The Duke of Buckingham thus expressed himself in favour of a Toleration: My Lords; There is a thing called liberty, which … is, that the people of England are fondest of; it is that they will never part with…. This, my Lords, in my opinion can never be done without giving an Indulgence to all Protestant Dissenters. It is certainly a very uneasy kind of life to any man, that has either Christian charity, humanity, or good-nature, to see his fellow-subjects daily abused, divested of their liberties and birth-rights, and miserably thrown out of their possessions and freeholds, only because they cannot agree with others in some opinions and niceties of religion, which their consciences will not give them leave to consent to…. Methinks, in this notion of persecution a very gross mistake, both as to the point of Government, and the point of Religion…. It makes every man’s safety depend on the wrong place; not upon governors, or a man’s living well toward the civil government established by law, but upon his being transported with zeal for every opinion, that is held by those that have power in the Church that is in fashion…. My humble motion to your lordships is, that you would give leave to bring in a Bill of Indulgence to all Protestant Dissenters.
—HOUSE OF LORDS, OCTOBER 1675, COBBETT’S PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY OF ENGLAND, VOL. 4: COMPRISING THE PERIOD FROM THE RESTORATION OF CHARLES THE SECOND, IN 1660, TO THE REVOLUTION, IN 1688
TOLERATION IS PROFOUNDLY important. It addresses some of the most difficult and persistent features of human social relations. Combinations of hierarchy and loathing across group lines recur frequently in recorded history, notably, but not exclusively, when cultural pluralism takes religious form. The pervasive, protean, and passionate qualities of religious imaginations and identities combine belief with practical social organization. Hand in hand, religious and political contention can create markers of solidarity, incommensurability, and enmity that expose different faiths, especially minority faiths and their adherents, to zealotry and danger. Often led by specialists in violence, such processes under conditions of diversity that designate people and practices as unacceptable have been persistent in human history.
As Bernard Williams observed, toleration “is necessary when different groups—moral, political, or religious—realize that there is no alternative to living together, that is to say, no alternative except armed conflict, which will not resolve their disagreements and will impose continuous suffering.”
1 An alternative to oppression, suffering, and violence, toleration is most needed in circumstances that make respect, cooperation, and social peace difficult to obtain. “We need to tolerate other people and their ways of life,” Williams ruefully noted, “only in situations that make it very difficult to do so.”
2 Toleration thus is motivated and should be judged by its capacity to manage deeply felt commitments in inconvenient conditions.
Toleration is a virtue.
3 It is not, however, a simple good. In the recent past, a significant number of philosophers and political theorists have probed and debated toleration’s meaning, complexity, and ambiguity. They have understood it to be a concept that is “grim and limited,” even if immensely valuable.
4 Grim because it is premised on dislike and disapproval. Limited because its rules, combining law, intellectual justification, and social practices, are contingent on self-discipline by the powerful, and offer a form of liberty more qualified than a right.
Toleration is what George Fletcher calls an unstable virtue. Hovering between “an impulse to intervene and regulate the lives of others, and … an imperative—either logical or moral—to restrain that impulse,”
5 it never is simply fixed or secure, for it is inherently controversial. Its very existence, its conditions for the accommodation of disliked beliefs and social practices, and its substantive range cannot but be deeply contested and often fiercely resisted, not always unreasonably. Toleration implies circumstances that make it possible and reasons that make it desirable.
6 Both are uncertain.
Curiously, discussions and considerations of such matters have played little if any role in scholarly literatures in history and the social sciences that detail and seek to understand contentious and often violent engagements across the lines of religion and ethnicity, nation, and race. Toleration has yet to function analytically as a theoretically inscribed variable, in part because the philosophical literature designates toleration as self-abnegation by powerful actors but stops short of fashioning the concept in sufficiently differentiated fashion to make it a tool for systematic historical and empirical research. As a result, the separation between philosophical inquiry and such investigations has remained quite stark. My goal, by contrast, is to encourage the integration of toleration “into the current primary social science concerns and analytical methods,” which is how J. P. Nettl identified his objective in considering the modern state as a multilayered conceptual variable.
