Locke and the Limits of Liberal Toleration: Public and Private as a Temporal Distinction
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Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) marks an important milestone in the political argument for division of church and state. In this essay, I focus on how Locke’s argument relegates religious belief onto the realm of the future of afterlife, making it more or less irrelevant to affairs of the commonwealth. His temporal division of commonwealth and kingdom of God is a political strategy as it is a religious position. By choosing to focus on the goods of this life, which include “life, liberty, physical integrity, and freedom from pain, as well as external possessions, such as land, money, the necessities of everyday life, and so on,” Locke demonstrates a stronger commitment to the realm of the visible world, the present world, than the world which cannot be seen, but constitutes the heart of true belief. The goods of this world together constitute a realm of exclusive private property, whereas the goods of the spiritual life, the harmless routines of everyday life, and the future life all escape into an extra-civil realm of “toleration” not subject to law. This other realm could be categorized as the “private” as opposed to the “public” realm ruled by civil jurisdiction of the commonwealth, but all these extra-civic goods constitute an arena that stands in deep contra-distinction to the world of “private” property. The traditional modern division of public and private is so deeply, conceptually unsatisfying, because it privileges the world of civic, private goods as the realm of the public while relegating the world of common, final goods to the “privacy” of the domestic sphere. The feminization of religion, the feminization of culture, the feminization of good works, the feminization of literature, can all be explained by what I call the limits of liberal toleration. In an ironic inversion, the commonwealth becomes the kingdom of private property while all that exceeds the boundary of private property comes to be the truly public sphere of common wealth. By establishing a critical distance from Locke’s attempt to impose a chronological division between present and future and complicating the picture through an alternative figuration of the dimension of time, we can better understand how women and other outsiders fail to be excluded by the spatial or even temporal figuring of public and private.
Abstract
Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) marks an important milestone in the political argument for division of church and state. In this essay, I focus on how Locke’s argument relegates religious belief onto the realm of the future of afterlife, making it more or less irrelevant to affairs of the commonwealth. His temporal division of commonwealth and kingdom of God is a political strategy as it is a religious position. By choosing to focus on the goods of this life, which include “life, liberty, physical integrity, and freedom from pain, as well as external possessions, such as land, money, the necessities of everyday life, and so on,” Locke demonstrates a stronger commitment to the realm of the visible world, the present world, than the world which cannot be seen, but constitutes the heart of true belief. The goods of this world together constitute a realm of exclusive private property, whereas the goods of the spiritual life, the harmless routines of everyday life, and the future life all escape into an extra-civil realm of “toleration” not subject to law. This other realm could be categorized as the “private” as opposed to the “public” realm ruled by civil jurisdiction of the commonwealth, but all these extra-civic goods constitute an arena that stands in deep contra-distinction to the world of “private” property. The traditional modern division of public and private is so deeply, conceptually unsatisfying, because it privileges the world of civic, private goods as the realm of the public while relegating the world of common, final goods to the “privacy” of the domestic sphere. The feminization of religion, the feminization of culture, the feminization of good works, the feminization of literature, can all be explained by what I call the limits of liberal toleration. In an ironic inversion, the commonwealth becomes the kingdom of private property while all that exceeds the boundary of private property comes to be the truly public sphere of common wealth. By establishing a critical distance from Locke’s attempt to impose a chronological division between present and future and complicating the picture through an alternative figuration of the dimension of time, we can better understand how women and other outsiders fail to be excluded by the spatial or even temporal figuring of public and private.
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