A Critique Of Pure Tolerance

Beyond tolerance, by R.P. Wolff.--Tolerance and the scientific outlook, by B. Moore.--Repressive tolerance, by H. Marcuse.

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization? Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity.

In the globalized, postmodern world, the production of encounters and crashes between dissimilar cultures, ways of life, and systems of values has drastically increased in number. More and more frequently, they originate harsh conflicts, exhibiting the existence of alternative and apparently incompatible ways of living and thinking – culturally, religiously, economically and politically speaking. In this context, words as tolerance and intolerance have been put at the heart of the political debate. However, what is the real meaning of these political concepts? Why did they originate and how did the developed over time? Do they still represent a valid resource for comprehending our current societies and dealing with them? Through the different voices of several scholars in the humanities, this book traces the history of tolerance since the wars of religion to the contemporary age, combining the historical reconstruction with a theoretical and critical analysis of the idea and practice of tolerance in different epochs and places. The obstacle course depicted here reveals the constitutive fragility of this concept that, however, cannot be totally dismissed from our political vocabulary.