7What Sudipta Kaviraj has written about religion as “many different things,” and thus with “an indeterminacy of reference,” holds for toleration as well. Like religion, toleration refers to a range of institutional fields, spanning “an ethical order, a social order, philosophical systems, political institutions.”
8 The sources, qualities, and strategies of human diversity and prospects for toleration all vary. How, I ask, might we specify toleration’s various dimensions and identify elements of its formation and topology in both settled and unsettled times? Without such analytical instruments it is not possible to advance a program of inquiry and research that can construct both richer descriptions and better causal explanations about particular historical situations and thus help identify forms of toleration we might wish to have.
I
It is easy to confuse toleration with what it is not. Toleration does not connote being unconcerned. Toleration exists despite caring. That is, toleration designates a willful decision to permit disliked groups, beliefs, or practices to persist despite the ability to do otherwise. Toleration is least required when different groups who dislike each other’s values and ways of life are nonetheless indifferent. Toleration is least secure when it is based not on principles but on “a Hobbesian equilibrium, under which the acceptance of one group by the other is the best that either of them can get” given the temporary balance of forces.
9 Toleration is most likely to succeed when it is underpinned by persuasive argument and sustained by values both internal and external to it, when it is supported by practical arrangements that make its performance more likely, and when public authorities are willing to act when fanaticism threatens to override group inhibitions and self-policing.
As a site of applied ethics combining normative and practical elements, toleration hovers in an uncertain zone between, though often overlapping with, respect and recognition, on the one side, and persecution and oppression, on the other. A condition of toleration is the existence of persons and ways of thinking and behaving that elicit more than mild dislike or discomfort, but antipathy often closer to outrage and revulsion.
10 Without such aversion, toleration so overlaps respect and recognition that it loses its distinctiveness. Dislike is often an antecedent to action. To be tolerant is to accept and refrain from action despite the absence of indifference. “Intermediate between wholehearted acceptance and unrestrained opposition,”
11 the concept designates a family of conceptions that support such self-discipline. Unlike cultural and moral relativism characterized by the absence of judgment, and unlike multicultural respect based on a normative approval of human diversity, toleration “
presupposes … negative judgment or condemnation. To tolerate something or someone,” as Steven Lukes rightly notes, “is to abstain from acting against what one finds unacceptable.”
12 Toleration is not passive endurance, for it entails more than just not doing, but a reflective not doing, a self-conscious acceptance despite dislike and disapproval. Other considerations intervene to motivate either a temporary or permanent suspension of action, notwithstanding an often potent disposition to act.
As a willful act of omission, a deliberate silence or restraint, a suspension of commitment, and a willingness to share geographic and political space with others who deviate from true belief, correct values, and proper behavior, toleration is less a matter of social justice than of forbearance in the face of diversity.
13 Toleration implies targets of disapproval, asymmetric relationships, and the absence of self-regulating regard. That is, it presumes circumstances in which members of at least one group view negatively the ideas and deeds of at least one other. Notwithstanding, those who could act to restrict others do not. They might condemn, but do not intervene despite their ability to do so; “we do not speak of the weak tolerating the strong.”
14 Toleration thus restrains action consistent with disapproval. Such self-control requires either cost-benefit calculations that toleration is a necessary means to some more valued end or more principled justifications, based on religious convictions, secular skepticism, or other values that can trump the desire to impose religious and ethical uniformity on persons one wishes were not present or who one hopes would lead their lives differently.
15 Not requiring respect or appreciation of difference, the central “problem of toleration,” as Susan Mendus identifies it, is “explaining how it can be right to permit what is wrong.”
16Toleration implies the capacity to not tolerate.
17 It is a rejection of available intolerance. Toleration curbs behavior by those capable of repression, but does not insist that the beliefs motivating the restrained wish to act against others be given up. Toleration, in short, is based on an insistence that those who have the ability to curb others should voluntarily refrain, even when they are convinced that such actions would be just and means of repression are at hand. This is more than sufferance, for toleration compels decisions not to deploy such available instruments.
Toleration has thus been defined by Andrew Cohen as “an agent’s intentional and principled refraining from interfering with an opposed other (or their behavior, etc.) in situations of diversity, where the agent believes she has the power to interfere.”
