What Locke Knew About Elites

In early September 2019, the former Prime Minister of Belgium tweeted: “This week, the most important event was … the discovery of an unkown [sic] text by the Father of Liberalism, John Locke, on tolerance.” That the text in question—a 1667 manuscript memorandum entitled “Reasons for Tolerating Papists Equally with Others”—was not, in fact, a defense of tolerance towards Catholics, but rather a systematic outline of Locke’s reasons against it, didn’t seem to matter. For the purposes of social media, what the “Father of Liberalism” actually had to say about tolerance, or its limits, was beside the point.