Martin Luther famously declared “Here I stand, I can do no other.” In this declaration, we see a pure kind of moral stance—one of immovable identity and purpose. While toleration also stands for something, the essence of its stance is of a different kind, that of interaction. Its value is grounded upon how it enables persons to maintain relationships in a world made up of many persons and groups all standing for something different, and often at odds with one another. In this essay, I shall focus on an aspect of toleration that has been submerged in the extensive discussions about its nature, grounds, and limits: that toleration must include an element of relationship, or a form of mutuality. The relational feature of toleration has not been ignored, but has been conceived in stereotypical ways. Interestingly, the view of the relationship in toleration has undergone a shift over the years. For the most part, and historically, this dimension is criticized as too minimal, as just a form of “putting up with” and condescension.1 Recently, toleration has come to be appropriated by those who seek to reconceptualize it as a version of multiculturalism, so that it comes closer to meaning full acceptance and embracing of difference.2 Toleration is a type of relationship but it is not simply either forbearance or openness. It uniquely attempts to balance both an attitude of separation/disapproval and an attitude of acceptance. How is this balancing possible?
In this chapter, I explore the element of mutuality as part of the core meaning of toleration. My argument is that for toleration to come about there must be an initial “will to relationship.”3 This will is defined as an initiating psychological-political stance, creating a condition of opportunity to build an on-going relationship. For the relationship to be one of toleration, this condition must be extended and sustained through institutions and political norms consciously projected to maintain the relationship that acknowledges the presence of conflict and disagreement. Specifically, for toleration to survive, the institutions and ethos of politics itself must be valued for more than strategic purposes. Persons desire to live together on some terms; their will to do so is realized in political rules and loyalty, which exemplify and protect their relationship to one another. In the next section, I give an argument about why we must take the element of relationship into account and the implications this has for studying toleration. In section two, I revisit the early modern period in order to highlight the extent to which a will to relationship was an element in the initial establishment of toleration and forced an ethical dimension to political settlement. Section three considers how three typical contemporary debates can be illuminated by and can help clarify the meaning of mutuality. In the last section, I conclude with a preliminary basis on which to limit differences—what substantive values underlie toleration?
The standard definition of toleration highlights two components as basic to its structure: (a) disapproval of or disagreement with practices, beliefs, or persons and (b) restraint of oneself from imposing one’s reaction.4 According to this conventional view, toleration is the positive act of not interfering with or coercing another despite one’s negative response. It is a unilateral act of one person toward another, an act that must be undertaken for the right reasons in order to be considered a value, virtue, or principle. To restrain oneself for purely self-interested purposes (e.g., economic reasons), or because one had no choice (e.g., one’s minority status) would not be considered toleration in a moral sense. This basic definition of toleration must be amended by adding a third component to its normative structure. One may disapprove and then restrain oneself but crucially (c) one remains in a relationship with the person or group with whom one is in conflict. We do not call an act toleration if disapproval and restraint are followed by a retraction of contact, or by ignoring or making the other invisible.5 The restraint is meaningful because the parties continue in the presence of one another in a nontrivial way, acknowledging a relationship of accommodation.
The literature on toleration is most often focused on the possibility and nature of the morality of constraint, and generally ignores this essential feature of the conditions for it—the commonality or mutuality of the ensuing relationship. This gap in the literature results from the conceptual residues of toleration’s original use in situations of asymmetrical power. Where a Catholic majority tolerates a Huguenot minority, the ensuing “relationship” may represent progress insofar as there is no longer active persecution, but given our principles of equality this may appear to be a severely unsatisfactory model for contemporary toleration. Two points need to be emphasized in this regard. In the historical section of this chapter, I stress that we can learn a great deal more about the conditions of toleration than the stereotypical picture presents. The virtue of restraint is a great one, but the innovation in the policy of toleration between radically unequal opponents is not reducible to “constraint.” The fact is that restraint is motivated because of a preexisting will to relationship which thereby sets the stage for institutions and norms of political mutuality. Second, today we do live in conditions of relative equality. The ideal of toleration does not become superfluous because of this fact; rather, different aspects of its normative force come to the foreground. The conventional liberal solution to conflict—public neutrality—is strained when demands for recognition and interaction ask for more than blindness to difference in the public sphere. Toleration as a form of mutuality is an attempt to address this impasse.
Therefore, we should replace the idea of toleration as a virtue of self-restraint undertaken for moral reasons with an idea of a specific type of political-social relation, the fundamental feature of which is the maintenance of relationship in the midst of the potential for conflict due to disagreement or difference. The ability to hold difference and commonality together simultaneously is a normal human capacity. All people (and the most traditional or dogmatic person must be able to do this) allow slippage or flexibility in applying the norms we carry about in us.6 But a description of tolerance in this elemental, cognitive sense should lead us to mark out what more is needed for an explicit value or principle of toleration. How are we to find moral terms in addition to cognitive and emotive means to facilitate toleration not within (even) a traditionalist world but between highly distinct world-views and systems of belief? I hope to answer that question here.
The use of the words “relationship” and “mutuality” in toleration can generate a great deal of confusion. First, we say in the simplest descriptive and morally neutral sense that toleration is a relationship of some type. For purposes of understanding the language of toleration in the contemporary world, this is a claim with some theoretical significance, and I examine toleration as a political-social relationship, not as an individual duty. Second, relationship or mutuality is part of toleration. In this second sense, it is a specific aspect of toleration that describes it as positively linking people together in spite of and because of their differences: there is a will to relationship, which is not yet fully morally specified. This will to relationship is instrumental or causally important in initiating toleration. Finally, mutuality is also a more fully ethically negotiated relationship and ought to be an objective of toleration. A pre-ethical will to maintain a relationship with persons whom we disagree with or disapprove of begins a search for the grounds of that relationship, and may eventually lead to a further aim to sustain a fair and on-going basis of membership in one society. Thus, the will to relationship is a psychological-political predisposition and must become a more explicit norm of mutuality realized in institutional purposes and conceptual innovation.
The importance of an independent role of mutuality is brought out by a reading of Thomas Nagel’s well-known article in which he attempts to work out how liberalism might “provide the devout with a reason for tolerance.”7 Nagel seeks to establish a point of view that the devout would be “compelled to” or “must” adopt, by the logic of seeking a legitimate ground to proceed in a context of deep disagreement. This “common ground”—a process of reasoning—is an “idea of something which is neither an appeal to my own beliefs nor an appeal to beliefs that we all share.”8 We take up a “higher-order framework of moral reasoning … which takes us outside ourselves to a standpoint that is independent of who we are.”9 But there is a basic ambiguity in the source of the compulsion to rise to this framework of reasoning. What would lead the devout—the deeply and wholeheartedly committed—to “look at certain … convictions from outside,”10 to see their truths as “beliefs,” one set among many others? Nagel suggests: “I believe that the demand for agreement and its priority in these cases over a direct appeal to the truth, must be grounded in … a kind of epistemological restraint: the distinction between what is needed to justify belief and what is needed to justify the employment of political power depends on a higher standard of objectivity.” And he elaborates: “We accept a kind of epistemological division between the private and the public domains: in certain contexts I am constrained to consider my beliefs merely as beliefs rather than as truths.”11
The obvious question arises here: why would that reasoning be a necessary logic for the devout, from within their point of view? It is a logic for the devout who, living within liberal democratic polities, seek terms of legitimacy on which to base public policies affecting themselves and other citizens. But what of those who would claim, as upholders first and foremost of religious truth: I would prefer and will work to live in a religious community that shares only my beliefs. My primary aims as a person are to realize those devotions to my religious ideals; I don’t seek to live in a diverse society based upon secular legitimacy. These devout do not look reasonable insofar as they don’t care about the terms of legitimacy grounding public laws. Nagel might reply that it doesn’t matter that these devout do not care about legitimate bases of coercion—they would be obligated by the fact that they live in a society that must find legitimate grounds for laws, grounds that do not coerce for the wrong types of reasons. But, if this is his reply, then he has failed to give the devout a reason for tolerance that would be compelling and not simply abstractly obligatory.
To focus on the intransigent devout does not mean that attempting to convince the deeply religious who do wish to live on legitimate terms is not a compelling aim. Nagel offers reasons for tolerance for this type of devout. This is noteworthy because it suggests a line of reasoning that might be more broadly appealing: the legitimacy of a liberal polity is not based upon the need to remake all citizens into individualists or liberal persons in a deep way.12 Even though deeply committed to religious truths, one could recognize the need to find a space of reasoning applicable to all persons, oneself included. But a distinction between the “reasonable” devout and the “unreasonable” devout brings out the step preceding efforts to construct legitimacy. One must desire to move to an “impartial” point of view. One is only compelled to see one’s truths as mere beliefs because legitimacy matters at least as much. The devout must care about building a common world with persons different from them.
Nagel’s concern with the devout brings up another puzzle in the study of toleration that leads to a focus on relational aspects. For much of its conceptual history, toleration has been equated with freedom of conscience, which came to mean “autonomy” in its modern variant. As previously noted, claims for equal respect also developed in conjunction with toleration. Enlightenment values that increase access to rights for disenfranchised groups are consistently linked to the call for toleration. The puzzle is: calls for toleration seem (historically) always to have followed on demands for freedom and equality, yet it is exactly the point that we cannot count on those who oppose the claims for freedom and equality to agree with the logical or moral necessity of such ideas. That is why there is conflict. The historical correlation of freedom and toleration is not matched by logical moral necessity. I suggest that we view the demands for freedom and equality in a different light. They were not originally conceived as reasonable arguments made to convince the other side (from this latter side they don’t appear “reasonable” at all—as Locke noted in A Letter Concerning Toleration—“every one is Orthodox to himself”);13 rather, they were and are demands by certain oppressed and suppressed groups in a society to become active participants in constructing the terms of relations in that society. Thus, demands for freedom and equality are demands to reconfigure social relations. Toleration has been consistently linked to these demands because its principle is that adjustment between different groups must be made and relationships maintained. In a context of hierarchy and asymmetry, people’s rejection of their restricted position means that toleration seeks to find the terms on which the demands of freedom can be acknowledged. In a context of legal equality, people’s demands for recognition of difference means that toleration seeks to find terms of mutuality that can accept claims of difference. In both cases, the claims made against the status quo are for the realization of a group’s or persons’ access to social meaning and well-being, which I discuss in section 4.
