 Rawls sees political philosophy as fulfilling at least four roles in a society’s public culture. The first role is practical: philosophy can propose grounds for reasoned agreement when sharp political divisions threaten to lead to violent conflict. Rawls cites Hobbes’s Leviathan as an attempt to solve the problem of order during the English civil war, Locke’s Letter on Toleration as responding to the Wars of Religion, as well as the philosophy that emerged from the debates over the US Constitution, and from debates over the extension of slavery before the American civil war.