of churches as “prophetic” bodies, “capable of reproving the princes of the earth” (258). He even pipes in stray lines from Locke's other writings to substantiate a genuinely supernatural ecclesial body, one that embodies the corporatism of high church ecclesiologies but without their clerical hierarchies or exclusive sacramentalism. This supernatural voluntarism, at times, strains coherence. One wonders how to square it with the right of exit upon which Locke insists or the absence of common standards of orthodoxy. Collins is surely correct to underscore the publicness of Locke's putatively prophetic churches; but he evades here the question of whether they remained, in some irreducible sense, soteriologically private. Moreover, as this charge of reducing ecclesiae to mere clubs will be part of the arsenal of religious illiberalism well into the nineteenth century, the common reading of Locke as advocating privatization appears not so easily dispelled.

Still, Collins's consistently brilliant reading of Hobbes and Locke through the lens of “the Restoration toleration wars” (7) provides a vital reminder of the inadequacy of toleration, in and of itself, as the interpretive key to the ecclesiastical politics of the era. One cannot simply chart one's proximity to “the liberal tradition” by their mere acquiescence to the fact of religious pluralism. There were competing articulations of religious freedom, civic and sacred, just as there were distinct visions of confessional uniformity. One must be careful not to mistake the separation of church from state for the gateway to secular modernity.