Theory & Event

“If we are to make sense of the relationship of liberalism and cultural pluralism,” Ira Katznelson has written, “the defining issue must remain that of toleration.”[1] Certainly, in the final years of the 20th century, there has been considerable talk about toleration. From university campuses to churches, synagogues, and mosques; from Presidential “town meetings” to neighborhood associations; and from Bob Dole to Rodney King, toleration has become something of a secular catechism, cited and recited as a first principle of political life in multicultural times. Indeed, it has even been suggested that toleration is the key to the future of liberal democracy at the end of the 20th century, the minimal condition that enables a diversely constituted public to survive as a common entity.[2] Yet in spite of its rhetorical popularity, in spite of the apparent consensus with which the citizens of western liberal democracies and political philosophers alike have coalesced around the ideal of toleration in recent years, concurrent events tell a dramatically different story. From documented increases in hate crime, the re-emergence of “separate but equal” doctrines, continued white flight from public school systems, and anti-immigration measures like California Proposition 187 in the United States, to “ethnic warfare” and the rise of protofascist groups throughout Europe, an unfortunate wealth of signs points to the tragic yet repeated failure of toleration at the very moment of liberalism’s broadly proclaimed triumph.[3]

This insistence upon the value of toleration in the face of what appears to be its collapse intimates a crisis in contemporary liberalism, a moment when, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, we suddenly discover that we have lost the answers to questions that have long been unrecognizable as questions. And yet such a crisis can be instructive, Arendt suggests, for it “forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgements, that is, with prejudices. Such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but makes us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity for reflection it provides.”[4] My concern in this essay, then, is to take that opportunity for reflection, to rethink toleration against the conflicts in public life for which it has repeatedly been promoted as remedy. By doing so, I hope both to unsettle our faith and to refresh our confidence in the value of toleration. For as I will suggest, the liberal concept of toleration contains within itself an important set of counter-principles that preserve precisely those elements that modern doctrines of toleration seek to overcome. In this sense, then, one of the primary threats to liberalism in multicultural times might be found at the heart of one of the very principles marshaled to salvage a common world and adapt liberalism to the present moment. Renewing our confidence in the promise of toleration, then, requires us to ask not about the place of toleration within a liberal political order, but rather about the place of politics within the practice of toleration.