18 Actors with power, Preston King elaborates, decide “to endure, suffer, or put up with a person, activity, idea, or organization” despite their moral or practical aversion. Given the intensity of dislike, toleration is “an act of extraordinary self-restraint,”
19 especially by public authorities who command sovereign powers and law. Understood this way, toleration is not a matter of private judgment but a contested feature of public policy whose indulgences extend liberty.
It hardly needs saying that, in the West, it was the Reformation that projected toleration beyond considerations of heresy and the status of non-Christians, the two sets of questions that had concerned the Church and some rulers in medieval Europe. Toleration, to be sure, possesses an etiology older than ideas and developments in the early modern period. But it was Christian civil war that transformed toleration from a concern with peripheral people by religious authorities and political rulers to a set of questions located at the very center of European public and private life. When John Rawls explained why he had turned from the mode and content of reasoning, above and outside human particularity, that had characterized
A Theory of Justice’s search for a comprehensive liberalism to focus, by contrast, in
Political Liberalism on potentially irreconcilable human differences among persons who do not all share a single comprehensive doctrine, he highlighted the Reformation’s radically unresolved moment when “rival authoritative and salvationist” forms of Christianity, each “dogmatic and intolerant,” faced off while seeking to control and secure protection from secular authorities.
20Almost no one in the sixteenth century considered toleration to be a good thing. At a moment when the political was so deeply embedded in the language of God and his creation, and the human condition was understood as an aspect of a larger cosmic structure, conflict tended to be total. Unlike various syncretic and open religious faiths, like Islam in India, the forms of western Christianity were unitary and closed. In France,
tolerer was used by partisans of a tough line against heresy to denote subjection to an evil, a course of action they despised. During the broadside wars of the Reformation, polemicists often treated toleration as an unwelcome sanction for licentiousness and iniquity, an endorsement of great mistakes, a threat to the seriousness of theology and the depth of doctrine, and thus a recipe for disorder. As a negative slur, the term was “mainly used pejoratively,” Alexandra Walsham writes, “denounced … [as] a diabolical device, the hallmark of the Beast, ‘the last and most desperate design of Antichrist,’ ‘the whore of Babylon’s backdoor.’”
21 Only a minority expressed a contrary conviction to the effect that “we should refrain from mutual slaughter in the name of our differences of opinion on the matter of the Holy Trinity, the sacrament of the Eucharist or predestination, since God, in the Last Judgement, will not ask us about our theological opinions, whether right or wrong, but about whether we tried to live by the commandments of the Gospels.”
22Today, the location of key arguments has shifted, but aspects of the underlying structure remain present, especially in articulated doubts that toleration is too generous because it goes hand in hand with an abandonment of judgment and thus relinquishes the quest for truth. Stipulating that “I refrain from reacting aggressively to things I strongly dislike or disapprove,” Leszek Kolakowski advised that toleration risks insisting that “I refrain from expressing—or indeed holding—any opinion, and sometimes even to condone every conceivable type of behaviour or opinion in others,” for its teaches “that when we persist in our beliefs, even if we do so without aggression, we are
ipso facto sinning against tolerance.” Toleration thus can produce a neglect for fundamental values. It can become not just a means to tolerate those held by others but can induce people to become indifferent to their own. Toleration, Kolakowski further cautioned, can turn “against itself” and thus can produce a circumstance that “destroys the conditions of its own existence.”
23 Taken too far, toleration may exact too high a price if its suspension of judgment and action comes at the expense of egalitarian values or human rights. This, famously, was the view of Brian Barry.
24 A century and a quarter earlier, Walter Bagehot similarly worried that when toleration becomes too democratic it risks negating liberal values. Further, there is a republican line of criticism that worries lest toleration “weaken the civic and moral virtues that are necessary for self-government.”
25 For those who hold this constellation of views, toleration threatens to become a dangerous snare that leads to the suspension of necessary disagreement, even to the absurdity of sanctioning the bad and the ugly.
26 If, as John Gray, notes, “the objects of toleration are what we judge to be evils,” or at least are “undesirable, false, or at least inferior,”
27 why should such objects not be reined in?
