Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present (Ideas in Context)
Cambridge University Press, 1/17/2013
EAN 9780521885775, ISBN10: 0521885779
Hardcover, 662 pages, 24.4 x 17 x 3.7 cm
Language: English
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.