LARS TO/NDERtive, we are better served if we speak of Enlightenment(s), in the plural. Moreover, because
there is no such thing astheEnlightenment, any attempt to construe one is just as much
a reflection of the embodied circumstances—that is, the desires, prejudices, and hab-
its—in which the historian’s interpretation is set as it is a reflection of what actually took
place in the past. This means that we must see the business of historical interpretation as
an attempt either to define or to transform oneself in light of some limited section of what
we call ‘‘history.’’ As Ian Hunter argues, invoking the embodiment of his own argument,
interpretations of the Enlightenment are ‘‘intellectual practices or ‘spiritual exercises’
whose special role is to permit attention to and transformation of the self.’’^6
What follows seeks to heed these considerations by paying close attention to the way
in which the valorization of Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Kant has changed
over time. It also tries to show how this valorization entails a marginalization of other
Enlightenment thinkers—Voltaire, in particular—promoting an image of reason that pre-
vents the contemporary model of reasonable toleration from engaging the endurance
of pain and suffering (what I earlier referred to as the disconnection of tolerance and
toleration).
The Lockean Paradigm
Today, there are few who would disagree with James Tully’s remark that theEpistola de
tolerantiam, by Locke, is ‘‘a classic in the European struggle for [tolerance] and tolera-
tion,’’ one that poses the issue of democratic pluralism ‘‘within a recognizably European
problematic, the terms of which were set by the generation of Grotius and Lipsius.’’^7 This
makes Locke a natural starting point for our discussion.
Let us first note that only in recent years has theEpistolaattained the status of being
a ‘‘classic’’ in the history of tolerance and toleration. In the 1960s, for example, historians
such Henry Kamen and Joseph Lecler saw no reason to make Locke the centerpiece in
their accounts. To the contrary, they argued that Locke’s discourse is, above all, a demon-
stration of ‘‘Nonconformist thought, with all its narrow-mindedness’’ and added that the
Lockean arguments are ‘‘neither as original nor as liberal as defenses [of tolerance and
toleration] penned by other European writers.’’^8 These remarks, which no longer appear
to be prominent in the literature, may not reflect the actual legacy of Locke, yet they do
invite us to pursue another kind of questioning: How has theEpistolabecome so central
to contemporary discussions of tolerance and toleration? What kind of desires and inter-
ests does this reevaluation reveal? And what are the ontological commitments that under-
pin it? Answers to these questions say more about contemporary political theory than
they say about theEpistola.
We can now turn to Locke’s argument for the rationality of toleration. The historical
events that led to this argument are well documented. Locke wrote the major part of the
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