Edited by John Christian Laursen and Maria Jose Villaverde - Contributions by Joaquín Abellán; Jonathan Israel; Henri Krop; Gerardo López Sastre; Cyrus Masroori; Rolando Minuti; Concha Roldán and Luisa Simonutti

In today's developed world, much of what people believe about religious toleration has evolved from crucial innovations in toleration theory developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thinkers from that period have been rightly celebrated for creating influential, liberating concepts and ideas that have enabled many of us to live in peace. However, their work was certainly not perfect. In this enlightening volume, John Christian Laursen and María José Villaverde have gathered contributors to focus on the paradoxes, blindspots, unexpected flaws, or ambiguities in early modern toleration theories and practices. Each chapter explores the complexities, complications, and inconsistencies that came up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as people grappled with the idea of toleration. In understanding the weaknesses, contradictions, and ambivalences in other theories, they hope to provoke thought about the defects in ways of thinking about toleration in order to help in overcoming similar problems in contemporary toleration theories.

Introduction: Paradoxes of Toleration in Early Modern Political Thought
John Christian Laursen and María José Villaverde
Chapter 1: Spinoza's Paradoxes: An Atheist who Defended the Scriptures? A Freethinking Alchemist?
María José Villaverde
Chapter 2: Spinoza on Lying for Toleration and his Intolerance of Atheists
John Christian Laursen
Chapter 3: Jansenist Fears and Huguenot Polemics: Arnauld, Jurieu, and Bayle on Obedience and Toleration
Luisa Simonutti
Chapter 4: 'The general freedom, which all men enjoy' in a Confessional State: The Paradoxical Language of Politics in the Dutch Republic (1700-1750)
Henri Krop
Chapter 5: A Leibnizian Way to Tolerance: Between Ethical Universalism and Linguistic Diversity
Concha Roldán
Chapter 6: Toleration in China and Siam in Late Seventeenth Century European Travel Literature
Rolando Minuti
Chapter 7: Toleration in Denis Veiras's Theocracy
Cyrus Masroori
Chapter 8: David Hume on Religious Tolerance
Gerardo López Sastre
Chapter 9: Rousseau, A False Apostle of Tolerance
María José Villaverde
Chapter 10: Intolerance of Fanatics in Bayle, Hume, and Kant
John Christian Laursen
Chapter 11: Tolerance and Intolerance in the Writings of
the French Antiphilosophes (1750-1789)
Jonathan Israel
Chapter 12: Immanuel Kant: Tolerance Seen As Respect
Joaquín Abellán