Toleration and The State of Nature

Abstract

Abstract The chapter reassesses the Lockean dimensions of James Fenimore Cooper’s fiction, arguing that Locke’s concern with toleration, not property, was the more important influence on Cooper’s last two Leatherstocking novels. By analyzing the state-of-nature-like settings of The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841), it examines how Cooper emphasizes the parallels between cultivating a responsiveness to nature’s sublimity and fostering an openness toward human difference in response to the moral and political divisiveness of the 1830s. In doing so, Cooper offers an important revision to Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime and how it bears on social life.