Today, such views vie with a strong countercurrent that also is sharply critical of toleration, but for rather different reasons. Much contemporary criticism has followed a line of argument pioneered in Thomas Paine’s denunciation of toleration in
Rights of Man as condescending, filled with cultural contempt. Serving to reinforce the laddering of power, he wrote, toleration “is not the
opposite of intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding Liberty of Conscience and the other of granting it. The one is pope armed with fire and faggot, and the other is the pope selling or granting indulgences.”
28 Premised on judgments that denigrate the cultural other, toleration thus advances, rather than curtails, human domination by proceeding without appreciating competing values or regarding minority practices as legitimate. Subjecting such beliefs and behavior to undue scrutiny, toleration demands the provision of reasons that the dominant group does not stipulate for itself.
On this understanding, toleration’s combination of disdain and the power to control with merely provisional decisions to self-restrict is sinister, a soft glove covering a hard fist of power. Toleration is too limited in its reach, too cold in its treatment of the weaker other, and misleading in its putative broadmindedness. It stops short of recognizing diverse communities of fate and affect, and it underestimates the legitimate depth of ethical conflict, whether religious or secular. Lacking appreciation or ample respect for the full range of human ways of living, toleration fails to take deep diversity properly into account in collective life and decision making, and thus neglects the imperatives of multicultural citizenship.
29 Worse, as Wendy Brown put the point, toleration as a helpmeet to unequal cultural and political authority is “depoliticizing, regulatory, and imperial,”
30 and, as Herbert Marcuse notably insisted, it can operate not to advance but repress diversity.
31It is impossible to simply reject or set aside these distinct lines of objection, which, simultaneously, are quite accurate yet not quite convincing. They pivot on toleration’s conditional approval of difference, an inherent feature. And they are right, of course, to observe that toleration requires suspending critical judgment and that it always risks self-important arrogance, for, as Lukes has noted, “the tolerator is not merely exercising power; he is also claiming authority,” the authority of treating disapproval as legitimate.
32As an ethical and political site, toleration is not a clear-cut or uncomplicated virtue. By insisting on the necessity to suspend some, though not all, judgment, and by often lacking a sense of cultural equality, it inhabits a location charged with tension. Measured against truth, it necessarily shrinks in scale; measured against equal regard, it contracts in appeal. But measured against the long history of human depredation, it nonetheless remains an essential asset. A world without toleration is fraught with danger. Absent toleration, unbridled conflict and coercion produce stark worlds of winners, who defeat pluralism, and losers, for whom the costs of engagement can be very high, even ultimate.
33Hardly a single or fixed position, toleration should not be measured against idealized worlds. Rather, it has to be considered as a complex set of views and means embedded in actual, and often threatening, historical arrangements and circumstances. Toleration, moreover, never can be absolute, as it inherently competes with other values that actors also hold. Despite his deep commitment to toleration, Bernard Crick cautions that it “can never always be right to be tolerant; there are occasions on which we should be intolerant.”
34 Toleration must not simply mean that anything goes. But reciprocally, toleration does impel real latitude for demographic, cultural, social, and political heterogeneity and thus in fact can open up possibilities for wider and warmer forms of respect and recognition. Like purgatory, toleration is a site with paths that run in more than one direction.
II
It makes little sense to set toleration aside. Decent human life cannot do without it. Rather, we might ask whether, when, and how it can help organize and manage human diversity in ways that are less dreadful and less unjust than all-too-common alternatives. However penetrating, sharp critiques of toleration, Brown rightly concedes, should not move us to a position “rejecting tolerance outright, declaring it a necessarily insidious value, or replacing tolerance with some other term or practice.”
35 Without toleration, members of disliked groups often are compelled to live on a plateau of anxiety, subject to hierarchies of humiliation. By offering the prospect of social peace, moreover, toleration is instrumentally valuable and not just for the vulnerable.
Toleration’s achievements and significance grow the more we recognize its jagged genealogy and uneven legacies, the more we acknowledge its uncertain, precarious, and porous crosscurrents, the more we understand that human differences always can be exploited to advance “the evil of cruelty and fear.”
