Dr. Amy Gais

“The Coerced Conscience is a formidable and incisive book, one offering fresh ideas for cultivating and protecting conscience against anxieties of conformity, insincerity, hypocrisy, and torment. Gais supplies inspired analyses of long-standing concerns in modern and contemporary political theory, generating a powerful treatment for conscience and its demands.”

Lucas Swaine, Dartmouth College

“Freedom of conscience is a malleable, contested, and often misunderstood concept. By recovering the ideas of its most ardent defenders and most vocal critics of the early modern period, Amy Gais’ beautiful new book powerfully reminds us of how central freedom of conscience is for the capacities of citizenship, civic trust, and individual authenticity.”

Glory Liu, John Hopkins University

“In a time when claims of conscience constantly—and controversially—clash with the demands of social equality and the rule of law, this work could hardly be more timely. Gais’ compact, sensitive interpretations of Milton, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle illuminate conscience’s multifacted aspects and origins. Her deft contemporary arguments stress both the political and moral costs of overindulging conscience and the social and psychological costs of belittling it. Her arguments will unsettle almost everyone. An excellent book.”

Andrew Sabl, University of Toronto

The Coerced Conscience (Cambridge University Press, 2024) recovers how religious dissenters in early modern Europe articulated new defenses of liberty of conscience under conditions of severe persecution. This book shows how influential theorists of toleration, such as John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, defend liberty of conscience not only as a religious freedom but also as a political necessity: suppressing conscience fosters feigned conformity, erodes civic trust, and breeds religious and political fanaticism. By connecting these intuitions to contemporary debates on same-sex marriage, reproductive health, and immigration and religious asylum, I argue that liberty of conscience remains a crucial safeguard against political, social, and psychological harms today.

This book serves as the backdrop for three articles on hypocrisy and conformity. One article, “The Politics of Hypocrisy: Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle on Hypocritical Conformity,” was published by Political Theory. You can access the article here. This article situates influential early modern figures in overlooked debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity (i.e. the outward profession of a religion one does not believe in or a denial of a religion that one does), to show that early modern toleration was shaped by concerns with the social and psychological repercussions of religious dissimulation.

Abstract: Contemporary political theory has increasingly attended to the inevitability, and even advantage, of hypocrisy in liberal democratic politics, but less consideration has been given to the social and psychological repercussions of this ubiquitous phenomenon. This article recovers Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle’s critiques of hypocritical conformity to demonstrate that their influential theories of toleration and freedom were shaped considerably by concerns with enforced conformity. Reframing Spinoza and Bayle as theorists of hypocrisy, moreover, suggests that recent redemptive accounts of hypocrisy in political theory overlook deeper and arguably more discerning anxieties about a politics characterized by hypocrisy, specifically the deleterious effects of social mistrust and psychological distress.

Another article on Thomas Hobbes and toleration, “Thomas Hobbes and ‘Gently Instilled’ Conscience” was published by History of European Ideas. You can access the article here.

Abstract: This article engages with a key interpretive puzzle in Hobbes’s political thought—his seemingly contradictory view of liberty of conscience—and argues that Hobbes theorizes civic education as a powerful tool to confront and refashion prevailing views of conscience in early modernity. While influential accounts have recovered more ‘tolerant’ arguments in Hobbes’s political thought, recent revisionist accounts have argued that Hobbes does not merely advocate for the compulsion of outward conformity but also subjects’ inward persuasion. Yet this nuanced attention to the sovereign’s role in cultivating obedient, peaceful subjects does not attend fully to his shaping of the consciences of his subjects. Situating Hobbes in the early modern discourse on casuistry, as well as political debates on educational reform, reveals that the sovereign can and should try to shape the consciences of subjects, specifically returning to a view of conscience as a kind of “knowing with” others. Reframing Hobbes’s project of civic education as strategy to “gently instill” the consciences of subjects does not merely shed light on the interpretive puzzle of Hobbes’s ambivalence toward toleration but also draws attention to one of the most powerful and arguably underappreciated ways to overcome the threat of conscience to sovereignty.

A third article on Pierre Bayle and religious persecution, “‘Want of Zeal for It’: Pierre Bayle on Religious Radicalization,” was published by Religions in a special edition on Religion and Contemporary Political Theory and Practice. You can access the article here.

Abstract: This article argues that Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) is not merely a theorist of religious toleration but also a theorist of religious radicalization. By exploring how religious dissenters experienced religious conformity as a kind of mental and spiritual torture akin to conventional forms of corporeal punishment, I demonstrate that Bayle’s influential defense of toleration and liberty of conscience hinges on his account of the psychological mechanism of religious radicalization. Demands for religious conformity do not convince dissenters of their error but of their lack of zeal for their faith. Bayle’s plea for toleration, more broadly, urges us to reflect on the ways that we invite those who are different from us into dialogue or risk alienating them even further, an urgent concern today as extremist religious and nationalist views are on the rise across the globe.