Toleration in Conflict
Past and Present

This book represents the most comprehensive historical and systematic study of the theory and practice of toleration ever written.

Rainer Forst (Author)

9780521885775, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 January 2013

662 pages
25.3 x 18.2 x 3.8 cm, 1.34 kg

'From the Bible through the Church Fathers and the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, and into modernity, Forst demonstrates how efforts to theorize toleration turn into their opposite: the same conceptual resources that advanced toleration are later employed to advance intolerance.' Vincent Lloyd, Studies in Christian Ethics

The concept of toleration plays a central role in pluralistic societies. It designates a stance which permits conflicts over beliefs and practices to persist while at the same time defusing them, because it is based on reasons for coexistence in conflict - that is, in continuing dissension. A critical examination of the concept makes clear, however, that its content and evaluation are profoundly contested matters and thus that the concept itself stands in conflict. For some, toleration was and is an expression of mutual respect in spite of far-reaching differences, for others, a condescending, potentially repressive attitude and practice. Rainer Forst analyses these conflicts by reconstructing the philosophical and political discourse of toleration since antiquity. He demonstrates the diversity of the justifications and practices of toleration from the Stoics and early Christians to the present day and develops a systematic theory which he tests in discussions of contemporary conflicts over toleration.

Introduction
Part I. Between Power and Morality: The Historical Discourse of Toleration: 1. Toleration: concept and conceptions
2. More than a prehistory: Antiquity and the Middle Age
3. Reconciliation, schism, peace: humanism and the Reformation
4. Toleration and sovereignty: political and individual
5. Natural law, toleration and revolution: the rise of liberalism and the aporias of freedom of conscience
6. The Enlightenment - for and against toleration
7. Toleration in the modern era
8. Routes to toleration
Part II. A Theory of Toleration: 9. The justification of toleration
10. The finitude of reason
11. The virtue of tolerance
12. The tolerant society.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], History of ideas [JFCX], Social & political philosophy [HPS]