Liberty, Toleration, and Law: The Political Thought of William Penn

FAIN: FA-55440-10

Andrew Robert Murphy
Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8559)

In many ways William Penn is a familiar figure to those interested in the history of religious liberty. Penn's life and career have been explored from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and a number of works over the past half-century have advanced our understanding of Penn's importance in his English and American contexts. Yet just a handful of years short of the 300th anniversary of Penn's death, we still lack the definitive treatment of his political thought as a whole, one that explores its philosophical and religious sources and places it into its many contexts. This project aims to rectify that lacuna, one especially lamentable given the explosion of historically informed scholarship on early modern political thought. The emergence of transatlantic studies as a way of integrating the histories of England and its territories in the Americas makes a new look at this important figure in English and American history an especially timely undertaking as well.

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Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn (Book)
Title: Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn
Author: Andrew R. Murphy
Abstract: In a seventeenth-century English landscape populated with towering political and philosophical figures like Hobbes, Harrington, Cromwell, Milton, and Locke, William Penn remains in many ways a man apart. Yet despite being widely neglected by scholars, he was a sophisticated political thinker who contributed mightily to the theory and practice of religious liberty in the early modern Atlantic world. In this long-awaited intellectual biography of William Penn, Andrew R. Murphy presents a nuanced portrait of this remarkable entrepreneur, philosopher, Quaker, and politician. Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration focuses on the major political episodes that attracted William Penn's sustained attention as a political thinker and actor: the controversy over the Second Conventicle Act, the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, the founding and settlement of Pennsylvania, and the contentious reign of James II. Through a careful examination of writings published in the midst of the religious and political conflicts of Restoration and Revolutionary England, Murphy contextualizes the development of Penn's thought in England and America, illuminating the mutual interconnections between Penn's political thought and his colonizing venture in America. An early advocate of representative institutions and religious freedom, William Penn remains a singular figure in the history of liberty of conscience. His political theorizing provides a window into the increasingly vocal, organized, and philosophically sophisticated tolerationist movement that gained strength over the second half of the seventeenth century. Not only did Penn attempt to articulate principles of religious liberty as a Quaker in England, but he actually governed an American polity and experienced firsthand the complex relationship between political theor
Year: 2016
Publisher: New York: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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