36 By reducing fear and insecurity, toleration, can serve as a condition for, not an enemy of, a commitment to diversity and cultural respect. Whether this extension actually happens, of course, poses a contingent and important historical challenge.
After all, toleration has not been the norm in human history. Most of the time, situations marked by deep cultural and religious pluralism have produced persecution. “Correct” ideas and behavior are imposed through coercion to correct beliefs and acts that the dominant party believes to be primitive, or repulsive, malicious, or barbaric. Grounded in deeply felt world views, moreover, such profound disapproval cannot be dismissed as simply unreasonable. It thus is a matter of great and compelling importance to understand why, when, and how stronger parties abstain from restrictive deeds and permit liberty for ideas and practices that range from the unloved to the robustly reviled. Unfortunately, such questions demand a concept that moves beyond definition to become a tool for rigorous and systematic empirical inquiry.
That, we currently lack, in part because the main literatures that have documented the history of toleration have tended to divide rather too crisply into opposing evolutionary and realist camps. Focusing on the history of ideas, the first offers a chronicle of ethical achievement. It records how ever broader and appealing ideas advanced to transcend civil disabilities for religious minorities. This record demonstrates toleration’s dramatic evolution from early modern Europe, when it mostly was thought to be undesirable, to the nineteenth century, when toleration achieved a positive valence, as one “sketch of the struggle for religious liberty of the last four hundred years” put things, that brought about a “complete emancipation” by the mid-nineteenth century.
37Appreciative narratives portraying the history of toleration as a stirring line of progress long have dominated English historiography. This is the story of a lineage that takes us from Sebastian Castellio to Roger Williams and, decisively, to John Locke and on to John Stuart Mill. Now classic texts written in the first half of the twentieth century by H. F. Russell Smith, A. A. Seaton, T. Lyon, and especially W. K. Jordan,
38 as well as an assertive revival of such work,
39 appreciatively detail transformations to theories of religious toleration after the break with Rome in 1534 and the Act of Supremacy making the Queen the head of the Church. Jordan’s still unsurpassed four-volume survey chronicles these years as an era of “one of the most momentous changes in the history of English thought,” a shift from medieval conceptions of toleration inside “an organic conception of Christian life” to “the legal guarantee of free belief and the free exercise of that belief.” After a period of religious extremism, Anglican thought grew more moderate, the dissenting sects started to embrace religious liberty, and “the secular forces” of political necessity, rationalism, and skepticism became more prominent. On this influential view, early modern toleration in England thus was “one of the most significant advances the human race has ever achieved,” the opening of a process that produced a sequence of ever more generous and inclusive ideas that bonded with the body of thought we have come to call liberal.
40During the past quarter-century, a growing number of historians have called this history of unfolding ideas into question. They stress the expedience and expose the limits of toleration in a world marked by might and command in numerous case studies that reveal the persistence of bias and bullying even in such relatively tolerant locations as early modern Basle, Strasbourg, or the Dutch Republic. In Basle, nonconformists never were safe or free from the dangers of persecution protected by law. Though a relative haven, Strasbourg witnessed the official harassment of nuns, demonstrations against Catholic priests and services, assaults on Anabaptists, and anti-Calvinist displays. The city’s laws stifled religious argument, limited which services people could attend, forced religious instruction, and mandated baptism within six weeks of birth. Even in the Netherlands, where the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was a haven, toleration often was deployed by public authorities and church figures in purely instrumental ways as part of an elaborate system of bargaining for advantages in the context of a shifting balance of power in the various towns. Such realism, stressing how toleration was the cry of the weak and disappointed, underscores how toleration was crafted only when it was advantageous. Toleration, it stresses, was a pragmatic accommodation to the balance of forces, “a function of
raison d’
état rather than a matter of principle.”
41Each viewpoint sees itself as an antagonist to the other. From the perspective of the first, what is most striking is how the zone of toleration has expanded notwithstanding pressures of bigotry, fanaticism, and persecution. From the perspective of the second, the history of ideas is thought to have substituted teleology for an awareness of just how unusual, situational, and evanescent toleration has been and how often it has been entwined with intolerant refusals to grant full membership even in liberal polities.