It is not absolutely necessary that one accept freedom/autonomy or equality as one’s supreme value in order to accept toleration. In general, and historically, this has tended to be the case: these have promoted toleration because they predispose a person to accept diversity first and foremost and not to insist on conformity. But one may come to toleration from another direction—from that of peaceful coexistence—and therefore accept diversity and claims for freedom and equality for the sake of a unified community.14 Thus, toleration can be arrived at from the direction of seeking diversity or from the direction of seeking coexistence, but in either case it serves as the capacity and will to relationship in the face of diversity. Hence it exemplifies a unique, modern, and sui generis value.
Before turning to political history, we ought to consider briefly the question of the source of the will to relationship itself. If the construction of this will does not rest upon moral reasoning, on what is it based? I have been speaking as if the will to relationship is an original moment of encounter but we might think of it more as a metaphorical situation in time. A sudden encounter between diverse groups because of conquest, for example, is by far the exceptional situation. Usually issues become politicized and groups or peoples come to see each other in political terms that need working out. When exactly a compulsion or motivation to find a common ground arises is an historical question for a particular regime of coexistence. Groups find themselves confronting one another due to various historical, cultural, economic, and military forces and developments, and needing to determine the political nature of the relationship that will obligate them to common laws and norms.
We actually begin with a compulsion then, often not well articulated, to find a ground to build or, more often, rebuild a joint world. The critical first step is the willingness of persons to go on together, putting themselves on a path of interaction. This raises the difficult (intractable?) question of how we know such a “will” exists. Suppose a minority group simply has no choice but to put up with the situation of coexistence when they would ideally wish to live a separate life. Or a majority group wishes the minority would disappear. Each side may be prevented for practical reasons from being able to pursue their ideal of separate ends. Does their failure to pursue separatism display a will to live together? It seems to me that the fact that there is usually a necessity or involuntary element to living with others does not undermine the description of toleration as inclusive of a will to live together. Our lives are not worthwhile only insofar as we choose the terms we live by, without the interference of heteronomous necessities. Indeed, we are constantly presented with many features of existence we would not have chosen, and yet we can affirm these and find a will to accept them. We might see worth as coming out of the capacity to recognize why we might want to will to live together in the context of difference when we cannot do anything else. Perhaps the question ought to be: on what terms can we create grounds in order to transform necessity into a will to affirm a common life?
This necessity leads people to search for or conceptualize reasons and values they can agree on to govern that world. Their search is the elaboration and thereby transformation of political thinking, to build mutually comprehensible terms. In this interpretation, toleration does not come about because people “resolve their differences” but because they come to rebalance those differences through seeing their commitments and beliefs as broader than they did at the beginning of the encounter. The role of politics is to find a means to acknowledge and incorporate claims, but its ethical role is to make the will to mutuality sustainable in the long run. To argue then that reasons of freedom and equality arise subsequent to a will to relationship is not to render such reasons superfluous. The will to relationship is only made good if grounds can subsequently be found for the terms of relations between people. A preliminary will to relationship is not equal to toleration and depends for its development and stability on the grounding that will guide resolution of conflicts, which inevitably persist in societies needing and aiming for toleration.15
Toleration depends upon an initial will to interaction in the face of differences. This will is certainly not enough to secure toleration and it can fail in two senses. First, we might say that all political relations throughout history have been based on a “will to interaction in the face of differences” and that this has led to domination by the powerful, not an acceptance of differences. Second, in confrontations between groups, the attempt to find grounds for continued interaction could fail because common grounds might not be possible to prevent groups rejecting a settlement. What is crucial therefore is to establish a will to relationship that will not lead to domination and that can be given longevity, in order to prevent groups from continually fragmenting and rejecting a common life. This is only possible through a reinvention of the public, political sphere. My aim in this section is to show how that might come about. Politics must be innovative and transformative, and not simply a calculation of static interest or balance of power if toleration is to be feasible.
We are not condemned to thinking about politics in purely strategic terms, as a mere mechanism to guarantee rights, if we consider the following logic. In every encounter between groups, there will be the more and less powerful. The impulse of the powerful is to dominate the less powerful, yet the latter have a power in that their differences cannot be eradicated and the powerful seek to continue in relationship with them.16 These two conditions force the parties to go up to a level of interaction that both can find comprehensible and sustainable. They must make it mutually comprehensible together even if this does not insure completely equal power. The political terms of the relationship represent their coming to terms. Thus politics here is transformative of both the identifications of the groups—they come to see who they are as tied to the political institutions they build—and of the public morality or ethics—the parties come to use a public set of terms or language enabling them to reason about what is common to them. Toleration isn’t possible without making politics transformative in both these senses.
For a relationship between diverse groups to become acceptable and stable, the parties are pushed to build a political realm to which they can all become loyal. The main story I want to present here is of the development of an independent political public sphere in early modern Europe, as a practical and also (gradually) morally justified construct enabling the stability and coherence of toleration. Politics as a normative force is key because we cannot expect groups to converge on toleration in the long run and across broad differences just by persons individually coming to accept reasons of freedom or equal rights. Group identity all too frequently trumps these individual values. Hence individuals must also see themselves as invested participants in a public political realm, in which the meaning of freedom and equality will be worked out. This is why the concept of identity is important: people must accept citizenship as part of who they are for toleration to be possible. Indeed, their particularist identities (religious, ethnic, racial, etc.) come to be part of the political identification that toleration requires.
The emergence of toleration after the Reformation is still a very rich source of knowledge for understanding the normative and practical features of change.17 In particular, it is worth briefly tracing aspects of the historical story to show how the ontological needs of relationship in a context of diversity gave politics a transformative ethical role for conflicting groups.
The usual answer to the question of the origins of toleration is sheer exhaustion due to incessant religious war.18 While this may seem obvious, we might remember that the Crusades brought religious conflict but not toleration. The fact of war alone cannot explain a fundamental transformation in ideas about the foundations of social order, which is indeed what the settlement of toleration required. The expediency solution continues, however, to inform much of political theory. In Rawls’ much-quoted observation: “the principle of toleration came about as a modus vivendi following the Reformation: at first reluctantly, but nevertheless as providing the only workable alternative to endless and destructive civil strife.”19
Perez Zagorin offers a corrective to this view of the strategic foundations of toleration, arguing that expediency in almost all cases failed to establish lasting regimes of tolerance. He writes that “without an underlying theoretical rationale that was both philosophical and religious … and without the gradual acceptance by political and intellectual elites and others of principles and values enabling them to subordinate and set aside religious difference and strive for concord through mutual understanding, religious toleration, and the freedom it implied could not have been attained.” He emphasizes the essentially principled, religious nature of the foundations of toleration: “In the battles over religious toleration that were so bitterly and widely waged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the idea of toleration was itself very largely inspired by religious values and was fundamentally religious in character” and furthermore for the proponents of “a policy of peace and tolerance toward religious differences, their supreme concern was the welfare of religion itself.”20
This sharp contrast, pervasive in the toleration literature, between principled, religious sources and a “pragmatic,” expedient sources of toleration misses a crucial point about toleration’s development, that it wove together both aspects of motivation.21 Consider Zagorin’s contention that values and principles (a critique of the notion of heresy is one important theoretical innovation he examines at length) “enable” people “to subordinate and set aside religious difference.” Certainly, had there been no language with which to critique persecuting policies of church and state, there would have been no ideological tools to conceive alternatives or by which to mobilize forces against the status quo. Nevertheless, it should be possible to give an explanation of this change that is more attuned to the conditions in which changes in belief become politically and sociologically viable and powerful. Ideas about freedom of religion were not unheard of before this time, hence the question arises: what was it about this particular set of circumstances that led to the proliferation of debate and the push to a new settlement about religion and the political realm?
The centrality of questions of identity and citizenship to conflicts at this time is clearer when we consider the conundrum raised by the disuniting of what had been one united normative community of moral-political order. How did one maintain one’s identity as a Christian and as a citizen in these circumstances? In 1560, Michel de L’Hôpital observed: “We … see that a Frenchman and an Englishman of the same religion are more friendly towards each other than two citizens of one town, but of different religions, so far does the relationship of religion surpass that of nationality.”22 To us, living in liberal democratic societies, nearly five hundred years later, the passion to defend to the death one’s particular religious beliefs and the hysterical fear of religious diversity are hard to fathom. It becomes more comprehensible when we realize the depth of the challenge. The dynamics making this a crucible of change included the fact that political-religious relations were premised on a principled intolerance, that is, the moral authority of the Church and thereby politics rested on an elaborate justification of persecution (begun by Augustine) of beliefs diverging from the Church. What was at stake in the conflicts was not only the functioning of a previously secured framework for identity.
