Despite his role as colonial proprietor of Pennsylvania and an important voice in seventeenth-century debates concerning toleration, William Penn remains at the fringes of contemporary political theory. This is unfortunate because his story has a good deal to teach current readers about the promises and pitfalls of theorizing toleration in a pluralistic world. This article offers contributions to our understanding of the politics, philosophy, and history of the early modern Atlantic world by reconstructing Penn’s unique political theory of toleration in view of its colonial entanglements. It argues that the radical egalitarian impulse found in Penn’s thought was incompatible with the narrow catalog of “ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen” on which it is based, and explores the consequences of this disjuncture. The infant years of Penn’s “holy experiment” provide an enriching historical window into how English ancient constitutionalist ideals, transatlantic tolerationist discourses, and Indigenous practices of reciprocal treaty making were contested—rarely on equal footing—in the newly founded City of Brotherly Love.
Joshua Santeusanio (Mon,) studied this question.