toleration

toleration, a refusal to impose punitive sanctions for dissent from prevailing norms or policies or a deliberate choice not to interfere with behaviour of which one disapproves. Toleration may be exhibited by individuals, communities, or governments, and for a variety of reasons. One can find examples of toleration throughout history, but scholars generally locate its modern roots in the 16th- and 17th-century struggles of religious minorities to achieve the right to worship free from state persecution. As such, toleration has long been considered a cardinal virtue of liberal political theory and practice, having been endorsed by such important political philosophers as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, and it is central to a variety of contemporary political and legal debates, including those concerning race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Toleration as negative liberty

The term toleration is derived from the Latin verb tolerare—“to endure,” or “to bear with”—and involves a two-step process comprising disapproval and permission: one judges a group, practice, or belief negatively yet makes a conscious decision not to interfere with or suppress it. For instance, ruling elites might view an unconventional religion as fundamentally erroneous and its doctrines as utterly misguided while nonetheless endorsing the rights of its adherents to profess it free of legal penalties. In a similar vein, one who disapproves of homosexuality might support legislation outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, on the grounds of liberty or equality. The achievement of toleration in any given realm of society, then, involves a willingness on the part of individuals or governments to provide protections for unpopular groups, even groups they themselves might consider deeply mistaken.

Compared with more expansive terms such as recognition or acceptance, then, toleration is fairly minimal. As a species of what the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”—characterized by noninterference, or the absence of external constraints on individual action—toleration has historically tended to fall somewhere between persecution on the one hand and full liberty and equality on the other. And yet this minimal, negative term has played a key role in the protracted struggle on behalf of broader understandings of political rights for unpopular minorities. Tolerationist politics seeks to provide a sort of foothold for such groups as they carve out a protected social space for themselves; it represents an acknowledgment of both the reality and the permanence of diversity within contemporary societies. In this sense, a minimal term like toleration may require extensive government action to safeguard unpopular minorities from violence at the hands of their fellow citizens or other actors in civil society.

Across time and place, reasons for tolerating have varied widely. In some cases, prudential, strategic, or instrumental considerations—including weariness of the social costs of continued persecution—lead elites to support rights for members of unpopular groups. At other points in history, religious convictions about the importance of free assent in matters of faith, such as are found in the thoughts of Locke, have advanced the tolerationist cause. Epistemological skepticism, moral relativism, and philosophical commitments to autonomy as a fundamental human value have grounded tolerationist thought and practice as well. In other words, the practice of toleration (by individuals or governments) may or may not reflect a virtue or ethic of “tolerance”; it may rather express far more concrete and particular judgments about specific situations.

Liberalism and toleration

Historically, toleration has most often been associated with matters of religion as marginalized or minority religious groups seek the right to follow their consciences unmolested. Scholars trace the roots of modern toleration to the wars of religion in early modern Europe and to 17th-century England, where religious issues were intimately connected with political disputes that led to the beheading of one king (Charles I) and the abdication of another (James II). Such historical eras witnessed the coalescence of a host of arguments (philosophical, political, psychological, theological, epistemological, economic) supporting religious toleration, as well as the victory of tolerationist forces in England and in France (under the Edict of Nantes) and across the Continent. In earlier eras, tolerationist systems of various sorts had existed under the Roman Empire, under the Ottoman millet system (which permitted the existence of autonomous non-Muslim religious communities), and in the work of medieval thinkers who envisioned adherents of diverse religions coexisting peacefully. Scholars have also located tolerationist sentiments outside the Western tradition entirely, in such important figures as the Indian emperor Ashoka (3rd century bce).

Such historical resources notwithstanding, however, it is the liberal tradition that has most powerfully articulated the grounds, significance, and potential of the tolerationist ideal in modernity. Modern liberal theory has built its approach to social difference and diversity generally upon the cornerstone of toleration as a blueprint for addressing socially divisive phenomena. John Milton’s pamphlet Areopagitica (1644), with its plea for freedom of the press, also functioned as a defense of the rights of religious minorities, since the censorship Milton denounced was often directed at unconventional religious treatises. Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1690) is generally considered the most important liberal defense of religious toleration, yet the significance of Locke’s formulation lies not so much in its originality but rather in the way that Locke synthesized more than a century’s worth of European tolerationist arguments, many of them deeply Christian in nature. Lockean toleration, in turn, entered the American tradition through its influence on Thomas Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia,” first drafted in 1779 but not passed until 1786.

But important as he was to the American case, Locke was just one of many important early modern figures (along with Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Bayle, and Benedict de Spinoza, to name just a few) who contributed to the spread of tolerationist ideas in Europe. Works by important French and German Enlightenment thinkers—for example, Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance (1763; A Treatise upon Toleration) and Immanuel Kant’s “Was ist Aufklärung?” (1784; “What Is Enlightenment?”)—embraced the cause of toleration in matters of religion and provided a template for the Enlightenment’s championing of free inquiry and freedom of thought and speech. Still later, Mill’s On Liberty (1859) broadened the liberal defense of conscience and speech into a theory championing the rights of individuals to act on their deepest beliefs in matters that did not harm others and to be free not only from political and legal sanctions but also from the tyranny of majority opinion.

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Toleration has been as important in practice as it has been in theory, as a conceptual foundation for such basic liberal practices as the separation of church and state and constitutional efforts to protect individuals’ ability to act in accordance with their deepest convictions. Protection for conscience and religion is enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1789) and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and such rights ground a host of wider protections.

Questions of toleration extend beyond religion into other areas of social and political life, wherever unpopular or controversial groups face a hostile environment and stand in need of protection from state interference or their enemies in civil society. Over time, tolerationist arguments have been employed in attempts to protect groups marginalized on account of race, gender, and political views. In the early 21st century, matters of sexual orientation continued to engage the attention of legal and political theorists as they probed the nature and limits of toleration.

Critical perspectives

Like any other central political concept, toleration has always had its detractors. Early modern critics viewed defending religious orthodoxy as an integral responsibility of legitimate government. On this understanding, religious toleration threatened to undermine one of the key ingredients of social solidarity and to weaken the state, perhaps fatally. In the 20th century, critical theorists—most notably, the German American philosopher Herbert Marcuse in his noted essay “Repressive Tolerance”—objected to the fact that toleration’s emphasis on maximizing individual choice leaves in place powerful social disparities. Marxist-informed critics such as Marcuse aimed to uncover the ways in which structures of power (for instance, the capitalist class structure and patriarchy) influence, often in deeply hidden ways, the formation of religious or political beliefs, a process that seems to be overlooked by toleration’s acceptance of individual preferences as sacrosanct. Postmodernists, multicultural theorists, and those seeking a more positive recognition of difference often criticized toleration as insufficient and grudging, unable to provide authentic respect for the diversity that lies at the heart of contemporary social life. Toleration, in this view, grants permission for difference but does not praise or affirm it. And those who rank social unity, religious truth, or collective values more highly than individual autonomy continued to object to, or at least to question, toleration’s decoupling of political society from overarching views of the good life.