Incivility runs rampant. Disagreements seem harder than ever to overcome, concerning as they do matters of identity-shaping significance. Differences increasingly breed personal animosity, rather than mutual respect. Meanwhile, information technologies foist these squabbles onto the reading public at a rate hitherto unimaginable. The result? Popular discontent, factionalism, and a growing distrust of institutions and hierarchies as well as the coarsening of our public debates. The possibility of even minimal consensus in political and social life — to say nothing of civic friendship — seems to have receded into an unreachable, if not-too-distant, past.
Such was the turbulence of post-schismatic Europe, as Teresa Bejan describes it in Mere Civility, when political thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Roger Williams began formulating concepts, such as free speech and religious freedom, foundational to modern political liberalism. It was a world in which the theological and political differences between Quakers, Puritans, Anglicans, and Catholics — which few today could identify, much less take as casus belli — could give rise to prolonged warfare.
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