These are fictitious choices. The one does not falsify the other. Toleration never was an uncomplicated extension of freedom. Exclusions and patterns of persecution did not melt away when leading thinkers such as Locke or John Toland shifted toleration from a site for theological debate about heresy and religious difference to become a political and legislative question under conditions of religious pluralism. Still, their texts, and the vast array of reflections and arguments that circulated and were debated in early modern England, did powerfully widen the available intellectual and political space. Precisely because realist histories are convincing when they stress lapses and dangers, the expansion to the scope of toleration’s ideas and protections gains in importance.
The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tracts, essays, and books, ranging from the ephemeral to the enduring, that have sought to advance visions of toleration have possessed two vital features. Written to enlarge the range of possibilities, these texts have offered what Rawls called “realistic utopias,” designs close to social reality yet still distant from immediate realization.
42 By insisting on the worth of toleration in difficult historical circumstances, such writings have pushed out the boundaries of what otherwise could not be supposed or conceived, and they have suggested constellations of means with which to confront and contain coercion and bloodshed. The best of these works, like Locke’s
Letter on Toleration, link arguments for why it is desirable or necessary to potentially, if not yet actually, feasible visions and policies on the understanding that toleration designates a distinctive, fragile, and controversial zone of authoritative institutions.
This, certainly, is how Locke saw toleration. As an alternative to Christian civil war, he advanced toleration as a practical and pressing solution, as a set of means to establish secure borders between political authority and civil society and among religious rites and doctrines, each “Orthodox to it self.” It was “the refusal of Toleration to those that are of different Opinions,” he argued, rather than Europe’s diversity of religious doctrines and practices as such, that “has produced all the Bustles and Wars, that have been in the Christian World, upon account of Religion.” Toleration, on this account, is not predominantly an idea—though it surely is that, if a complex one—but a set of institutional arrangements that can serve to demarcate official policies and relationships across group lines. Toleration should do so, Locke famously advised, by distinguishing “exactly the Business of Civil Government from that of Religion” and by settling “the just Bounds that lie between the one and the other.”
43Such proposals have sought to advance the practice of toleration by connecting abstract norms to determinate historical circumstances by way of robust institutional proposals. These writings also have grappled with judgments about how to distinguish two kinds of wrongs: those that can or should be tolerated in order to secure a good or prevent something worse and those that should not because toleration would either protect something too awful or bring about a dangerous or otherwise unbearable outcome. These are amongst the hardest questions to adjudicate in public life, and it is good to possess rich examples of attempts to grapple with them.
III
The challenge that is most urgent is not choosing between an emphasis on ideas or on social reality. Nor does it make sense to pursue the stylized debate political theorists have been conducting about whether or not to appreciate toleration, as if toleration is a singular set of ideas and practices. If we are to assess toleration, we must do so in situational contexts armed with analytical distinctions that can guide scholars to consider toleration as a complex institutional site that can be apprehended with the goal of understanding its range, dimensions, and configurations. By treating toleration as a family of conceptions and practices that has varied and mostly widened over time, though not in simple or linear fashion, it should be possible to probe and compare arrangements across times and places, pose better questions about the character and consequences of such variation, and construct explanations that account for why particular arrangements were selected. How can we unpack the appropriately tight definition of toleration offered by Cohen (which, as you recall, designates toleration as “an agent’s intentional and principled refraining from interfering with an opposed other [or their behavior, etc.] in situations of diversity, where the agent believes she has the power to interfere”) into dimensions that can be identified and analyzed distinctively and in combination? If toleration comprises an institutional family encompassing acts of intentional self-restraint by capable public authorities regarding disliked persons, beliefs, and actions, how, in short, might we construct the concept as a layered instrument that designates aspects whose variation can be assayed systematically? What might such an agenda for social scientists and historians look like?
Consider how the debate between the historians of ideas and the realists might be transformed into a treatment of the normative status of toleration, ranging from a situational necessity advanced reluctantly, ungenerously, and resentfully to toleration as a cherished value. Justifications for toleration can vary significantly, from the entirely practical to the doctrinal, whether religious or secular in character. Given situations, moreover, can shape relations among actors who locate toleration quite differently along such a continuum, thus animating disagreement not only about whether toleration should exist, but about its grounding, security, and character.