The complex origins of toleration depended on endogenous changes in religious beliefs about conscience, heresy, and the community of believers on earth (along with other internal doctrines); exogenous changes in the accumulation of ideological and concrete power by secular rulers; and finally, changes in conception of the self and allegiance. The capacity of persons to come to identify with one another on political terms served as the linchpin between innovations in beliefs about toleration and the external forces that made adopting these beliefs feasible and attractive. Specifically, the emergence of the state, a public realm, and groups’ connection to it proved the crucial resolution. While the appeal of toleration became stronger with both religious and political changes, I focus on the latter, because ultimately, I believe the capacities of the political realm were the driving force, though not in simple strategic terms.
Toleration was initially a top-down initiative: political sovereigns attempted to impose order and peace within their realm by adopting policies of coexistence. However for the state to be able to implement toleration and hope to have it survive as public policy, elites and the people would need to believe the state could protect them. This was not just a question of coercive power but essentially one about faith in the state. The more competing groups took a risk and relinquished power to the state, the more it could protect the diverse groups within it. This iterated process (repeated efforts at coexistence collapsing back into violence and chaos) took decades to achieve a relatively stable regime of tolerance in France, England, and the Netherlands.
The belief that the duty of the magistrate is to enact the dictates of the Church’s orders called for a type of implementation of religion in the world. This command does not appear verbatim in the Old or New Testament but served complex political-religious (indeed social-cultural) purposes, one of which was to legitimize the normative authority of the secular ruler. Ironically, this belief also kept politics in a condition of dependency and derivative value. For toleration to come about, people could no longer expect the ruler to compel them and others to live in a uniform way.
Changes in religious ideas such as the deconstruction of the idea of heresy and the elaboration of a notion of individual conscience were certainly integral to dislodging this belief. But even these crucial conceptual developments would not have enabled a ground for a relationship of toleration to develop. No necessary path of action follows inevitably from a complex set of ideas contained in a body of religious beliefs. What may appear a foregone conclusion in hindsight is that particular elements of belief-systems make them susceptible to manipulation for the ambitions of rulers, or for the propagation of a system of power. We can see today the lengthy process of religious reinterpretation undertaken as a political-social-cultural phenomenon in the case of Islam and its articulation of authentic arguments for toleration. Part of this process will require more than hermeneutical retrieval or innovation and will depend on a revaluation of the political realm in Islamic societies. Once we focus on the fact that religious differences were not just ideas but also communities of believers, we see how the solution of toleration in the early modern period required that people and groups be able to rethink their loyalties. For those who had already rejected coercion for the sake of salvation and doctrinal unity (for reasons of its cruelty to the human body—e.g., Montaigne; or for reasons of peace—“irenicism”—e.g., Erasmus or Franck), the mental leap required to think of oneself as accepting this reorientation to the political sphere would not have been as difficult. But most people could not let go of the immediate connection between faith and the belief that this faith must be shared by all members of a community. The process of change was long in the making and required major identity re-orientation.23
For decades, an unmixable amalgam persisted—of traditional ideas about faith and implementing God’s will on earth, new ideas about faith and God’s relation to human life and the individual, and old ideas about the duties of the political magistrate, or of the relative value of the earthly realm. Not until new ideas about the nature and value of the political realm and its connection to human life could be formulated was there any chance for toleration’s becoming a stable idea. Perhaps we can say that a humanization of religion had to be matched by a corresponding elevation of politics.
In this process, the political identification of the people with the state or polity might appear initially to have been purely strategic and provisional: as long as the sovereign could protect them, the people would go along with him or her. But this purely strategic view inadequately grasps the nature of the relationship between the people and the conception of the political sovereign emerging during this period. To be moving or persuasive as a source of allegiance, sovereign rulers worked to reinforce the justice-providing features of the state. For example, Jean Bodin, as the theorist of the absolutist state, was also a firm supporter of toleration. He depicted the function and nature of the sovereign as a neutral and depersonalized power, not as a paternalistic oligarch. Hobbes, while he did not support freedom of worship, did support freedom of belief. His depiction of sovereign power can be interpreted as supporting the rule of law. Finally, Locke extended the concept of political power as the realm of secular law accountable to the people. These conceptualizations of political power and the public realm were constructed to create a political-social order that could appeal across deep differences of belief and moral commitment. Thus the aspirations contained in ideas of the “neutrality” or “impartiality” of the state should not be seen as a false universalism, but as built precisely to represent a concrete creation of a common world overarching deep differences. When religious believers relate to this state, in an ideal conception of this process of political identification, they do not approach the state solely as a provisional tool for achieving their own divisive purposes. If everyone were to conceive the state in such manipulative terms, the state could not actually achieve the goal of protection, but would continually be suspect and therefore guaranteed to fragment.
For the survival of a political unity in the face of conflicting groups, there must be a constitutive element of moral universalism in the essence of the state: people must be able to conceive part of who they are through participating in the “impartial” realm of the public sphere. This neutrality is not devoid of identity but constitutive of part of one’s identity—it creates political identification—as a person living in a common political world. Thus from its inception the ideal of the public sphere, or political realm protected by the state, embodied an attempt to create a unity out of diversity. The opening line of the Toleration Act of 1689 asserts: “Forasmuch as some ease to scrupulous consciences in the exercise of religion may be an effectual means to unite their Majesties Protestant subjects in interest and affection” and then continues by delineating the penalties lifted (along with other provisions as well as stipulations) for those Dissenting religious groups previously suppressed. The purpose of the act is explicitly stated as uniting citizens in interest and affection.24 It is quite natural to ridicule the rhetoric of this Act and others like it, exposing the underlying interests served, and the fact that parties were left unprotected by it. Nevertheless, the historical and ethical meaning of such legal documents is larger than the self-interest of the persons who framed it. We cannot reduce that meaning to the level of individual calculation because of the concrete consequences such proclamations of “unity” eventually enabled.
In the early modern period, basic norms of liberal politics began to be institutionalized by political leaders and activists. To emphasize, these norms did not develop out of altruism or dreams of universal justice. We cannot explain ethical public policy as a direct result of any group’s, writer’s, or actor’s direct moral intention but rather as the result of the imperatives of constructing a common existence that is stable and acceptable between persons divided by religion, culture, interests, and so forth. The normativity comes out of the collective necessity. Because diverse believers at this time (often bitterly) disagreed with one another, their capacity to move on together depended on growth in their political identifications, to include state institutions and more “impartial” political norms.
My brief look at the logic of the origins of toleration in post-Reformation Europe argued for the importance of an independent political realm as the solution to the problem of mutual impassability. We begin with the problem of newly politicized groups challenging a status quo and calling into question the will to relationship. Political rulers and theorists asserted the basis of continuing in a common life rather than secession. To achieve this persons and groups take up the perspective of a public realm.
Toleration establishes as an ideal the concept of an arena of accommodation between groups who had previously attempted forcible conversions or ejection of others. To be able to occupy this space of mutual existence, a majority of persons must be able to identify with this political sphere. The process of creating an allegiance to the political realm was the work of theorists such as Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, and others who did so in more indirect ways.25 The extent to which politics can become secure in part depends upon people’s willingness to transfer allegiance to it, to identify with it as a realm in which norms of non-particularist justice and of accountable government are in theory aspired to. These aspirations are not meaningless and morally hypocritical; they constitute a unifying process which enables the protection of the diverse groups within a political community.
The story of toleration’s beginnings as a conscious political idea shows how the demands of negotiating relationships in a context of politicized differences necessarily pulls all parties, the stronger and the weaker, to an acknowledgment of a form of mutuality, which had ethical consequences. I now shift to consider whether and how the role of mutuality assists us in addressing continuing contemporary conflicts. The issue of the imposition of religious uniformity may have been taken off the table but religion continues to be a divisive force in other ways. In addition, new issues and claims raise other divisions. Immigration, emigration, and population changes shift balances of interest and identity; growing awareness of social problems (e.g., environmental and economic) and cultural transformation (e.g., gay rights and growth of fundamentalist religions) also generate contention. In the face of these contentions, how does mutuality serve to guide how we ought to balance relations and demands between conflicting claims? In this section, I want to unpack more fully the nature of the ethical imperative that toleration brings in deciding conflicts.26 Moreover, in looking at some persistent problems, we get a better sense of what mutuality means in more concrete terms.
The fact of deep conflict not resolvable by strategic bargains is the context in which toleration becomes important. The ideal of toleration does not give us a blueprint or a decision-rule for deciding a particular case in accord with some metric. It does not for instance demand that in all cases of conflict the logic of equality or of autonomy ought to apply (as noted, the definitions of “equality” or “freedom” are themselves up for contention). But in deciding conflicts it does say: act so that you acknowledge the presumptive worthiness of your opponent’s position in the face of your own, and sustain the mutual benefit of your common lives. Or in other words: adopt public policy that most fully enables a common life cognizant of people’s pursuit of meaningful differences.
We need to distinguish here between two lines of addressing conflicts. One line deploys principles or decision-rules such as “maximize” equality, individual rights, or order/security; or tradeoff between order and freedom in the ratio of x; and other direct decision-rules. Toleration is not reducible to this direct decision-rule, which yields a specific tradeoff. It does not for example insist that individual rights must always be maximized, because this would not be a sustainable rule in a society in which communal goods (capacities to sustain minority group integrity) must also be protected. Rather, it directs us to choose a decision-rule so that two things are balanced: the capacity for diverse persons to lead meaningful lives (particularity is taken into account) and the value of the common political life is sustained (for all to agree, basic freedoms and rights are essential). Toleration here is a meta-level attitude one ought to have in deciding conflicts, not the metric that will decide between those in contention over specific policies; nevertheless, it is of intrinsic, not derivative, value because the guiding, overarching attitude it fosters is necessary for justice and social unity in a diverse society.
