Liberty of conscience is a central and controversial issue both in early modern thought and in today's controversies over the precarious state of liberal democracies. In both historical contexts, liberty of conscience is investigated from predominantly normative perspectives: it is defended as a fundamental requirement of democratic systems, even when it clashes with the demands of equality and the rule of law. Alternatively, it is criticized as an inadequate principle—an ethnocentric expression of Protestant modernity, incapable of accounting for multiculturalism and giving equal voice to divergent ethical and religious options. This book approaches liberty of conscience from a different, more realistic historiographical and interpretative perspective. Its central chapters provide a selective, yet very instructive, survey of the rich early modern intellectual debate concerning the dramatic issues of public sincerity and the pursuit of one's inner ethical and religious convictions. John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle—these are the great figures that Amy Gais has chosen to discuss—addressed these problems with very different political and normative intentions. However, they shared a similar focus on the psychological causes and effects of either coercion or the free expression of individual consciences. Unlike thinkers suc