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The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius
Author(s): Ian Hunter (Author)
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date: October 27, 2011
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 236 pages
- ISBN-10: 0521200830
- ISBN-13: 9780521200837
Book Description
Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) was a tireless campaigner against the political enforcement of religion in the early modern confessional state. In a whole series of combative disputations – against heresy and witchcraft prosecutions, and in favour of religious toleration – Thomasius battled to lay the intellectual groundwork for the separation of church and state and the juridical basis for pluralistic societies. In this text, Ian Hunter departs from the usual view of Thomasius as a natural law moral philosopher. In addition to investigating his anti-scholastic cultural politics, Hunter discusses Thomasius’ work in public and church law, particularly his disputations arguing for the toleration of heretics, providing a revealing comparison with Locke’s arguments on the same topic. If Locke sought to base toleration in the subjective rights protecting Christian citizens against an intolerant state, Thomasius grounded it in the state’s duty to impose toleration as an obligation on intolerant citizens.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Hunter’s excellent book offers the first really convincing account of Thomasius’ political thought in any language. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the early German Enlightenment and to the development of German political thought.”
Joachim Whaley, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, English Historical Review.
Joachim Whaley, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, English Historical Review.
“In this well-written, lucid portayal, Hunter offers Thomasius’s defense of religious toleration and the … retirement of the state from the sphere of religion as a compelling contrast to the sort of tolerance derivative of Kantian metaphysics and of Lockean … subjective rights.”
S. Dunwoody, University of Chicago, H-Net Review
Book Description
A discussion of Thomasius’s work in public and church law, providing a revealing comparison with the arguments of John Locke.