Given the redefinition of the logical structure of toleration with which I began this paper, we can now see its characteristic ethical core. It explicitly supports the capacity of persons to adopt a complex moral attitude: stand for principles, respect others who do not share those same principles, and sustain a common life. While persons have in effect done this implicitly and on various scales since moral consciousness began,27 the unique quality of toleration is its direct justification of this capacity for sustaining a complex social morality. This attitude does not say: accept all differences regardless of their consequences. Rather it says: make policy decisions to resolve conflicts so that the reasoning and results sustain the mutual benefit of your common but diverse lives. The fact is that in many conflicts public policy must be made in which some will win and some lose. That this social fact exists does not mean that toleration does not. It may help to indicate a legal analogy here: the institution of the courts themselves or the idea of “due process” stand for the meta-level attitude of willingness and need to sustain a common life, in the face of the fact that there will be conflicts which will sometimes lead to what appear to be zero-sum outcomes.
I have called the explicit commonality-supporting feature of toleration “mutuality” as distinct from the initiating will to relation. Mutuality is the norm-guided disposition that others who disagree or maintain different practices have a presumptive claim to their differences, and to being our interlocutors in the common political project. Ideally, all groups in society accept this about one another and are aware of these interdependent presumptive claims. For toleration to be a long-term guiding feature of a just society, it must be supported by mutuality as an end, enabling continuous adjustment and negotiation without expecting a conflict-free consensus. These norms are embodied in society in an ethos that values engagement with one’s opponents, the role of government and the moral and constitutive worth of the public sphere precisely because it mediates contention. Persons in a diverse society value politics because of their recognition of the structure of human life in the contemporary world. It is diverse and conflict-ridden (even conflict-producing). And, therefore, no one’s particular objectives can be conceived as if they existed in isolation from another’s, and thus a liberal, tolerant regime is not one in which each separate group will be able to live life as if the presence of different others were not an enduring reality. This goes beyond the classical view of a liberal society in stressing that members cannot only care about the terms separating and keeping them safe from one another, but must as strongly and directly care about what binds them together. In this way, mutuality adds to what people care about: they care about their particular cultures and beliefs and also about what enables them to live peacefully and justly with those who don’t share these. Persons, individually and as members of groups, accept this about their society and acknowledge the importance of their interdependency. Such a perspective forces individualists on one side and communalists on the other to modify exclusionary, categorical objectives.
In order to flesh out in a cursory, preliminary way what mutuality amounts to concretely, I take up three perspectives from which the core problem of toleration is attacked. All three lines of criticizing toleration do so from the same objection: toleration purports to allow differences to coexist but this core objective is bound to fail. These important challenges are: incompossibility; hegemony and cultural loss; and illiberal minorities.
Incompossibility: One view of liberal toleration holds as its objective the coexistence of radically diverse beliefs and practices. Jeremy Waldron argues that such a place—the condition of “compossibility” as he terms it—cannot exist. He concludes that liberals must accept having reached an impasse: “It seems more honest to admit defeat in the long search for a solution to the algebra of compossibility.”28 Waldron has constructed a powerful case for liberal society’s failure to accommodate, without bias, all (reasonable) alternative aims. Given this problem, one would think a claim of mutuality to be a charade (cynical or naïve). In order to show how conceptualizing toleration as a form of mutuality can help us think through the problem Waldron confronts us with, I want briefly to consider two examples he gives. In one situation, Waldron juxtaposes the entrepreneurial pornographer (P) and the devout Muslim (Q) and observes:
In the example of the pornographer and the Muslim, we concluded that P and Q cannot live together in a liberal arrangement any more than our imagined slave-hunter and his victims could live together. But even if the incompatibility between P and Q is like the incompatibility between the slave-hunter and his victim, it is not clear who, in the case of P and Q, is like the slave-hunter and who is like the victim. Is P like the slave-hunter because he insists on flaunting his pornographic wares in a way that makes Muslim life impossible for Q? Or is P like the victim because his exhibitionism is crowded out by Q’s imperious insistence on a certain sort of pious environment? If a liberal society cannot accommodate P and Q together, then which of them should it throw out? P or Q or both? And what is the principle on which that is to be decided?29
Waldron compares this situation to that of the impasse reached between Salman Rushdie and the devout Muslims insulted and disturbed by his publication of The Satanic Versus. These examples highlight the problem that no condition exists in which neither party will have to bear being imposed upon, or to have their chosen ends denied. Often sustaining both sets of chosen ends will be impossible in a common world.
Waldron throws a spotlight on the problem intrinsic to liberal toleration: for it to offer a true approach to real differences it must be able to acknowledge and somehow accommodate nonliberal communities and beliefs. But it is impossible that the differences in a society of toleration will remain wholly “protected” in the sense of unconstrained or unrestricted through their having to come into contact with others very unlike them. The objective of toleration as mutuality, however, does not pretend to achieve a “sort of Kantian algebraic liberalism.”30 It directs us toward establishing lines of communication rather than toward securing a space of coexistence that protects each from impingement by others. All societies as systems of interaction and imposition require rules of interaction, and as I have stressed toleration must take the nature of interaction, not simply the possibility of coexistence on parallel tracks, into account. What will the terms of that interaction be? What principles might guide our judgment about when one party rather than the other ought to bear the brunt of hard interactions? What can be said to the constrained party that might justify their constriction in any particular conflict?
While the case of P and Q and the Rushdie case are similar in their demonstration of the impossibility of achieving an uncoerced coexistence of ends, they are not similar in how we argue about where the burden of impingement ought to fall. I would suggest that those “proponents of communal or militantly sensitive religions”31 must always be taken into account: on the one hand, not forced to become liberals, nor on the other, permitted a veto over the direction of public policy. The fact is, if a society is to be defined in part by its capacity for toleration, then at its foundation is a predisposition toward allowance of a broad range of human existence and meaning. This foundation is antithetical, therefore, to those persons who seek to live in a condition of communal and religious uniformity. Toleration cannot characterize their world. Nevertheless, toleration would not exist if it were not sensitive to persons who are “sensitive.” It is not present in a purely procedural, callous world of indifference.
In the examples given, we can justify denying protection to the pornographer’s ends and justify Rushdie’s right to publish. A perhaps too-easy retort to the pornographer is that his desires are of an intentionally offense-producing nature. He desires to impose his taste for pornography on “unwilling passers-by”: he wants more than just to enjoy pornography in the privacy of his own home, or even to sell it in brown wrappers on the street. If we care about the nature of our intersubjective existence, then it would seem to be relevant whether one’s aims rest upon directly causing offense to others. We might say that schadenfreudian aims are not equally worthy of protection, as non-intentionally offensive objectives might be. The pornographer would defend his right to offend others as a right to freedom of expression. But we can object that graphic depictions of sex in the public sphere are a confrontation, an attempt to stop communication rather than maintain it. Interaction is halted: the pornographer’s act is a one-time or iterated series of shocks. His is a desire to impinge on others for narcissistic gratification without having to filter this through any norms of artistic expression.
On the other hand, while it is not integral to Q’s aim to cause offense to others, the devout Muslim’s desire not to be bombarded with pornographic images on the street might be seen as just as imperialistic as the pornographer’s. Where will this desire not to be imposed upon stop? Does acknowledging its power here commit us to its power in the Rushdie case? Salman Rushie is not like the pornographer insofar as Rushdie’s aims were not essentially meaningful because they brought pain to Muslims, even though the publication of The Satanic Versus certainly had the effect of causing great alarm and shock. For Rushdie, the right to publish what others consider blasphemy is integral to his artistic freedom. The long history of artistic expression, which enables artists to push boundaries beyond the confines of conventional society, is a valuable heritage with political consequences that must be protected in a liberal, tolerant society. What goes on under the aegis of artistic expression will often be offensive to those who reject such experimentation with taste, form, and ideas. Nevertheless, the sensitivity of a community cannot justify the repression of exploration in this realm of human experience. We might argue that the discipline of attempting to present expression in forms of “art” justifies the artist’s experimentation. These bounds allow an artist to transgress the tastes of the sensitive persons in the larger society. Clearly, this dichotomy between a purely offensive act and an artistic act that offends deserves much more discussion, which I cannot provide here. What the conception of toleration in terms of mutuality enables us to focus on in these difficult tradeoffs is the way in which the burden of impingement can be justified between those in conflict. In the Rushdie case, the conditions for interaction are maintained when we locate artistic freedom within a protected domain, even as the content is disturbing.
Thus, denying the pornographer and justifying Rushie both result from the need to protect the broad grounds for communication and interaction that make up the background of toleration. These grounds are protected by a commitment to the exploration of language, communication, and ideas generally. This commitment is not reducible to a Millian marketplace of ideas, because not all ideas contribute to the practices of language development. But the domain of artistic experimentation can be conceived as a hard-won political innovation, one contributing to the good of a free and tolerant society.
Hegemony and cultural loss: One of the more persistent attacks on the liberal theory of toleration is that it is itself a hegemonic discourse,32 which does not resolve but hides (indeed reinforces) power. This is simply the incompossibilty thesis presented with an indictment of the liberal structure. Stanley Fish gained notoriety in arguing that all acts in the public sphere are inevitably acts of domination: to label some beliefs and practices as “intolerant” is itself an arbitrary imposition of power perpetrated by those who happen to be in the majority and get to decide the boundaries of the intolerable for the time being.33 Because there can be no impartial, absolute standard of acceptability (this we know because of the very need to have toleration), we cannot impose a line between the tolerable and the intolerable that will not have bias built into it. The problem with this line of attack is that to claim that the meaning of all acts in the public sphere can (and therefore should) be reduced to a story about domination makes ethical discourse and intention an absurd undertaking. It is logically and indeed morally wrong to assert that because there is no absolute standard, every attempt to draw a line between the tolerant and intolerant is equally biased, as I argued in discussing incompossibility.
