Search results

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: How to Write About Toleration -- Chapter One: Personal Attitudes and political Arrangements -- Chapter Two: Five Regimes of Toleration -- Multinational Empires -- International Society -- Consociations -- Nation-States -- Immigrant Societies -- Summary -- Chapter Three: Complicated Cases -- France -- Israel -- Canada -- The European Community -- Chapter Four: Practical Issues -- Power -- Class -- Gender -- Religion -- Education -- Civil Religion -- Tolerating the Intolerant -- Chapter Five: Modern and Postmodern Toleration -- The Modern Projects -- Postmodernity¿ -- Epilogue: Reflections on American Multiculturalism -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index.

This article recovers "evangelical toleration" as a neglected tradition in early modern political thought with important consequences for contemporary political theory and practice. Many political theorists dismiss the prudential arguments made by "proto-liberal" thinkers like Roger Williams or John Locke in favor of toleration as a necessary precondition for evangelism and conversion as intolerant, unacceptably instrumental, and inessential to their deeper theories. By contrast, critics of liberalism treat them as smoking gun evidence for an imperial and civilizing mission underlying liberal toleration. I argue that both sides underestimate evangelical toleration's genealogical and theoretical importance. Not only were evangelical considerations essential in shaping the particular institutions associated with toleration in England and America, the varieties of evangelical toleration represented by Williams and Locke shed significant light on the very different institutions—and intuitions—governing the expression of religious difference in liberal democracies today.

Political liberals now defend what Rawls calls the "inclusive view" of public reason with the appropriate ideal of reasonable pluralism. Against the application of such a liberal conception of toleration to deliberative democracy "the open view of toleration is with no constraints" is the only regime of toleration that can be democratically justified. Recent debates about the public or nonpublic character of religious reasons provide a good test case and show why liberal deliberative theories are intolerant and fail to live up to democratic obligations to provide justifications to all members of the deliberative community. In a deliberative democracy, accommodations to religious minorities must be based on transformations in the current reflective equilibrium among the norms that make up the complex democratic ideal. This is not merely a conceptual enterprise of commensuration, since the need for any such transformation in standards of justification is due to changes in the nature of the polity itself, changes that in turn modify its regime of toleration.

Baird reviews 'On Toleration' by Michael Walzer.

If we are to understand the concept of toleration in terms of everyday life, we must address a key philosophical and political tension: the call for restraint when encountering apparently wrong beliefs and actions versus the good reasons for interfering with the lives of the subjects of these beliefs and actions. This collection contains original contributions to the ongoing debate on the nature of toleration, including its definition, historical development, justification, and limits. In exploring the issues surrounding toleration, the essays address a variety of provocative questions. Is to

This collection of essays explores conceptions of toleration and tolerance in Asia and the West. It tests the assumption in contemporary Western political discourse and theory that toleration is a uniquely Western virtue and finds that many other traditions have comparable ideas and practices in grappling with religious and cultural diversity.

Arguments for toleration -- Trust and the rationality of toleration -- The conversion to toleration -- Establishing toleration -- Of socinians : toleration and the limits of trust -- Of homosexuals : trust and the practices of public reason -- Epilogue: Balancing trust and toleration