Toleration in Political Conflict
Cambridge University Press, 10/3/2013
EAN 9781107040328, ISBN10: 1107040329
Hardcover, 234 pages, 23 x 15.4 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
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.
Advance praise: 'One of the most important philosophers writing on toleration today, Glen Newey brilliantly analyses the conceptual intricacies of this complex notion as well as the political stakes in understanding and applying that term. A timely book.' Rainer Forst, University of Frankfurt, and author of Toleration in Conflict (2013)