The Erosion of Tolerance and the Resistance of the Intolerable
Authors: Ricœur Paul 
Published: March 2007

Tolerance is the fruit of an asceticism in the exercise of power. It is a virtue. An individual virtue, and a collective virtue. It would in fact be a mistake to believe that it only takes on meaning with a form of power, that of the State. Intolerance has its first impulse in the power that each of us has of imposing our beliefs, our convictions, our manner of leading our lives on others, from the moment that each believes only these to be valid, only these to be legitimate. For each of us, to act is to exercise a power over … This initial asymmetry of action makes it such that every act has an agent and a receiver, a passive agent. But if intolerance is armed with a power over …, it is justified in the eyes of the one exercising it by the alleged legitimacy of the belief, of the conviction. This presumption of legitimacy results from the disapproval of opposed or simply different beliefs, convictions, ways of life. Two elements are therefore necessary to intolerance: the disapproval of the opposed beliefs and convictions of others, and the power of preventing them from leading their life as they see fit. It is here that lies the double reason for the propensity towards intolerance in the human heart. We could think that intolerance only rages when, on the one hand, the power to prevent sits in the hands of the public force, using the secular arm, and when, on the other hand, the disapproval takes the form of a public condemnation by a State partisan professing a particular vision of good. In this respect the religious wars of Europe would constitute the lasting paradigm of intolerance, the Church - or the Churches - offering the unction of truth to the States and the State furnishing the sanction of the secular arm to a given Church. In accordance with this ancient paradigm, the residual religious fanaticisms of old Europe would today find themselves relayed by the fundamentalist fanaticisms coming principally from Islam. It is also against this version of intolerance that the discourse of tolerance constituted itself in the Western world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But if the power of the State, joint until a recent past to ecclesiastical power, is alone in giving a public dimension to reprobation and an historical efficiency to the power of prevention that individual will lacks, public force ultimately only operates through the individual passions that serve as relays in the direction of the most intimate dispositions of the human heart. Even the tyrant needs a sophist to extort the belief by persuasion, flattery or intimidation. It is in the last instance within the individual, even driven by fear, that the destiny of intolerance plays itself out. To reduce the discontinuity between the individual and the institution, it is legitimate to underline the role of what Michael Walzer calls in Spheres of Justice “shared understandings”: it is true that we can always find intermediary communities of allegiance, conviction and power between the individual level and the state level. It is even at this privileged intermediary level that the education of passions which we will discuss later on can be exercised …. In the same way, to return to the period of Enlightenment, it is as much to the individuals called out of the voluntary state of minority (Kant) to the States invited to lift the censorship and also to the enlightened part of the public that the Encyclopedists’ plea in favor of tolerance addresses itself. From this moment it is in a double - or even triple - sense that tolerance is a virtue. The ultimate reason is that power is a general anthropological structure which lets itself be discerned at all levels in which one's power (puissance) to act is susceptible to affecting the other's power (puissance) to act and to diminishing it (Spinoza).