The advent of religious toleration in England at the end of the seventeenth century has long interested political theorists as well as intellectual and literary historians. Many have argued that toleration is, or ought to be, a movement from below, born of the desire to be free. By contrast, a careful reading of John Locke and the latitudinarian tradition indicates that toleration originates in raison d'état arguments, and that the question of state power can be neither historically nor analytically detached from it. Toleration is among other things a linguistic program, and it turns out that the discourse of toleration mistrusts the ambiguities of literary language. Two poems by John Dryden, Religio Laici and "To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew," push against the limits of toleration discourse; the first, written while Dryden was still an Anglican, limns the emptiness of a formal commitment to "common quiet"; the riotous figuration of the second, written the year of his conversion to Catholicism, points to what Charles Taylor has called the "awkwardness" of a multicultural polity trying to balance its commitments to majority and minority identities.
This article describes the current academic climate, among both faculty and students, as too harried and stressed for students to be really transformed by what they are learning. As a way to resist the neoliberalization of the university, it proposes that we rethink our relationship to enchantment.
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