"Conscience
and Community is both a major advance in the study of colonial
America and a contentious contribution to liberal political philosophy.
Historians and political philosophers will have to wrestle with
his work for a considerable time to come." —Evan Haefeli, William
and Mary Quarterly
"This
book is more than just a richly detailed and carefully documented
work in the history of ideas: it is also one of the more original
and persuasive reconsiderations of the negative liberty paradigm
to appear in some time."—Richard Boyd, Humane Studies Review
"Conscience
and Community is a welcome combination of thorough historical
analysis and lucid contemporary argument."—Sammy Basu, History
of Political Thought
"Andrew
Murphy provides an incisive critique of the assumption that the
autonomy prized in liberalism has its genesis in the seventeenth-century
debates over religious toleration in England and America. . . .
Anyone concerned about the historical intricacies of religious toleration
within liberalism and their implications for multiculturalism needs
to read this text." —John Francis Burke, Journal of Church
and State
Religious
toleration appears near the top of any short list of core liberal
democratic values. Theorists from John Locke to John Rawls emphasize
important interconnections between the principles of toleration, constitutional
government, and the rule of law.
Conscience and Community revisits the historical emergence
of religious liberty in the Anglo-American tradition, looking deeper
than the traditional emergence of toleration to find not a series
of self-evident or logically connected expansions but instead a
far more complex evolution. Murphy argues that contemporary liberal
theorists have misunderstood and misconstrued the actual historical
development of toleration in theory and practice.
Murphy approaches the concept through three "myths" about religious
toleration: that it was opposed only by ignorant, narrow-minded
persecutors; that it was achieved by skeptical Enlightenment rationalists;
and that tolerationist arguments generalize easily from religion
to issues such as gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, providing
a basis for identity politics. The book seeks a renewed appreciation
of the specificity that made religious toleration so divisive as
well as the general tension between conscience and community that
persists in contemporary societies.
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