A history of the struggles for civil rights has, as Professor Grayling points out an excess of material to draw from and may be presented using different organising principles. Professor Grayling writes with a purpose: to remind his readers of the importance of liberty and rights, as the great liberal democracies sacrifice hard won liberties as part of a so-called war on terror. His organising principle is the idea of liberty, tracing its development and influence in the history of the last 500 years. The work is also conceived as a debate with Lord Acton, the 19th Century historian who associated the idea of liberty with the idea of religion but whose disappointment with the adoption of the concept of papal infallibility by the Catholic Church under Pius IX in 1870 led to Acton’s famous dictum: “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Professor Grayling’s view is that religious oppression led to a battle for religious liberty and freedom for one’s conscience but that religious institutions were as liable to oppress liberty as any other institution.
Professor Grayling’s desire to consider the idea of liberty in a religious context leads him to consider, therefore, many incidents of great religious oppression and the struggles for freedom of conscience to which they gave rise. As to the former, Thomas of Torquemada, the man who made the Spanish Inquisition famous, ranks as a prominent villain. Thomas persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella that political and financial advantage could be obtained by insisting on purity of worship and religious thought among Christians, converted Jews (to Christianity) and among any Muslims who remained in Spain after the Reconquista has driven Muslim rule from the peninsula. He set about his task with torture and murder and delivered to his grateful monarchs causing Spain to lose, inter alia, the benefit of the bulk of its talented Jewish population.
The struggle for liberty of thought has heroes as well as villains. Michael Servetus, a medical doctor and Spaniard who argued with Calvin about predestination and the concept of God as a trinity, refused to denounce his “heretical” views even as he was burned at the stake in Geneva. The execution of Servetus led to a widespread questioning of an approach to faith that required stringent agreement on arcane matters of doctrine on pain of death.
One of the most eloquent voices for religious toleration was Sebastian Castellio, a native of Lyon in France, classical scholar, school-teacher and former housemate of Calvin. Castellio published a tract suggesting that it was anomalous that peoples of completely different faiths were allowed to live untroubled while those who disagreed on one point of controversy were treated harshly. He argued that it would be better to wait until the final day when all points of difficulty would be made clear. He argued that the points on which people disagreed were difficult so that strict insistence on uniformity meant that a heretic eventually became anyone you disagreed with. Castellio’s work was very influential in promoting a marked increase in religious tolerance across Europe.
Other great libertarian struggles reviewed by Professor Grayling include the struggle against the doctrine of absolute monarchy in England culminating in the glorious Revolution of 1688; the struggle to abolish slavery, also focussed on the United Kingdom; the battle for rights for women; the struggle for workers’ rights including the right to have legal trade unions and the struggle in the nineteenth century to expand the franchise. Professor Grayling’s narration uncovers lesser known heroes of such struggles such as Anthony Benezet, son of French protestant asylum seekers in England who, subsequently, settled in Philadelphia. Benezet became a Quaker and, through his faith, became a campaigner against slavery. His 1771 publication which documented the horrors of the slave trade of which many were unaware started a debate which led to the abolition of the slave trade in England in 1807 and abolition of slavery, itself, in the Empire in 1833. A number of other lesser known campaigners, including Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, built on the Benezet’s contribution before the man whose name is most associated with the abolition of slavery, William Wilberforce MP, was recruited to the cause and made his famous speech in the House of Commons on 12 May 1789.
Professor Grayling looks not only at the activists in the struggle for liberty. He also sets out the achievements of the ideas men in that process. The poet, John Milton, features for his tracts against the Stuart monarch’s requirements of uniformity of forms of worship but also for his arguments in favour of a right of divorce and for freedom of speech. The philosopher, John Locke,3 is discussed for his arguments in favour of freedom of religion but also for his theories of government including the idea that the sovereign exercises power on trust for the people.4 And among many others discussed, one should mention Tom Paine, whose Rights of Man popularised the idea of human rights and the democratic ideals that had underpinned the American and the French Revolutions.
The final chapter of Towards the Light is called The Idea of Liberty and the Verge of Betrayal. The first half of the chapter involves a retracing of the history searching for the most appropriate philosophical justification for the concept of liberty. Professor Grayling’s conclusion is that one need not adopt a particular philosophical or moral underpinning for the importance of human rights and that right which is most fundamental: liberty itself. The justification lies in the struggles that people have undertaken to win and maintain such rights. Those who struggled knew what was required to make a flourishing life possible and that knowledge, flowing from those experiences, is sufficient justification in itself.
The second half of the chapter returns to Professor Grayling’s purpose in writing the book. Among the many encroachments justified by the war on terror, Professor Grayling gives particular prominence to a British proposal for a National Identity Register based on biometric data and the United States Patriot Act and the unregulated and non-transparent surveillance of its citizens which has ensued. Professor Grayling’s words, taken from the last paragraph of his book, might be addressed to each one of us:
“If there is one thing these pages might do, therefore, it is to remind us of the reasons why we struggled for our liberties, how much it cost our forebears to get them, and therefore why it matters so much to keep them, now that we are actually in the process of losing them. Let us fight, and fight again, to keep them … It is what we owe our dead who bought them for us with their lives, it is what we owe ourselves in our aspiration for good lives, and it is what we owe those whose lives are to come …”
Stephen Keim SC
Footnotes
- Professor Anthony Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a prodigious writer of books; essays and newspaper pieces and broadcaster. His website is http://www.acgrayling.com/. His photo portrait on the inside of the dust jacket of the book reveals a cheeky smile and a great head of hair.
- Bloomsbury Publishing Plc describes itself as an independent publisher and winner of the Publisher of the Year award in 2005 and 2006. It published the Harry Potter books, inter alia. It may be located at http://www.bloomsbury.com/info/aboutus.asp.
- Locke is the author of the most concise statement of the rule of law available: “where law ends, tyranny begins”.
- Locke’s work was effective in providing the philosophical justification, after the fact, for the events of 1688 which brought William and Mary to the throne.
