This volume contains essays on several important thinkers' views of toleration: Spinoza, Leibniz, Bayle, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. There are also essays on various Dutch and French authors, primarily religious ones. The chapters as a whole are intended to “focus on paradoxes, blind spots, unexpected flaws, weaknesses, or ambiguities in early-modern toleration theories and practices” (p. 1).

Each essay contains interesting points, and several offer clear and well-developed summaries and interpretations. Taken together, however, Paradoxes of Religious Toleration in Early Modern Thought is less a whole than a collection of disparate parts. The editors do not seem to have required the authors to discuss a common set of themes, and so some essays come closer to the promised subject than others. This variety means that opportunities to compare thinkers are missed. It is also unclear what principle of inclusion and exclusion governed the volume: There are no essays on Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, or Montesquieu, or on Sebastian Castellio, and there is nothing about Madison, Jefferson, or other Americans. Surely, Locke and Montesquieu deserved sustained discussion in a book about toleration in early modern thought.

Many of the essays prove to be not about toleration narrowly but about religion broadly, or themes such as religious fanaticism. But in no case is the challenge with which revelation confronts reason as such discussed systematically. Nor is the comprehensive challenge to political authority that issues from priestly or divine authority explored at length. These questions, however, are the central ones that should be addressed when one goes beyond toleration per se. They should not merely come up by the by in occasional essays. To require that religion be politically reasonable would seem finally to demand that it conform either to Plato's and Aristotle's best regimes—which are not regimes of tolerance—or to regimes grounded in the equality of individual natural rights. The fullest discussion of the place of natural rights, and the importance of Locke, is in Concha Roldan's essay on Leibniz. In Leibniz himself, however, tolerance “is more than a mere liberal political principle, but rather establishes a rational dialogue leading to true conciliation among different positions” (p. 96).

Several of the other essays will also be of special interest to political theorists. Gerardo Sastre's essay on Hume considers a variety of Hume's writings, including the History of England, clarifies Hume's concerns about religion, makes evident the link that Hume sees between encouraging toleration and discouraging religious superstition and enthusiasm, and, consequently, takes Hume's statement about “true religion” with a grain of salt. Hume proposes “a policy of tolerance” because toleration “is a matter of principle” and at the same time a “skillful expedient to allay religious fervor.” Hume also proposes “an established church with priests bribed to be indolent” (p. 152).

Joaquín Abellán's discussion of Kant reconstructs “his view of tolerance” from his moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of law. Morality establishes religion's foundation, not vice versa: “[R]ational religions can offer the basis for religious reconciliation by eliminating consequences derived from differences of religion” (p. 210). Still, Kant expresses a certain preference for Christianity” (p. 211). Rousseau, in Maria Jose Villaverde's essay, is “a false apostle of tolerance,” intransigent “toward materialists and atheists but also toward women,” whose “tolerance is … limited to those aspects of religion that he considered indifferent,” such as “most dogmas, rituals, and ceremonies,” “but not including, despite his assertions, the opinions that he judges as essential, like belief in God or the afterlife” (p. 172). Spinoza, in another of Villaverde's essays, is chiefly concerned with wide “liberty of thought and expression.” He is “the most tolerant of the early toleration thinkers;” liberating men from “traditional religion” was a first step toward living a rational life and ultimately arriving at happiness (pp. 4,5). For John Laursen, Spinoza's chief concern is defense against persecution through silence “and indeed lying;” open and “principled atheists” might “run afoul of the law, even under Spinoza's ideal government (p. 5).

Despite the many cogent points about toleration that the authors make in these and other essays, and the paradoxes they uncover in it, they offer no unified view of toleration, or discuss in detail why it might be harmful or good. Among other matters, one should see that it is not only forbearance offered by government but an individual virtue, indeed, one of modernity's central virtues. This dimension receives surprisingly little attention in the volume. Tolerance as a virtue sets acceptable behavior toward those of other faiths, but it differs from piety or reverence. Individually, it is a disposition or habit, a trained limiting or directing of one's own spiritedness so that one makes way for others' freedom. To be tolerant is to allow others to act religiously in their own way, although to tolerate is not necessarily to approve, help, or even to engage. Today, indeed, toleration can be so broad that we too easily forget that we tolerate primarily those of different faiths, and need not approve of these faiths. Some discussion of tolerance as a virtue would have been welcome in order to clarify more fully what makes it desirable.

A comprehensive look at toleration would also need to consider several other issues that are not addressed systematically in the volume. The first, as I suggested, is the link between toleration and a regime based on equal rights. Individual natural authority replaces (or modifies) revealed authority. Such natural authority is linked to our shared desires for preservation and comfort and, therefore, to attention to commerce and eventually to industry—attention to the expansion of value beyond natural penury. Happiness is primarily satisfaction of these desires. Such natural authority and attention foster concern with the private more than with the public, and with limited government. Religion, understood as, by right, a voluntary individual choice of faith, or of membership in religious associations (whatever the experiences that make one choice more likely another), is coherent with the other elements of liberal democracy, the emblematic natural rights regime. Religion so understood is advanced by toleration. Toleration's grounding in the foundations of liberal democracy also allows us to see that it is primarily the individual whose religious choice is tolerated, because he or she is legally equal. Groups or religious communities are, in liberal democracies, at root tolerated as organs or objects of free individual choice, rather than being tolerated simply as groups, or for merely prudential reasons. The different grounds of toleration matter: The individual, liberal, grounds allow us to distance ourselves (publicly and privately) from claims by religious groups and leaders to have special authority over the individuals who comprise them.

To understand the place of toleration in many of the thinkers discussed and not discussed in this volume, one must also see them as not merely dealing with religion and like matters intellectually, but as having the practical constitutional intent of seeking to advance a new or modified way of life generally. This comes out to some degree in some essays, but not fully or systematically. Failing to emphasize this leads the editors to equate the importance of various authors—but, in fact, some are more central than others in leading the practical revolution. Modern tolerance began as a form of political or persuasive action and of individual disposition toward believers in religions other than one's own or the reigning one. Over time, its largely intended effect has been to temper religions' most strident or seemingly authoritative political claims. To understand it properly, one must see it as part of the overall modern political, economic, and technological project, which combines the practical and theoretical in a novel manner.