Toleration is protean. In unsettled early modern Europe, a good many kinds and forms differently combined claims to freedom of conscience, the separation of spiritual and secular authority, and notions of love for neighbors and weaker brethren. Variously motivated, toleration’s patterns of abnegation and its combinations of liberty and indulgence took many forms. These included toleration as a private, thus passive and covert, expression of belief; de facto toleration that resulted from a lack of resources to enforce conformity; toleration as an interim strategy because the balance of contending forces permitted no other solution; and toleration in which rulers sanctioned pastoral latitudinarianism, with religious authorities deciding not to peer too closely into men’s souls. Not just the content but the geography of toleration differed and fluctuated, sometimes limited to particular localities but other times applicable over wider territories, including nation-states and zones of conquest.
As these possibilities unfolded, and as various thinkers sought to find grounds to justify alternative courses of action, it was already clear that toleration was not a singular or unitary possibility, for it varied too much from place to place to be that. If we understand tolerators as persons with the capacity not to tolerate, there was a multiplicity of such actors within the Church and within various governing authorities in empires, states, and towns who possessed the ability to define and implement an array of different public policies to deal with those they disliked. In turn, there were diverse driving forces that produced dislike and a variety of disliked persons and practices. These, in turn, varied by social distance from those who might choose to tolerate them. The degree of difference might be relatively small, as in distinctions between Lutherans and Calvinists, or very great, as between the highly dissimilar Spanish and Inca, or located in a zone in between, as in relations between Christians and Jews, who clearly were neither Christian nor quite full outsiders, for they were inscribed within Christianity’s grand narrative.
Just as tolerators and tolerated are not of one piece, neither is the relationship between dislike and disapproval. Not just the content but the degree, intensity, and scope of dislike can vary and thus the degree of self-restraint or modification of dislike required by toleration. The sources and character of diversity are not fixed or homogeneous. As an empirical matter, moreover, there is no precise mapping that connects the qualities of dislike to the taking of decisions to tolerate. Less dislike does not necessarily produce more toleration. And toleration can be shaped over time either by a reduction to the intensity of dislike or by decisions to permit belief and action despite dislike.
Such decisions take in different sites and possibilities. Most important is toleration’s substantive content and extensiveness as an authoritative institution. Central to debates and decisions about toleration in early modern Europe was a lack of agreement about how many aspects, zones, or spheres of life were to be covered. These questions became especially pressing and vexing with the development of modern states claiming unique sovereignty over people and territory. As their authoritative institutions crafted ties with diverse civil societies, often marked by religious heterogeneity, they had to define the content of their people and the meaning of their territory. For toleration, these matters raised questions and offered choices that have persisted ever since as matters for official and public adjudication about the conditions of safety for the physical, mental, and spiritual lives of disliked persons and for the terms of their incorporation into the polity and society.
These options cluster into five distinctive, if overlapping, categories, each of which is a site for the expression, adjudication, and management of intergroup dislike. In each, toleration—understood not as a fixed noun but as a cluster of practices and norms—can be characterized as a three-actor game in which public authorities manage relations, fashion institutions, and adjudicate conflicts between majorities and disliked minorities in the civil societies they seek to govern. In each, authorities have to assess the degree of danger and the degree of opportunity offered by human heterogeneity. Each thus has profound implications for the degree of danger and opportunity experienced by the vulnerable. For both the dominant and the vulnerable, moreover, the capacity to impose and the capacity to shape and resist themselves are variables, at each of these levels.
First is the question of toleration in the sense of sheer physical presence. Will those with the capacity to exclude people from places abide their company and agree to share geography with persons they find objectionable? On a continuum from extrusion to full spatial integration, many options appear, including various forms of residential segregation.
Second is the issue of physical security. Will public authorities supply policing to provide members of disliked minorities with protection from violence? Ranging from none to absolute guarantees, the mechanisms of policing can vary. These include providing authorization for groups to self-police to the provision of public forceful protection backed and enforced by law.