As a standpoint from which to address the problem of cultural loss, however, it must be taken seriously. A major problem in diverse, pluralist societies is the degree to which some groups’ practices and beliefs are undermined by the larger, more powerful culture. This issue (along with that of illiberal minorities) has generated a large literature on group rights, which I shall not address here. But the alternatives may to some degree be put succinctly. Defending a version of cultural rights, Charles Taylor has argued that the state ought to positively protect the survival of threatened groups and culture from absorption and dissolution into the larger culture, which inevitably happens when “neutrality” prevails in the application of rights. The curious feature of his argument is his failure to justify singling out as the subject of protection a culture as distinct from a people holding a culture. He writes:
It is not just a matter of having the French language available for those who might choose it. … [I]t also involves making sure that there is a community of people here in the future that will want to avail itself of the opportunity to use the French language. Policies aimed at survival actively seek to create members of the community, for instance, in their assuring that future generations continue to identify as French-speakers.34
But generalizing such a principle raises many difficulties. Which cultures are worth preserving via policies to insure the existence a community of people who will want to carry this culture forward into the future? In this view, people become carriers of culture, rather than culture being worthwhile because it remains a vibrant tool sustaining people who live in a world they want to carry on. Jürgen Habermas makes the right argument, I believe, against this line when he claims that “the protection of forms of life and traditions in which identities are formed is supposed to serve the recognition of their members; it does not represent a kind of preservation of species by administrative means.”35
On the other hand, writers such as Brian Barry opt for what he calls the rule-and-exemption approach. This is a pragmatic, not a principled political recourse, he insists, asking which legal mechanisms for accommodating and protecting various salient or vulnerable groups within liberal societies should be pursued. He modifies a purist stance of identity-blind liberal justice in order to account for the differential effects of laws on minorities, which can have an eroding effect on the capacity of a people to engage in their distinctive practices. A rule-and-exemption approach “avoids the invidiousness of having different rules for different people in the same society.”36
In contrast to Barry, who sets the bar high for group exemption, I have stressed that toleration is predisposed to acknowledge the claims of distinctive groups for protection of practices to which they are deeply committed. This version of toleration cannot be reduced to a carte blanche for group rights. It begins with the aim of balancing sensitivity to diversity with an aim to mutuality. But it does not see mutuality as guaranteed only through difference-blind neutrality. Mutuality as the acceptance of difference within the rubric of relationship must protect those persons’ ability to maintain constitutive practices. In some situations, governmental concessions may be required because of the nature of the threats to the groups (Sikhs being prevented from wearing turbans on motorcycles; the Amish being allowed to take their children out of public schools before the age of 16). In others, the cultural practices will not be justified in seeking exemptions and persons will have to modify their ways of practicing or their beliefs (female genital cutting is a famous example). One might argue that this is a recipe for fragmentation rather than mutuality,37 but that does not have to be the case.
First, the background condition is always present: objectives cannot be justified in isolation from others. Because we are talking about a society in which there will necessarily be at least public interaction, there can be no claim to isolation from the effects of natural influence and transformation. Protection of groups does not apply to the natural movement of cultural change but rather to the effects of legal restrictions on constituted groups, that is, to the effects produced on particular persons who may be prevented from being able to be who they are because of neutral legal application. Thus, protections apply when practices are eroded owing to legal neutrality rather than simply to cultural shifts, when these practices are constitutive of oneself, and when these constitutive practices are not objectionable according to certain standards, a point I will discuss shortly.
These restrictions may not seem to be enough in the minds of some critics of group exemptions. There will be cries of reverse discrimination that may lead to an unraveling of public engagement by those not given group rights. Instead of mutuality we have particularism spreading on all sides. But this political psychology is not inevitable if a commitment on all sides to political engagement is secured. It can be argued that in being granted distinctive rights, those receiving recognition will find themselves more invested in (rather than resentful and withdrawn from) the polity that has carved out a space for them to continue to uphold important practices and beliefs. In order to address the legitimate demand that the state play a role in protecting groups from dissolution by an overpowering majority without this leading to public policy artificially propping up group preservation, we might make a distinction between what could be called activist identity claims and preservationist identity claims. An active orientation to their own members and an engagement with the public political realm would be important as preconditions for protection. We can directly make room for group differences (wearing religious dress or articles, acknowledging gay rights) because and insofar as in doing so we maintain a vital and engaged public sphere. Thus, there is room for protection of groups from dissolution in this view of toleration, but the nature of the threats to the group’s survival, the vitality of the group, and the engagement in a public political realm are important considerations.
Public debate must pose the question: can it be justified to require of some people that they lose the legal and social ability to maintain constitutive practices? Can those who lose nothing face those who lose much of their distinctive nature and claim that this is fair? Ultimately, the principle governing when or when not to recognize a group’s distinctive demands must depend on a balance between considerations of political vitality and ethical sustainability. Most important practices of particular believers or cultural groups are not unconscionable (and hence are ethically sustainable) to those with whom they come in contact, even if they are foreign or different. If these beliefs and practices are indeed central to the identity of a group and the application of laws will harm them, then they ought to be allowed. But this will also require reciprocal acknowledgment by the exemption-receiving group to maintain and carry forward their commitment to the vitality of the political realm. Recognition of diverse core beliefs and practices should contribute to the building up of a store of investment in the public good, and will do so as long as these are important core beliefs and as long as those not receiving exemptions recognize the fairness of the policies. Frivolous or purposely divisive identity claims are not a basis for receiving recognition given that such expenditure of public policy detracts from the purpose of the political realm as sustaining mutuality.
Illiberal minorities: Issues raised by the existence of illiberal minorities in a liberal society present in a stark way some of the most important problems facing toleration. The problems they are usually thought to pose are either that such groups demand the right to maintain practices which are antithetical to freedom and equality: how could toleration concede this without transgressing its core values? Or on the other hand, they force toleration to reveal its hidden biases—toleration is displayed to be incapable of neutrality toward such groups and must impose limitations. In the next section, I discuss principles according to which the line between acceptable and unacceptable differences might be justified. Here, I want to focus on alternative approaches to managing relations with illiberal minorities. In some sense, these are the true test case of the logic of toleration as a capacity to maintain relationships of moral significance among persons and groups who are radically different.
Two well-known, contrasting defenses of toleration have been offered by Will Kymlicka and Chandran Kukathas in a lengthy and rich debate that I shall not rehearse. But a couple of observations are in order. Kymlicka insists on the imposition of liberal norms to members of minority groups: “a liberal view requires freedom within the minority group.”38 As he writes, “Minority rights will not justify … ‘internal restrictions’—that is, the demand by a minority culture to restrict the basic civil or political liberties of its own members.”39 The reason for the guarantee of civil and political liberties, he states, is the promotion of individual freedom and personal autonomy. One problem with this argument is that civil and political liberties, while an indispensable structural condition, do not necessarily insure Millian autonomy of the type that enables one to “revise one’s plan of life.” Certainly, the capacity for individual choice is not guaranteed by most child-rearing practices or most norms of marital relations in the larger, majority “free” culture of individualism, which is accompanied by a highly conformist and consumerist American culture. We may grant the need for civil and political liberties without grounding it in the cause of autonomy. An even more obvious problem with this approach is that to insist on freedom within minority groups is to transform them from being illiberal into liberal groups, and the problem of tolerating them disappears. Kymlicka’s aim is to defend the principle of liberal tolerance (as opposed to nonliberal tolerance as exemplified in the Ottoman millet system)40 which integrates nonliberal groups more fully into the norms of a liberal society by making sure that an individual is “free to assess and potentially revise their existing ends.”41 Yet, such groups very often reject this attempt to integrate them into the broader political and social community.
In contrast, Chandran Kukathas makes a virtue out of separatism, beginning with his argument that standard liberal tolerance “does not give any independent weight to toleration at all. This is so because all dealings with illiberal communities are conducted on the basis of settled principles of liberal justice.”42 Kukathas believes another version of toleration could in principle prevent this distortion or constriction of illiberal minority groups (or points of view). Cultural toleration means that we must allow the development of any and all distinctive groups that do not “directly harm the interests of the wider community.” Kukathas takes as his starting point the radical incommensurability of cultural differences. Toleration must permit these to flourish—no “we” can judge them to be unacceptable for inclusion in “our” society, because if we take toleration as the core of liberalism, we begin with radical difference and must protect it. The resulting “wider community” is really a loose federation of locally settled groups, and the state merely serves to protect order. Kukathas wants to justify the independent value of toleration in this view by arguing that it enables “free discussion and criticism of all standards and judgments”43—a Kant-inspired idea of free public reason. But Kukathas’s solution to the question of illiberal groups is not satisfactory either. In coming to this point, he has committed the same evasion as the autonomy-based liberals he criticizes. He writes: “In the world of human settlements, relations between liberal majorities and illiberal minorities amount to a dispute about the nature of the good life to the extent that none is prepared to forsake its own ways and embrace one of the alternatives. For as long as toleration prevails, and no one tries to compel or manipulate the other to live differently, reason also prevails.”44 The crucial clause is: “no one tries to compel or manipulate the other to live differently,” which seems a major hurdle to have scaled! Given the interaction over the nature of the public good, not to mention the intolerance of the contemporary world, it is hard to imagine this being more than a utopian ideal of libertarian localism. How could a world of separate peoples manage the claims for authority that inevitably arise? The problem is not just a matter of transitioning from a world in which diverse groups are now interconnected and often in conflict to a world in which each group is partitioned into a separate space and relations have become purely reasonable or disinterested.
