Domesticating the Conscience

Abstract

Michael McKeon’s The Secret History of Domesticity offers a powerful theory for understanding the intensity of religious conflict during the 17th century and its role in advancing the central categories of liberal political thought. Through McKeon’s framework we can see the struggle for confessional homogeneity as a conflict over interpretations of the public and the role of the private with respect to its legitimacy, purpose and direction resulting from the devolution of absolutism. The perspective his theory illuminates also allows us to recognize the Anglican consensus as a domestication of radical challenges to the consolidating state on the basis of liberty of conscience.