Toleration in Political Conflict

Glen Newey argues that toleration is not just desirable but, given the nature of politics, inescapable.

Glen Newey (Author)

9781107040328, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 October 2013

234 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.49 kg

'Toleration in [Political] Conflict is simply the most impressive philosophical work specifically on toleration that I have ever read … It is an immensely long and thorough work.' John Horton, Keele University

Political disputes over toleration are endemic, while toleration as a political value seems opposed to those of civic equality, neutrality and sometimes democracy. Toleration in Political Conflict sets out to understand toleration as both politically awkward and indispensable. The book exposes the incoherence of Rawlsian reasonable pluralist justifications of toleration, and shows that toleration cannot be fully reconciled with liberal political values. While raison d'état concerns very often overshadow debates over toleration, these debates – for example about terrorism – need not be framed as a conflict between toleration and security. Framing them in this way tends to obscure objectionable behaviour by tolerators themselves, and their reliance on asymmetric power. Glen Newey concludes by sketching a picture of politics as dependent on free speech which, he argues, is entailed by the demands of free association. That in turn suggests that questions of toleration are inescapable within the conditions of politics itself.

1. Introduction: toleration in trouble
2. Tolerating politics
3. Democratic toleration?
4. Toleration as sedition
5. The trouble with respect
6. How not to tolerate religion
7. Liberty, toleration, security
8. Toleration and power
9. Tolerating ourselves, tolerating terror
10. Toleration, free speech and the right to lie
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB], Political science & theory [JPA], Social & political philosophy [HPS]