Kukathas’ implicit view of the nature of culture and of group integrity is misconceived. Intersubjective appraisal and judgment are integral to cultural distinctions, to the basic premises constructing a “people” or group in the first place. A majority culture necessarily “goes inside” a minority to judge the sustainability of the goals of the minority. And the minority is itself—in its very being—a judgment of having chosen an alternative to the majority (at least of the specific beliefs or practices which constitute the majority/minority split). This process of intersubjective, mutual judging does not simply exist at the level of ideas to be debated but at the level of beliefs/practices to be sustained within the boundaries of common life. That is, one would have to hold that it is not unbearable to one’s sense of self to live a life cognizant of, and in the same ethical and political universe as someone of a very different way of being. A principle of toleration cannot be founded upon a view of human judgment and value as mutually disinterested or autarkic.
Brian Barry rejects this entire dichotomy of approaches to illiberal groups, arguing instead that liberal theory defends the right to association, which would include a right to associate with groups whose (illiberal) norms we would not want the state to enforce. There is no need to dwell on respecting diversity on the one hand, or protecting autonomy on the other, because the principle is purely about rights to association and exit.45 Is this enough for a theory of toleration? Specifying decision-rules about the costs of association and exit yields a particular metric of win/lose. But as I have emphasized toleration must attend to the attitudinal level of commitment to forming and abiding by decision-rules that leave some worse and some better off. If we care about the degree of alienation and separatism of illiberal groups in a society, then just specifying rights of association as bulwarks against the state is not enough.
The problem that illiberal minorities pose is not only that they support values contrary to core commitments of freedom and equality for all persons. Indeed, is that really the main issue? The Catholic Church is based upon hierarchical and gender-biased norms, and there are real costs for those who wish to rescind their membership. But this case is illustrative of the other main issue that illiberal groups pose, which is their insularity from engagement with the majority political and social culture. The Catholic Church does not sequester itself, hence it is not seen as an “illiberal group” even though norms internal to it run contrary to equality for women and complete freedom of choice. In contrast, many of the illiberal groups that serve as examples—Pueblo Indians, the Amish, the Hutterite Church, etc.—seek to maintain a distant, unintegrated relationship with the larger society. Illiberal minorities challenge toleration not simply because they are so different from those usually welcomed by regimes of equal freedom but, importantly, because they seek to remove themselves from practices of a common life. Political engagement is precisely what they do not seek; rather they desire to be allowed a separate space from the majority culture and society. So the demand for toleration in cases of majority versus illiberal minority appears to be a one-way street. This is a structural and an attitudinal situation that must be changed if toleration is to mean anything. How to inject the element of mutuality into the imbalance between the majority and minority? What kinds of arguments can be made to bring these reclusive groups into a sufficiently engaged stance? The objective here is not forced incorporation into the larger society.
We might make the following argument: allow illiberal groups to practice nonegalitarian, restrictive practices within the domain of their membership, but insist on the capacity of persons to enter or exit without prohibitive costs. A person may choose to become a member of a group in which choices are limited and there may be little equality between persons. A person may have spiritual reasons to find this structure of existence attractive and meaningful. The limitation on such groups, however, is that they must secure their membership through the meaningfulness of their practices and ideals and not through coercive techniques in which individuals are forced to enter or kept within the group. The importance of the rules of entrance/exit, therefore, is not simply that they provide freedom of association for individuals, but that these rules are a tangible link between the minority and majority society to prevent minorities from becoming isolated islands. We must guarantee civil and political liberties to enter and exit the group, while we cannot insist on equality and free choice within the group. They serve as a bridge, channel, or corridor to maintain ties and to insure that the basis of membership is meaning and preference rather than fear and coercion.
The solution to the problem of illiberal minorities is not to begin with radical difference and construct public policy to maintain it as an end of political life, as Kukathas argues. Rather, the limits of sustainability of illiberal minorities must be specified through values that are rooted in thinking about why we seek to sustain (and not suppress) such differences in the first place: life, bodily integrity, and protection of meaning. When and if the practices of minority groups trespass these, the state should be called on to intervene. But in order to prevent this from verging in that direction, we ought to experiment with languages and processes of mutuality.
I have so far focused on toleration as an ideal about relationship that becomes an issue in a context of conflict and disagreement. In this context, it is the disposition to allow differences in order to end violence or coercion, to overcome the insuperability of conflict and to establish and continue a mutually acceptable basis of relationship. I examined this aspect of toleration through its initiating role and in its sustaining role as relations continue to develop and generate new conflicts. My purpose has been to make the relational aspect of toleration clearer, in both its causal and normative functions. But this refocusing of the meaning of toleration has left a crucial question unaddressed. Given that it is impossible to allow all differences, how are the boundaries of the acceptable and unacceptable drawn? A regime that purports to uphold toleration cannot build engaged political relations with persons who practice slave-holding or human sacrifice. But these are not hard cases any longer. What should the argument be against those who perform female genital cutting as a rite of passage? Or what does toleration as mutuality determine about hate speech and wearing the veil in public schools in France? The maintenance of relationship assumes some measure of substantive value, a certain threshold of conceivable ends that determines the range of differences a society can sustain. Toleration begins by taking relationality as a starting point: one must accept the moral immediacy of relationships. One cannot just pronounce in the face of opposition: “this is the truth and I am utterly indifferent to what you believe.” One is not just a place-holder for a set of beliefs or cultural practices, rather one is a person always in a context of other persons.
So much may be granted and yet, why would this not simply mean that one must therefore make every effort, for the sake of other souls or the sake of the perpetuation of the right practices and beliefs, to convince others of the truth, and to win them to one’s side? Relationality may lead to an imperative to convert. We must therefore add to this starting point an acceptance of plurality as part of human existence. The world is made up of ineradicable differences and the pragmatic fact is that this is inescapable. Moral arguments claiming that “harm” is done when a group is “forced” to accept a pluralist society around it are specious. The ever-present reality of differences would require that the imposition of uniformity be an unceasing production of pain, and a human point of view in which relationality plays a recognized part would deny the impossible objective of the conversion of all others. In addition, differences of ethnicity, race, and language—often a focus of calls for toleration—always remain as sources of ever-present plurality.
How do these abstract starting points help determine acceptable differences and those we can justifiably reject? One simple principle might be: reject those differences that inherently reject relationality and plurality (don’t tolerate the intolerant). But this is not sufficient, because there are occasions in which the intolerant will be allowed and cases in which discrimination has to be made, and as we’ve acknowledged a blanket call for pluralism will not work.
We—by this I mean myself and those engaged in this effort, as persons attempting now to defend toleration—want to begin with a language (which may not yet be a set of worked out substantive principles) that has as broad an appeal as possible in the contemporary world, not to set aside concrete ethics in the cause of neutrality. I am not presupposing the principles of toleration as mutuality but arguing for their good, on the assumption that they are human values that persons of all cultures could find meaningful and within which cultural diversity could still be protected. (This disposition is itself not devoid of “bias”: some persons or groups may not seek to find a basis for what is ethically shared.) If we look at ethical beliefs across the world, we can find some grounds for a human point of view. Public policy should aim at human well-being, which would be realized by protecting physical and psychological integrity. If a primary aim of politics is to make possible the well-being of persons (even those who emphasize order do so ultimately for the purpose of flourishing life, as Hobbes pointed out), how should we define the criteria of such well-being? The main components would include: that persons not suffer pain and constriction from malevolent or systematic human sources, which could be made otherwise; that persons develop to have a capacity to experience meaning and pleasure in existence and in others; finally, that the sources of meaning and pleasure are not in others’ harm or misfortune.
To make use of these basic assumptions, I suggest an idea of physical and psychological integrity. Toleration as mutuality uses a standard to judge where the boundaries of a common life are found. The limits reject practices that prevent physical and psychological integrity. The concept of integrity invokes a state of wholeness and soundness of body, mind, and emotion. Such a notion, as descriptive of an ontological fact is certainly controversial and challenged by psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers, but I believe it provides an important term for a political language of the person, in that it protects the sanctity of human life. Toleration’s aim cannot be to guarantee integrity through proactive means, but it ought to preclude actions that one expects will lead to violations of it. Acknowledging the integrity of persons is the only basis for maintaining an ethical relationship with them, and I believe it has an advantage over the idea of the “individual” in that it protects persons as creatures who live sentient and meaningful lives without presuming meaning to be individualized.
Physical integrity is easier to define—systematic norms and acts of bodily violence and coercion are unacceptable.46 Psychological integrity is much more difficult to specify and must be determined according to prevailing standards of what it means to be a person, with a self and a character, who can think and participate in a cogent, responsible way in the workings of social, cultural, and political life. Protection of integrity precludes systemic denigration of the person, and it precludes denying persons access to prevailing sources of emotional and cognitive fulfillment. The standard of integrity is to some extent relative to a society and the expectations of its citizens, and conflicts derive from this fact.
The logic of relationship and plurality leading to a notion of integrity might run like this: all encounters are occasions of moral immediacy. The basis for interaction must be to recognize the integrity (physical and psychological) of other persons. Toleration prevents or rejects practices that abuse this. The idea of integrity seems naturally linked to relationality in that it enables us to conceive of persons as separate and yet also inherently connected to others through intersubjective norms of action and value.
