Toleration and Democracy

It seems natural to mention the concepts of toleration and democracy in the same breath, for from a historical perspective toleration appears to be no less a modern achievement than the constitutional state and democracy. Moreover, toleration is regarded as a necessary component of democracy. John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and his Letter Concerning Toleration, published at the same time, seem to testify to this connection as much as the coinciding of the Glorious Revolution with the Toleration Act of William III, all of which occurred in the year 1689. Yet, on closer inspection things appear different. For a century later, at the very moment when social and political relations were being fundamentally transformed by the American and French revolutions in the name of popular sovereignty, we find Kant speaking in 1784 (in his answer to the question “What Is Enlightenment?”) of the “arrogant name of tolerance.” And in the debates over the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in the French National Assembly in August 1789, Mirabeau declared that the concept of toleration “smack(s) of tyranny” because it involves the power to grant or withhold freedom of religion. In The Rights of Man (1791), Paine likewise describes toleration as the counterfeit of intolerance and as no less despotic than the latter. Finally, Goethe would take up this critique of toleration and raise it from the political to the interpersonal level: “Tolerance should be a temporary attitude only; it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to insult.” Thus, toleration suddenly finds itself in conflict with democracy; it seems to belong to a pre-democratic, absolutist era. Conversely, however, the numerous political-religious conflicts from the modern period up to the present demonstrate that a pluralist democracy in which different conceptions of the good and the just confront each other cannot get by without toleration. The profound ambivalence of toleration that becomes apparent here is no accident—this, at any rate, is my thesis. Ambivalence is a distinguishing feature of the concept of toleration. For it remains a matter of controversy not only where the limits of toleration should be drawn within a political community but also what toleration actually means and, in addition, whether toleration is even something good when viewed from the perspective of an enlightened understanding of democracy. bs_bs_banner