Toleration and Democratic Membership: John Locke and Michel de Montaigne on Monsters

This essay examines John Locke's engagement with monsters as a question of toleration in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Recounting a monster's birth as a case of uncertain identity, Locke endorses a provisional form of judgment. I compare this response with Michel de Montaigne&#...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPolitical theory Vol. 43; no. 4; pp. 451 - 472
Main Author Shanks, Torrey
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.08.2015
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Comparative analysis
Democracy
Epistemology
Judgment
Political theory
Locke
Montaigne
toleration
membership
acknowledgment
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Summary:This essay examines John Locke's engagement with monsters as a question of toleration in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Recounting a monster's birth as a case of uncertain identity, Locke endorses a provisional form of judgment. I compare this response with Michel de Montaigne's treatment of monsters in his Essays in order to highlight a politics of imagination and reason relevant to political judgment and toleration. Montaigne alerts us to significant silences in Locke's treatment of monsters that reveal unrecognized dimensions of his tolerationist position in the Essay. The provisional judgment forwarded by each thinker resituates toleration from epistemological questions of identity toward various practices of acknowledgment as theorized by Stanley Cavell. Some of these practices of acknowledgement, I contend, are better suited to the conditions of democratic membership.
ISSN:0090-5917
1552-7476
DOI:10.1177/0090591714560376