Shaftesbury’s death in 1683. Shaftesbury reminds us of an English version of
the duc de Condé, the practitioner of timely alliance-switching. Shaftesbury
changed sides twice during the Commonwealth, and negotiated for the return
of King Charles II under a program of toleration and amnesty to all sides. With
the revival of the party of Catholic legitimacy under the Stuarts, he led the
parliamentary opposition and fled to Holland in 1682 under a charge of
treason, shortly followed by Locke.
Shaftesbury played the power game of religious animosities and factions
during the Restoration, but his machinations flowed with the structural drift
of the time. Opportunism and intermittent toleration was the most practical
policy for ending religious strife and its accompanying political turmoil. Locke
raised the lesson to the level of a principle. Social peace is possible only through
a reasoned disengagement from religious fanaticism; and this means seculari-
zation. Locke announced his philosophy at just the moment when his political
allies were making their triumphant return from Holland with the House of
Orange. Locke, as advanced in age as Hobbes was when he first began
publishing his major works, was stirred to complete his first creative fruits:
Essay on Human Understanding in 1688–89 (age 56–57), Letter on Toleration
in 1689, and Treatise on Government in 1690 (age 58).
We cannot attribute Locke’s position simply to the cause of toleration. That
position was widely shared among cosmopolitan intellectuals. The philosophi-
cal creativity of the 1670s through the 1690s consisted to a considerable extent
in working out different varieties of a nonsectarian religious stance: Spinoza’s
monism was a religion of reason, while the Cambridge Platonists revived an
older religious universalism. In Holland, the experienced side-switcher Pierre
Bayle, who had gone from the Jesuits to the Calvinists, was now calling for
disengagement from both sides; in the 1690s his Dictionary ridiculed the
inconsistencies of dogmatic religion and favored a secularist skepticism. Philo-
sophical creativity now appears as a dividing up of the territory of religious
liberalism. Again we see the pattern: as external political conditions shift the
space within which topics can be discussed, intellectuals respond to the oppor-
tunity by filling the space with a small number of contending positions.
How then did Locke happen to find his distinctive piece of the turf, and
why did his position prove so fruitful? Consider the trajectory of Locke’s career.
He began his Essay on Understanding in 1671, in a circle of intellectuals
around Shaftesbury, as a way of clearing up debates over revealed religion. His
notion was that doctrinal speculation could be avoided by limiting the under-
standing to what can be derived from sensation and putting aside further
attempts to “penetrate into the hidden causes of things” (Fraser, [1894] 1959:
xvii, xxiv–xxvi). This position is not unlike that of scientists such as Boyle—an
intimate friend of Locke—who chartered the Royal Society on the premise that598 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths