The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies: Reasonable Tolerance
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The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies: Reasonable Tolerance Catriona McKinnon and Dario Castiglione (eds.) University of Manchester Press, Manchester, 2002, 212pp. ISBN: 0 7190 6232 2. Toleration as Recognition Anna Elisabetta Galeotti Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, 242pp. ISBN: 0 521 80676 3. Recognition and Difference: Politics, Identity, Multiculture Scott Lash and Mike Featherstone (eds.) SAGE Publications, London, 2002, 282pp. ISBN: 0 7619 4987 9. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism Elizabeth A. Povinelli Duke University Press, Durham, 2002, 338pp. ISBN: 0 8223 2868 2. Contemporary Political Theory (2004) 3, 224–230. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300127
Tolerance should be a temporary attitude only: it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to insult. (Goethe cited by Forst in McKinnon & Castiglione 2003, 74) Kenbi Lawyer: What was it like before the white man? Tom Barradjap: I don’t know mate I never been there. Kenbi Lawyer: Yeah, right, ha ha ha, but what was the traditional law for this place? We need to know what was the traditional law for this place. (cited by Povinelli 2002, 61) In their introduction to The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies, Catriona McKinnon and Dario Castiglione suggest that, given the recent challenges posed by multiculturalism and globalization, the traditional liberal concept of toleration ‘may have lost its usefulness’ and needs to be reformulated in the light of ideals such as ‘reasonableness and recognition’ (p. 3). Attempts to justify toleration either on prudential or sceptical grounds can, at most,
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establish a limited form of toleration that fails to satisfy the requirements of justice and/or the political demands of the tolerated. By contrast, justifying toleration either in terms of public reason or recognition requires moving ‘to a deeper engagement with difference captured by ideas of respect and sensitivity to others’ identity and self-chosen aims and lifestyles’ (p. 7). This ‘deeper engagement’ is what the authors of and contributors to the four books reviewed here all hope to describe. However, they vary in their assessment of whether the concepts of toleration and/or recognition provide an adequate basis in terms of which to do this. Theories of toleration inevitably run into two difficulties. First, how can it be right to tolerate what is morally wrong? Second, how is it possible to determine the limits of toleration without this becoming a justification of intolerance? Rainer Forst (in McKinnon and Castiglione) argues that the ideal of public reason demonstrates that both these difficulties are more apparent than real. The epistemological aspect of being reasonable means recognizing pluralism as an inevitable consequence of the free operation of reason in society. The normative aspect of being reasonable means respecting others as ‘worthy of being given adequate reasons’ (pp. 80–81). Public reasons must satisfy the conditions of reciprocity (they must ap
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