I am grateful to Teresa Bejan for her generous and incisive reading of Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration, and for the important questions she raises in her review. As she points out, I have attempted (in this book and in my work more generally) to articulate an approach to political texts that hews closely to the circumstances and contexts of their production, while remaining open to creative ways of understanding their continuing importance to our own, often quite different, concerns. Doing so results not only in a renewed appreciation of specific thinkers, I argue, but also in a more capacious understanding of political theory itself. William Penn has always struck me as an individual perfectly suited to such an approach: His career, while driven by concrete political contestation, sheds light on a wide range of religious, political, and legal controversies at the heart of early modern political thought and practice.

Bejan raises two main questions in her review: whether Penn “provide[s] arguments or approaches that might enrich or improve our own thinking about the pressing challenges in our own day,” and how acknowledging Roger Williams’s importance might affect my assessment of Penn’s career. The first question raises difficult interpretive and methodological issues, issues which her book Mere Civility handles with clarity and grace, in historically cogent and analytically precise ways. In the case of Penn, I would point to his notion of “civil interest.” In One Project for the Good of England (1679), Penn argued that although some might hope to rid the land entirely of dissenters and sectarians, a more realistic prospect involved acknowledging a shared civil interest—a “lower but true principle” as compared to uniformity—emphasizing the value of a peaceful and prosperous political community in which government protected popular rights. A commitment to civil interest accepted the persistent reality of deep religious diversity among the populace, and simultaneously called for robust social, political, and economic cooperation. In fact, something like civil interest seems to be at work in Williams’s 1655 “ship of state” letter, in which he emphasized the common interest that “papists, protestants, Jews, or Turks” have in the smooth functioning of their shared political community. I would suggest that civil interest offers an ideal worth pursuing for societies characterized by deep diversity, even in times and places far afield from Penn’s (and Williams’s) own.

Relatedly, Bejan points out that Penn, like Locke, displays a “pernicious aspiration to unity, harmony, and fraternity as the bond of tolerant societies.” In Penn’s case, those aspirations reflected not only broader early modern dynamics—a deep cultural resistance to innovation and dissension—but also his more particularly Quaker valorization of consensus. As to her intriguing suggestion about Penn’s refusal to call for disestablishment, I suspect that his reluctance on that front had less to do with aspirations for unity, pernicious or otherwise, and more with a straightforward political judgment that such a move was a political nonstarter.

A consideration of the relative significance of Williams and Penn gets at the heart of one of the many virtues of Bejan’s book, and I am tempted simply to refer readers again to the second chapter of Mere Civility. She is correct that Williams, four decades Penn’s senior, accomplished much before Penn was even born, and that Rhode Island robustly protected religious exercise well before Pennsylvania came into being. Surely one theme that emerges from this critical dialogue is an appreciation of the diversity of modernity’s routes to toleration as epitomized by these two individuals and the places they helped bring into being. Williams and Penn—as theorists and practitioners—belong front and center in any narrative of the difficult emergence of liberty of conscience in the Anglo-American tradition.

There is much more to be said on all of these questions, of course, and I am gratified to have been the beneficiary of such a careful and thoughtful review. Like Williams, whose ongoing importance Bejan’s book did so much to illuminate, Penn stands as a figure who wrestled with many of the boundaries—theory and practice, England and America, liberty and law, church and state—that frame the contours of modern political thought.