Third is the acquisition of means to livelihood. Will disliked minorities be granted access to a limited or wide array of economic opportunities and occupational roles? Tolerated groups must have some means of material sustenance, but the extensiveness of these possibilities can vary considerably.
Fourth is the scope of autonomous cultural expression. How different and how visible are disliked groups permitted to appear and behave within the public sphere? Here the continuum spans the range from a hidden presence to open, even welcome, diversity, both religious and secular. Here too lie questions about the range of cultural matters toleration will cover. At the low end, just one, perhaps a different language or the right to build a church; at the high end, ideas and practices limited only by some universal moral and political values.
Fifth is the character and degree of civic membership. How, if at all, are they included in both military and civil institutions? Do persons who belong to disliked groups gain access to the rights, rituals, and symbols that characterize collective political life? In the wide space between none to all, there is an abundance of options, perhaps especially under democratic conditions. Further, answers to these questions are not fixed. While overall there has been a trend toward civic inclusion, there remain examples of segmented extrusion, even mass killing, of minority-group persons who had become full citizens.
The abnegation of action that is the central hallmark of toleration always proceeds along with affirmative decisions about toleration’s character, content, and scope. Decisions about toleration at each of these levels are loosely coupled. That is, there is a degree of independence, which varies in different historical situations, with regard to whether and how toleration is practiced at each level. These need not vary together or in the same direction in particular times and locations. As Preston King has underscored, “it makes no sense to speak of being ‘tolerant’ of an item in every degree and on every level. One may be completely tolerant of an item in full degree on every level save at least one; one may be tolerant of an item in some degree on one level and no others.”
44 Toleration rarely is complete or inclusive.
From this perspective, toleration is best understood not as possessing a bimodal character with peaks of yes or no, but as configurations composed of conditions within and across these five dimensions, each of which is arrayed on a continuum from less to more. Toleration thus can be more or less comprehensive, more or less active.
45 Proper-name history concerning a specific place thus consists of situations that combine circumstances at each level at a particular moment. By attending to these aspects and their arrangements, it becomes possible to assemble cases comparably while protecting their singularity. The goal of such scholarship on toleration, in the language of the philosopher Hugh Stretton, would be to offer “an organization of possibilities … being the sort of theory which leaves open the question whether people are doing what people would invariably do in these uniquely complicated circumstances, or are doing one of those comparatively few things which people … choose to do in such circumstances.”
46 Such interrogative theory constructs what toleration actually has meant in given settings. But it also invites a wide array of causal questions that can help craft accounts that explain why these details were chosen by toleration’s authorities.
The study of toleration requires the further development of the concept as a layered variable. As historians, we mainly study variation and particularity, but we want to do so in a manner that allows us to compose cases and instances for meaningful comparisons within and across time. So we need these kinds of tools. As historians of ideas, we aim to do better than consider one thinker at a time or compose lineages that risk becoming teleological, and this kind of approach can help. As social scientists, we require good objects of explanation—that is, systematically composed variations about subjects that matter—about which we try to identify mechanisms and provide causal accounts.
Treating toleration’s complex arrangements of liberty and indulgence in a manner comparable to how Nettl considered the state as a conceptual variable thus is a first step toward good and useful work. It begins with the understanding that, like all institutions, toleration’s combinations of principles and prudence makes peaceful human life possible by predictably regulating the character and terms of political, economic, and social transactions. As distinctively configured in particular times and places, and patterned by contexts, situations, human preferences and decisions, toleration, like other institutions, in turn conduces thought, sentiments, and behavior.
With toleration as a conceptual variable, it becomes possible to probe distinctive historical cases more methodically and revealingly by offering theoretically grounded tools with which to ask similar questions across a wide array of cases, across time and space, without reducing the particularity of any. To the contrary, this kind of interrogative theory deepens an appreciation of how specific instances are configured distinctively, all the while constructing them in a manner that can facilitate meaningful comparison. With historical information organized this way, it should also become more likely that we can come to better understand the conditions for moving toward and beyond toleration as well as fateful conditions when the vectors are reversed. With the range of potential options having widened under modern conditions to encompass both warm multiculturalism and the radical evil of genocide, fewer subjects are more pressing.
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