Teresa M. Bejan begins Mere Civility with a straightforward observation. It is tempting to think that our contemporary social and political situation, so rife with vocal hostility and contempt, is somehow without precedent, and to pine for a rebirth of civility. (Such temptations, I would add, are particularly strong in 2018, when an American president seems intent on razing any shred of civil charity, considers any appeal to mutual understanding a sign of weakness, and interacts with critics largely by assigning them derogatory nicknames.) Yet she astutely observes that if we do not know what civility means—or, rather, if a range of very different concepts and practices simultaneously parade under the mantle of “civility”—then appeals for more of it, or a rebirth or revival of it, are likely to be either fruitless (at best) or counterproductive (at worst). What is more, without a clear understanding of the trajectories that landed contemporary societies in the mess in which they find themselves, twenty-first century citizens will remain hobbled by an inability to specify precisely where their problems lie, to say nothing of what might be done about them. It is precisely in this conceptual, historical, and political morass, and at this historical moment, that Mere Civility aims to intervene. As the rest of the book makes abundantly clear, there is nothing “mere” about mere civility.

Bejan’s argument unfolds over four substantive chapters, bracketed by an introductory chapter laying out the contemporary significance of the topic and a concluding chapter that suggests an approach to contemporary disputes. Chapter 1 sets the stage by elucidating the post-Reformation context in which toleration and a host of related concepts and practices (concordia, evangelism, comprehension, homonia) assumed increasing prominence. From Luther’s vituperative denunciations of corruption within the Catholic Church to debates over adiaphora (things indifferent) to the crafting of colloquies, in which different views were introduced, examined, and debated in carefully controlled elite settings—exacerbated by the printing press and the collapse of early modern censorship regimes—toleration emerged as the most contested political question surrounding the persistence of religious difference. But it was not the only such question, and asking how the state ought to engage with religious diversity in its midst captures only one aspect of a rich early modern discourse. Equally important are the ways in which individuals and groups understood their ethical and political obligations toward each other—in other words, how they approached questions of civility and incivility.

Each of the book’s central historical chapters—on Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke—combines nuanced readings of primary texts with a thorough familiarity with secondary debates and larger literatures, plumbing the depths of the three thinkers’ “sophisticated efforts to think through what coexistence under conditions of fundamental disagreement requires” (p. 11). Bejan’s reconstruction of Williams’s distinctive brand of “evangelical toleration”—“an unapologetically negative form of permission without approval,” (p. 69) grounded in his view of society as “a discordant whole held together by the ongoing, evangelical, often heated disagreements of its members” (p. 73)—highlights the ways in which Williams viewed toleration as “the willingness to coexist with those people and views one finds most contemptible” (p. 76). (Scholars can only hope that Bejan’s account of Williams will replace Martha Nussbaum’s, which wrenched Williams out of his historical context and made him into a Rawlsian avant la lettre in her 2008 book Liberty of Conscience.) Chapter 3 turns to Hobbes, a thinker keenly attuned to the ways in which contumely, contempt, and religious discord could lead to all-out civil strife, and who rested his political theory on that supreme example of incivility, the state of nature. Hobbes’s “civil silence,” which he understood to be “the price of pluralism” (p. 110), Bejan argues, insisted that “peace required uniformity—or rather its simulacrum, conformity” (p. 95). Thus, Hobbes appealed to virtues like discretion and complaisance as antidotes to the harmful but all-too-predictable effects of hatred and contempt.

In the case of Williams, Bejan is introducing a thinker with whom many political theorists are likely unfamiliar. Hobbes emerges from her analysis as a more nuanced and interesting, but not, I think, fundamentally different thinker than many likely have already considered him. With Locke, however, I suspect that her interpretation will prove more unsettling of the scholarly consensus. Locke’s toleration is generally (and, I would argue, accurately) understood as minimal and constrained, hemmed in by now-familiar exceptions and exemptions. When we shift our focus, however, Bejan argues, and approach Locke not merely through what he thinks about state policy but also how he thinks individuals and groups in civil society should engage with each other, the Lockean agenda takes on a radically more ambitious cast. Mere Civility de-emphasizes Locke’s arguments about state policy and instead explores “the robust ethical demands that ‘mutual toleration’ would place on individuals” (p. 130). His “civil charity” called for the development of “an internal art of inoffensiveness” (p. 135), and in doing so transformed civility into “a matter of shared beliefs rather than behaviors” (p. 143). It is an “aspirational account of civility” (p. 135) distinctly uncomfortable with disagreement itself.