Does the principle of preventing harm to physical and psychological integrity enable us to draw clear distinctions? Obviously, much more would need to be said about its meaning. It might be helpful to consider as an example the clash between fundamentalist Christians defending the integrity of marriage and gays seeking the right to marry. Here one side seeks to gain rights that others already have, while the other seeks to preserve a view of the sanctity of marriage that it genuinely believes to be moral and based upon God’s law. If toleration is about protecting the integrity of the person, and instrumental to that integrity is access to important sources of economic, political, social, and cultural well-being, then society must give homosexuals access to marriage rights. Preventing access to this form of social recognition of the relationship of marriage insures that those gays who would choose it suffer concretely in terms of not being able to realize an integral psychological, social, and indeed physiological value (given the connection between the body and marriage). Fundamentalists may claim that they suffer as well from mental and spiritual discomfort by having to live in a society that enables this transgression of the sacred relationship of marriage. But their “harm” is not equivalent to that of disenfranchised gays because their own bodies and minds are not forced to be incomplete. Fundamentalists lose out here because their particular values are denied realization as the common good, yet toleration asks that even if they consider homosexuality to be antithetical to their deep, religious sense of self, they must recognize that preventing access to it for millions of gays greatly harms the well-being of their fellow citizens.
In order to continue to live with this other group who want to participate in marriage, the substantive and particular reasons for disagreeing with toleration here are not sufficient grounds for precluding the availability of this important social practice. This reasoning, of course, will not convince those who want to pass the Marriage Protection Amendment to the Constitution, thus, deploying arguments for toleration here based on mutuality and personal integrity will not be a silver bullet. Yet the virtue of the ideal cannot rest on its capacity to accomplish the impossible sleight of hand where both sides win out and determine the common good in accord with their particular view. What it does is to pose the problem in terms of the relationship between both sides: the objective of public policy must be what is most conducive to a common existence in which persons who disagree can find a standpoint of mutual justice. Therefore, both must acknowledge a commitment to not prevent access to the most important sources of meaning and value in a society, that is, a commitment to protect all citizens’ integrity. Importantly, the point of mutuality is to continue to build a language, terms of communication about such issues. Once discussion ceases, there are no avenues to prevent hardening of the sides.
In this situation, the debate is precisely over the very parameters of social and moral norms and the kind of society that people want to live in. If the norms overridden are of such constitutive importance, the groups losing the capacity to define the common good may believe their own integrity to be severely compromised, and they may seek to withdraw from active participation in collective life and isolate themselves, given that secession is not usually feasible. This is always a possibility and it points again to the importance of politics. In the last analysis, we come down to the question of why would those who believe fundamentally different things desire to live in a society together? Why would they accept that political system as legitimate and trust it to protect the value of all life, if that system protected values with which they fundamentally disagreed?
The greatest security we have that people will be drawn to policies and acts protecting openness and respect for others in their differences is through simultaneously reinforcing the distinctive values of a political sphere. These values include the search for justice (through ideas of equality and fairness) and engagement through communication, argumentation, and negotiation of conflict. The political sphere must be valued in its own right precisely and insofar as it is the only realm in which conflict and difference can be acknowledged and overcome, not to reach a consensus, but as a continuing constitutive activity of moral existence. The great benefits and virtues of a common history, contemporary life, and future have to be a focus of politics.
The coercive strength of the state is not enough to ensure allegiance; its moral aspirations have to be genuinely acknowledged and pursued. This active normative side of the state is not only institutionalized through a rule of law, and embedded in civil society, but also realized through a public sphere in which the presence of different groups is acknowledged in full awareness as a condition of interaction.47 Fragmentation and alienation can be guarded against if the political realm remains an innovative and transformative area of interaction. Groups cannot be written off. Principles guiding this sphere must be first, that no one can explicitly and by right control public culture and public norms. Arguments that justify intentional control of collective norms through legal action are to be rejected. Secondly, following this will no doubt require some element of substantive value change insofar as the political public life will have to become a primary, though by no means the main, orientation of all persons. Against those who believe this to be impossible because of the total commitment of the traditionalist to his/her group, I would argue that such a view of group commitment must be wrong about the ties modern persons have to particularist communities.48 It is a myth that “groups” are incapable of engaging and articulating particularist ties and reasons for their values. Because of the nature of modern society, which constantly forces a comparison between forms of life, ideals, and cultures, all persons can—and the political process must be conducive to this—express what about their lives is worth living, even if the ideals remain ones that others would not want to take up themselves. Cultural practices and beliefs that cause division can be made sufficiently less threatening, so that a process of continuing to live together is conceivable and desired.
Furthermore, an ideal of toleration must infuse citizens’ commitment to upholding this type of society. Thus attitudes of citizenship support the value of public life: an ethos of a common world requires that all persons in the interaction are aware, open, and respectful of one another’s differences and the potential for conflict. The point of public interaction is to act out a will to find a sharable point of view—that simply is what impartiality consists in: the conscious recognition of a common world in which one’s actions have consequences. And fourth, the vitality of the public sphere requires leadership, particularly in times of transition. The leadership of a state must not only explicitly support the cultural and ideological underpinnings of a tolerant society, it must also try to encourage social and moral values conducive to an active and engaged public life for all citizens. It must do this through leadership about the value of public interaction itself. The main contention of this essay is that toleration rests upon a capacity—constructed through public language, individual ethics, cultural ethos, public policy, and the vitality of political institutions—to maintain ongoing relationships of negotiation, compromise, and mutuality.
Discussions of toleration today often seem lodged between a rock and a hard place—on the one side it is claimed by moral reason, on the other, by politics as war by other means. Each side enlists toleration as essentially its own. But toleration shares with moral reason an aspiration to establish a basis for relationships beyond coercion, and it shares with politics as war an abiding recognition of the inevitable conflicts and alienness between persons or groups and the tradeoffs these involve. The kind of relationship or form of mutuality that toleration consists in is grounded neither solely in abstract moral reason nor in a pure self-interested balance of power. This in-between status, I hope to have shown, does not leave toleration in a contradictory, untenable, or hypocritical position, but offers a robust and attractive vision of what is entailed by it. It is precisely a capacity to maintain distinctions and to live fairly with others in recognition of them that characterizes the unique ethical nature of toleration. Against communalist identity, toleration asserts: when you build a politics that asks for only a part of yourself, you build a stronger polity because you build it out of the commitment of a vast array of persons, each one of whom can bring to it the vibrancy of particular knowledge, aesthetics, ethics, and experience. Against the rational strategist, the laissez faire liberal, or the cultural separatist, toleration as I have interpreted it asserts that the involvement of persons in the public sphere, in the realm of their common world, must be a primary commitment and not a derivative and functional one. While the self does not become subsumed in the public, its identification must be a core part of its identity.
A final observation: I have focused on politics in its role of upholding relations of toleration. But “politics” itself is protean and changes in it today lead us to rethink how it can serve this purpose. In the early modern period, toleration was in part brought about through a justification of the nation-state as a realm of justice and accountability. The boundaries of the sovereign state stabilized the realm of politics as a focus of normative obligation. Today, the destabilization of political boundaries presents us with new and urgent problems. One of the causes of contemporary intolerance is the threat to assumptions about allegiance, loyalty, and the parameters of obligation. Changes in politics have also led to prevalent outbreaks of great intolerance and violence. To reassert the primary value of toleration between diverse people we need to continue the positive innovative rather than coercive and domination-seeking work of politics.49
1. Instances are too numerous to count. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson contrast it unfavorably with “mutual respect” (see Democracy and Disagreement [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996], 79). According to David Heyd, it might in the future be recognized to have been “an interim value,” useful between an age of imposition of uniformity of value and that of complete acceptance and openness toward beliefs and cultures. David Heyd, “Introduction,” Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5. Notable denunciations of the nature of the tolerant relationship have been those of Goethe who found it insulting; Kant’s view of it as a paternalistic, haughty form of noblesse oblige; T. S. Eliot who believed the Christian did not wish to be tolerated; and Marcuse’s rejection of it as repressive.
2. See Brian Barry’s critique of this trend in Culture and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 118ff. Anna Galeotti (Toleration as Recognition [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]) argues for a view of toleration as recognition, which moves in this direction.
3. I thank Melissa Williams for emphasizing the usefulness of the locution “will to relationship.”
4. See for example, John Horton’s entry in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, ed. David Miller (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), 521; Glen Newey, Virtue, Reason and Toleration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 18ff. Many moral philosophers restrict their application of the idea of toleration strictly to moral disagreement or conflicts of belief and stipulate that toleration does not apply to questions of racism or homophobia and so on, thereby severely curtailing the relevance of a theory of toleration to contemporary conflicts. Peter Nicholson takes this position:
Sometimes “dislike” is added to “disapproval” … for instance, Cranston argues that unless we include ‘dislike’ we cut out such matters as racial prejudice. … A definition of the moral ideal, however, must exclude “dislike.” Raphael correctly stresses that we must see the moral ideal of toleration solely in terms of disapproval, i.e. of the making of judgements and the holding of reasons over which moral argument is possible.
Peter P. Nicholson, “Toleration as a Moral Ideal” in Aspects of Toleration, eds. John Horton and Susan Mendus (London: Methuen, 1985), 160. Where does the necessity—the “must”—in this description of toleration come from? It is a rational must derived from the dictates of moral argument. The problem with this is that in maintaining toleration on grounds of pure moral reason, we loose the applicability of toleration to the ethics of life, the essential raison d’etre of a language of toleration in the first place. This neglects some of the most urgent issues in which the language of toleration is now used.
5. Glen Tinder in his book Tolerance: Toward a New Civility (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), takes as his epigraph a quotation from Simone Weil: “Attentiveness is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” This captures a quality of toleration that is too often overlooked in the conventional definition of it. Note Mill’s discussion of Mormonism: “they have been chased into a solitary recess in the midst of a desert” (J. S. Mill, On Liberty [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 91)—not exactly an example of toleration. I thank Andy Altman for mentioning this example.
6. See Barry Barnes “Tolerance as a Primary Virtue,” Res Publica 7, No. 3 (2001), for a discussion of this essentially human capacity.
