How far Should Tolerance go?

Yves Charles Zarka

• Publisher: Mimesis International
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9788869772146
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What are the limits of tolerance in constitutional or liberal democracies today? This is a crucial question, for if there were no limits to tolerance, it would ultimately destroy itself by accepting the intolerable. The concept of tolerance has to be assessed from a political point of view, thus questioning to what extent its potential achievement does not suppose any moral mutation in humanity. For instance, if people were all already 'virtuous' according to a commonly held moral framework, there would be simply no need to speak of tolerance. Conversely, if it were the case that people could be made 'virtuous', then tolerance would be the matter of an improbable utopia. Ultimately, we need to consider how tolerance can be conceptualised in a way that is relevant to people and their societies as they actually are. In a time when a growing amount of political demands touches on themes of cultural identity and rights, and while we witness a mounting wave of religious fundamentalism, what should democracies accept and what should they refuse?

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction How to think of coexistence in a torn-apart world?
• 1. Tolerance is an issue for our times
• 2. Tolerance-structure
• 3. A torn-apart world
• 4. Recognition without reconciliation
• 5. The mechanisms of tolerance-structure
• 6. State neutrality
• 7. State neutrality and secularism
• 8. State neutrality and the limits of state action
• 9. Return to tolerance-structure: the “state neutrality” mechanism
• 10. From religious tolerance to cultural tolerance
• 11. Neutrality of justice and plurality of conceptions of the good
• 12. Principles of justice: political values or procedural liberalism?
• 13. Reasonable pluralism and consensus by crosschecking
• 14. The two tyrannies
• 15. How far can the state remain neutral?
• 16. Return to tolerance-structure: “fundamental values and rights”
• 17. Human dignity
• 18. Fundamental rights
• 19. Return to tolerance-structure: the third mechanism
• 20. Minorities and cultural rights
• 21. Critique of the concept of multicultural citizenship
• 22. Who is the subject of collective rights?
• 23. Do cultural differences need protecting?
• 24. Which cultural rights should tolerance-structure guarantee?
• 25. The fiction of single identity: we are all mixed-race
• 26. Education in memory and freedom
• 27. Subjective rights and the theory of connections
• 28. Critique of community
• 29. Tolerance-structure and the transformation of political society