With any of these case studies, of course, one could raise questions. Does Williams’s Calvinism, for example, complicate his commitment to evangelism? Is the “more tolerant Hobbes” interpretation even worth the few pages it receives? What are the broader implications for Locke scholarship of the places in which William Popple’s loose English translation, the Letter Concerning Toleration, departs from the Latin Epistola de Tolerantia that Locke actually wrote? But these are quibbles. The force of Bejan’s argument lies in her synthetic case that, in seeking the contemporary significance of early modern thinking, Williams’s commitment to rough-and-tumble contentious conversation is to be preferred to Locke’s genteel disapproval of disapproval. When considering the three approaches to civility, Williams “emerges . . . as an unlikely hero” (p. 13), and “Locke must be its villain” (p. 145).

Bejan’s concluding chapter draws connections from the three thinkers explored in the text to contemporary voices in debates over hate speech, civility, and cultural conflict. She helpfully draws on Rainer Forst’s distinction between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of toleration, viewing civility as concerned with “horizontal” relations between individuals and toleration referring to “vertical” relations between individuals and the state (p. 152). Doing so helps to distinguish political theories of toleration from the broader expectations of behavior between individuals and groups with different worldviews. That said, not all horizontal relationships are created equal, and I found myself wanting to know more about the implications for her argument of the tendency of social disparities of power and influence to bleed over into political relationships between individuals and the state, and, conversely, the ways in which state actors often exacerbate social tensions and power dynamics. If focusing on the vertical dimension of toleration tends to overlook the important theoretical contributions that these three early modern thinkers have to offer to broader accounts of civility—one of the signal contributions of this book—might it also be said that focusing on the horizontal tends to obscure the ways in which popular intolerance can lead to more straightforward forms of political oppression?

This is a critique, or at least a question, based less on the purported minimal nature of toleration and mere civility—I find this argument largely persuasive—and more on the dynamics, processes, and potential consequences of popular hostility and invective. What, precisely, is involved in the “mental toughness” (p. 162), the “hardening oneself to rough language” and “simply toughening up” (p. 168) that Bejan finds so appealing in Williams’s thought? And given the ways in which rough language seems often to lead, almost ineluctably, to rough treatment, might there be cause for concern about more than “wounded feelings” in the harshly inflammatory rhetoric that appears across the political spectrum in our own time? Denigration, of course, is nothing new; it is not nearly as far as we might think from early modern “papist,” “heretic,” and “blasphemer” to our own “Crooked Hillary” and “Little Rocket Man.” But is being denounced by one’s fellow citizens not a quite different phenomenon than being denounced from the highest office in the land? While not wanting to engage in a reductio ad Trumperum, these are, alas, characteristics of the historical moment in which we find ourselves. In Mere Civility, Teresa Bejan has equipped scholars with a wide array of tools—historical, conceptual, political—for reflecting on the ways in which incivility of speech intertwines with broader strands of intolerance and xenophobia in our particular moment, and for thinking about how these early modern thinkers might offer insights for sorting through the wreckage. I am eager to hear Bejan’s analysis extended to an engagement in just such a task.

Mere Civility is, simply put, a splendid book, a model of interpretive acumen and historical sensibility. It illuminates figures long departed and allows them to speak to current controversies, and it does so in ways that are both sensitive to the historical context in which those arguments were articulated and germane to our contemporary situation. It is a model of textual and contextual analysis, of judicious weighing of historical evidence in an attempt to more fully explicate the trajectories of toleration, civility, and incivility of various sorts. It may be “mere”—by either early modern or contemporary definitions of that important qualifier—and it may be in increasingly short supply, but civility remains, for many, an enduring ideal well worth striving for today.