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This book represents the most comprehensive historical and systematic study of the theory and practice of toleration ever written.
List of contents
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.
About the author
Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In addition, he is Co-Director of the interdisciplinary Research Cluster 'Formation of Normative Orders' and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Goethe University. He has also taught at the Free University in Berlin, the New School for Social Research in New York and Dartmouth College, and has been offered a full professorship at the University of Chicago and a visiting professorship at Harvard University, Massachusetts; he has also been invited to join the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin as a Fellow. In 2012, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the highest honour awarded German researchers.
Summary
Toleration is an indispensable yet ambivalent concept in pluralistic societies. Is it based on mutual respect or on condescension? Why is it right to tolerate what is wrong? This book is the most comprehensive existing study of debates over toleration since antiquity and develops a theory for our time.
