Liberty, toleration and persecution: Locke, Mill and the liberal tradition

Although completing their major work over one hundred and fifty years apart, John Locke and John Stuart Mill are two seminal figures in the development of the liberal tradition. However some recent commentators have seen Mill as far more at home in this tradition than Locke, even presenting key aspects of Locke’s political philosophy as having distinctly anti-liberal implications centered on persecution. This paper challenges this view and, in fact, reverses it, insisting that it is the seventeenth century figure of Locke who is far more compatible with what we now understand as the liberal tradition than his illustrious Victorian successor.