7. Thomas Nagel, “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16, No. 3 (Summer 1987), 229. Its importance is also brought out through the extent to which it helps us rethink some persistent questions such as the “paradox” of toleration, which asks how it is that one could fundamentally believe a practice to be wrong and yet not stop it. Disapproving too strongly, one could not tolerate at all (e.g., child pornography), but if one does not disapprove enough, why call the attitude or act toleration? We are then merely indifferent or alternatively even welcoming of difference. Toleration is a paradox if we see it as merely a matter of unilateral individual moral calculation. Then, indeed we wonder how this could be possible. But if we recognize that the demand of toleration to restrict oneself is motivated by a need for mutuality of some sort, then the paradox lessens, because another source of motivation comes into view. Additional considerations beyond those of protecting one’s moral judgments about belief X or cultural practice Y are at work in one’s motivation to be tolerant. Thomas Scanlon highlights this interpretation as well: “What tolerance expresses is a recognition of common membership that is deeper than these conflicts, a recognition of others as just as entitled as we are to contribute to the definition of our society” (Scanlon, The Difficulty of Tolerance, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 193) and “the case for tolerance lies in the fact that rejecting it involves a form of alienation from one’s fellow citizens” (ibid., 194).
8. Nagel, 231.
9. Ibid., 229.
10. Ibid., quotes on 230.
11. Ibid., 229–30.
12. Furthermore, in situations of moral conflict over issues like abortion, it may be the case that when we justify “allowing” abortion or “allowing” freedom of sexual conduct because of the fact that conflicting points of view on these issues are not amenable to open, public debate, but instead rest on deeply personal, often inaccessible reasons—when we “justify” allowance of these for these reasons—this in itself is a different political act than one in which we allow them because we support them as conducive to a liberal lifestyle.
13. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 23.
14. Melissa Williams’s essay “Tolerable Liberalism” clearly lays out the relationships among arguments for toleration. The main arguments she considers are those founded on reasons of freedom, equality, and peace. She notes: “What I find is that despite the marginalization of peace-based considerations in the liberal theory of toleration, in practice such considerations creep in constantly to temper the judgments that freedom or equality would dictate.” “Tolerable Liberalism,” in Minorities within Minorities, eds. Avigail Eisenberg and Jeff Spinner-Halev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22. Her conclusion that “giving deliberative priority to peace-as-social-concord is likely to lead to a more creative liberalism” (ibid., 40) supports my focus on relationship as part of the core of toleration.
15. What then is the connection between the reasons usually given in defense of toleration and the role of mutuality? We might picture the two versions as follows. Version 1 would be constructed as D + C (R1, R2, R3) = T1, where D is disagreement/difference; C is constraint; and R is reason. Version 2: D + M + C (R1, R2, R3) = T2, where M is mutuality. My argument is that as a political, public practice and ideal, toleration only makes sense as T2.
16. The fact that these differences cannot be eradicated is itself a significant cultural point which limits what politics must or can become. Indeed one of the lessons of the religious wars was the power of ideas and the insufficiency of violence to eradicate them. Or perhaps it was the case that the stomach for decimation of an intransigent population was becoming less hardened, again this would indicate a major cultural change.
17. Some writers deny the applicability of the story of the emergence of “classical” toleration to contemporary conflicts. Antoine Garapon, for instance, in “The Law and the New Language of Tolerance” in Paul Ricoeur, Tolerance Between Intolerance and the Intolerable (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), 71–89, argues that the original type of conflict over religious beliefs was a clash of definitions of societal good, beliefs that constituted “conflicting institutionalized cultures” while contemporary issues of toleration pertain to diversity of lifestyles, between individuals emancipating themselves from a dominant culture. A different critique focuses on the inapplicability of the logic of toleration because it relegates differences of conscientious belief beyond the scope of public power—privatizing them—while today’s “differences” are inherently constituted by public power—and hence cannot be privatized as religious beliefs were. See Kirstie M. McClure, “Difference, Diversity and the Limits of Toleration,” Political Theory 18 (August 1990), 361–91.
18. James Tully, writing about Skinner’s work on the early modern period, notes: “Effectual changes in European political thought and action in this period are the consequences of wars and practical struggles and, secondarily, the outcome of the ideological response to the legitimation crises engendered by the shifting power relations that give way to battle.” See Meaning and Context, Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 23–24. See also John Horton and Susan Mendus, eds., Aspects of Toleration (London: Methuen, 1985), 1–2.
19. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 159.
20. Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 13, 289.
21. I examine these questions and the aspects of value change integral to this shift toward toleration at length in Toleration and Identity.
22. Quoted in Joseph Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, Volume II, trans T. L. Westow (London: Longmans, 1960), 45.
23. Anthony Marx in Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) makes the argument that policies of toleration were part of state-building as an inclusive project, but that public passions often proved too powerful to accept the construction of order in this form. Hence rulers resorted to exclusionary forms of nationalist state-building as well as the inclusive toleration-based form.
24. The fact that “unity” was premised upon excluding Catholics might be taken to undercut the moral significance of this partial universalism. But normative change happens in different ways. The language of impartiality eventually came to be used to critique the partiality of the initial settlement.
25. In Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought (New York: Routledge, 2003), I have looked at Montaigne and Defoe in this regard; the works of Spinoza, Grotius, and Bayle, are also crucial.
26. Note Glen Newey’s view that its conceptual structure renders toleration ex ante empty. For Newey, the principle of toleration reduces to a balancing of (a) reasons for disapproving an action/belief and (b) reasons for (however) not preventing the (disapproved of) action/belief. A person who disapproved of gay marriage and yet allowed it exemplifies toleration whereas a person who did not disapprove and allowed it, or a person who did disapprove and did not allow it would not exemplify toleration. This purely analytical definition of toleration is not intrinsically admirable because it may be the case that we are unjustified in our initial disapproval, or that the reasons given to nevertheless not prevent it are not morally robust. Thus, he emphasizes the limited and contingent nature of toleration. Things we may have tolerated in the past are now accepted and cannot therefore be “tolerated” any longer. Examples of past toleration, e.g., between Catholics and Protestants in France, or Anglicans and Dissenters in England, display the inherently asymmetrical element of power in toleration and indicate its only contingently liberal character. But tendentious examples like smoking display the purely formal rendition of Newey’s understanding of this “value,” and leave us wondering why the discourse of the modern world keeps using “toleration” if its resonances are as empty as he asserts. Newey is right on one level, insofar as he correctly describes toleration as dependent on competing definitions of public policy for directing the application of toleration, but I would contend that this does not exhaust the content of its ethics.
27. See note 6 above.
28. Jeremy Waldron, “Toleration and Reasonableness” in The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies, eds. Catriona McKinnon and Dario Castiglione (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 33.
29. Ibid., 20 (my emphasis).
30. Ibid., 19.
31. Ibid., 33.
32. See Newey’s contribution to this volume.
33. He writes: “[A]ny regime of tolerance will be founded by an intolerant gesture of exclusion. (This is a criticism only from the perspective of the impossible goal a regime of tolerance sets for itself.) And those who institute such a regime will do everything they can to avoid confronting the violence that inaugurates it and will devise ways of disguising it, even from themselves.” Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 167. One wonders how those who lived through purges in Stalinist Soviet Union, the cultural revolution in China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Khomeini’s Iran, or lynching in the American south would equate the “violence” of liberal toleration to their experience.
34. “The Politics of Recognition,” Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58–59.
35. He continues:
the ecological perspective on species conservation cannot be transferred to cultures. Cultural heritages and the forms of life articulated in them normally reproduce themselves by convincing those whose personality structures they shape, that is, by motivating them to appropriate productively and continue the traditions. The constitutional state can make this hermeneutic achievement of the cultural reproduction of life-worlds possible, but it cannot guarantee it.
Jürgen Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” in Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” 130.
36. Ibid., 39.
37. For a typical objection to it in principle, see e.g., Barry, Culture and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4–8.
38. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 152.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 156.
41. Ibid., 158.
42. Kukathas, “Cultural Toleration,” Ethnicity and Group Rights, NOMOS XXXIX, ed. by Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 78.
43. Ibid., 80.
44. Ibid., 82.
45. Barry argues that the real issue in deciding upon principles to govern illiberal groups is freedom of association and freedom to exit such associations. There must be a balance between groups being able to decide on membership and exclusion in order to be able to maintain their own affairs, and prevention of costs to individuals who may wish to exit such groups. See Barry, Culture and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
46. Judith Shklar, through her idea of a liberalism of fear, eloquently defended the worth of toleration as a rejection of intolerance: “liberalism’s deepest grounding is in … the conviction of the earliest defenders of toleration, born in horror, that cruelty is an absolute evil, an offense against God or humanity,” in “The Liberalism of Fear,” Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 23.
47. This notion is in line with Rawls’s depiction of public reason. His approach to the function of the public sphere however tends to assume reason as already operative in the coming to negotiate differences, whereas I have sought to portray the aspirational nature of the public sphere as a means of bringing about effective political identity formation between those in conflict. See, e.g., Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
48. Even in the proverbial case of the Amish, they cannot seek to protect a complete purity of culture. Indeed the Amish have adapted insofar as they have had to learn to argue their rights/interests in a secular court of law, and they have had to take up new economic activities as their farming has been undercut by market forces (now entering the woodworking industry and arguing that their 14 year olds ought to be exempt from child labor laws that will not allow children under 18 to work in factories with heavy machinery). See George Simmel’s classic analysis of the types of ties characterizing modern group affiliations versus medieval group locations, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations (New York: The Free Press, 1955).
49. I thank the following people for comments on this chapter: Andrew Altman, Dario Castiglione, Noah Feldman, John Ferejohn, Steven Kelts, Glen Newey, Melissa Schwartzberg, and Melissa Williams.