The Power of Tolerance: A Debate (New Directions in Critical Theory) by Wendy Brown

by Wendy Brown

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization?Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Theory

Mass Market Paperback

First published April 1, 2014

About the author

Wendy L. Brown is an American political theorist. She is Class of 1963 First Professor of Political Science and a core faculty member in The Program for Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It was a good introduction to the rich, incisive thoughts of Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst in regards to toleration. You do not dig too deep into their positions or ideas. This is a book you can finish in a sitting. In a lot of ways, this book just felt like a slither of a tip of an iceberg. So, a reader may feel a bit cheated if one purchases this book in hopes to get into the cerebral nitty-grittiness of Forst and Brown's monumental ideas on toleration. But I felt like it was a enough to be acquainted with their projects and their general positions. Furthermore, the slim book provides motivation and curiosity to really explore each theorist's ideas. I embraced it as just a very interesting discussion between two brilliant people who thought about this very important subject a lot!

[Nick Ziegler · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is an interesting moment in this volume when the audience member identified as Fourth Questioner admits that she is unsurprised by the "sides" taken by each interlocutor of the debate, as they seem to her (for reasons she doesn't identify) to be somehow predictable on the basis of the subject positions of the two thinkers. The Questioner is at pains to be critical of Germany and its history of easy acceptance of "hegemonic ideas," and to suggest that she sympathizes with Brown, "the sceptic," with her US, feminine, "West Coast situation" perspective.

Brown positively bristles at being "reduced to [her] subject position," as well we all might, and even suggests that the Questioner is taking shots at her Jewish and lesbian identities -- this despite the fact that the Questioner was, if anything, being exclusively critical of Forst and his German masculinity (which the Questioner supposes to be somehow isomorphic with Forst's positive project of tolerance as public virtue, which is implied to have a disavowed dark side). Instead, Brown suggests that Forst and herself disagree not on the basis of gender, sexuality, nationality, or ethnicity, but because they are from different intellectual traditions.

The volume is about the uses to which tolerance, as an idea of regulating the interactions between people of different subject positions with different ethical practices and habits, can be put. The entire project is predicated on the idea that unchosen social positionalities somehow constrain or determine even the intimate aspects of a subject's life, like his or her beliefs about religion or philosophy, and that tolerance is a posited but perhaps dubious manner of ensuring that ethical differences with no overriding public or moral importance can be unmarginalized, unpunished allowed to be (ideally not by a deciding authority with its own positionality, but by the "rules of the game" themselves). As "the sceptic," Brown is critical of the idea that there might be a universal, or at least democratically-decideable, standard of discourse whereby those ethical practices that qualify for tolerance can be determined. Or, to put it another way, she believes there are no public norms, because the polis is riven with irreconcilable divisions that are always effects and causes of power differentials.

Nevertheless, in her position as a philosopher and political thinker, she appropriates for herself something like that which she denies in the political sphere. That is, she insists that she and (perhaps she is merely being polite) Forst are subjects with agency, making choices on the basis of the standards of rationality. Furthermore, despite disagreeing and even talking past one another at times (Brown is more insistent than successful in diminishing the number of contact points between their two projects; Forst is characteristically quick to see them as collaborating and having complementary conclusions), her participation in this event and in intellectual life generally belies a confidence that some public standards of rationality are possible. Indeed, she seems to believe she can communicate with Forst.

Though Brown insists that what divides Forst and herself are merely different intellectual traditions, it's not clear that this is a different claim than that made by the Questioner. After all, isn't her studying under Wolin, and Forst studying under Habermas, each a result of the subject positions of the two thinkers? If we were to write a history or genealogy of the differences between Wolin's lineage and Habermas's, wouldn't we explain this by reference to the distinct local histories of, at the broadest level, academic philosophy in the US and in Germany?

We would, but perhaps this would only be partial. Because, as Brown's umbrage helpfully reminds us, there is something inadequate about simply viewing subjects as reflexive or mechanical outcomes from extrasubjective processes of history or socialization (in the family, in the nation, and so on). There is a process of rationality that can be shared, at least to some degree, such that these extrasubjective processes can be bridged. But in her feigned bafflement at what Forst is after in talking of tolerance as grounding a way of conflict management in diverse societies, Brown seems to be denying the very possibility of such sharing in the first place. Her rejection of Forst's positive project of tolerance follows from a general pessimism about the possibility of communication in a public sphere between differently-constituted subjects with frequent power differentials.

And yet she would insist that she can do this very thing. Perhaps there is a lesson here for critical and social theory more generally.

[Huzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"On a civilizational level, tolerance is defined as a site of Western supremacy, or site of supremacy vis-a-vis the imagined tolerant, and it is used to justify violence against the imagined intolerant. It is used at the level of civilizational discourse to wrap the West in a shroud of pure tolerance and endless tolerance, when in fact these are all these histories of intolerance as well as internal struggles over bigotry in the West. In civilizational discourse today, we are the tolerant, they are the intolerant, hence we can bomb them into tolerance, to put it dramatically." -Wendy Brown

"We have to kill racism, not tolerate it" -Rainer Forst

Loved reading both sides arguments. Strongly recommend it.