Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780190679934
Subjects: Montaigne, michel de, 1533-1592; Toleration; Courtesy; Discussion; Communication in politics
Description: " At the heart of Montaigne's Essais lies a political conception of religious tolerance that we have largely forgotten today. In contemporary popular and academic discourse, tolerance of religious and other differences most often appears as an individual ethical disposition or a moral principle of public law. For Montaigne, tolerance is instead a political capacity: the power and ability to negotiate relationships of basic trust and civil peace with one's opponents in political conflict. Contemporary thinkers often argue that what matters most for tolerance is how we talk to our political opponents: with respect, reasonableness, and civility. For Montaigne, what matters most is not how, but rather that we talk to each other across lines of disagreement. In his view, any effective politics of tolerance requires actors with a sufficiently high tolerance for this political activity. Using his own experience negotiating between warring Catholic and Huguenot parties as a model, Montaigne investigates and publicly prescribes a set of skills, capacities, and dispositions that might help his readers to become the kinds of people who can initiate and sustain dialogue with the "other side" to achieve public goods - even when respect, reasonableness, and civility are not yet assured. Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics argues that this dimension of tolerance is worth recovering and reconsidering in contemporary democratic societies, in which partisan "sorting" and multidimensional polarization has evidently rendered political leaders and ordinary citizens less and less able to talk to each other to resolve political conflicts and to cooperate on matters of common public concern. "--

"Toleration is one of the most studied concepts in contemporary political theory and philosophy, yet the range of contemporary normative prescriptions concerning how to do toleration or how to be tolerant is remarkably narrow and limited. Contemporary thinking about toleration evinces, paradoxically, an intolerance of politics. This book argues for toleration as a practice of negotiation, looking to a philosopher not usually considered political: Michel de Montaigne. For Montaigne, toleration is an expansive, active practice of political endurance in negotiating public goods across lines of value difference. In other words, to be tolerant means to possess a particular set of political capacities for negotiation. Douglas Thompson draws on Montaigne's Essais to recover the idea that political negotiation grows out of genuine care for public goods and the establishment of political trust. Thompson argues that we need a Montaignian conception of toleration today if we are to negotiate effectively the circumstances of increasing political polarization and ongoing value conflict, and he applies this notion to current debates in political theory, as well to contemporary issues, including the problem of migration and refugee asylum. Additionally, for Montaigne scholars, he reads the Essais principally as a work of public political education, and resituates the work as an extension of Montaigne's political activity as a high-level negotiator between Catholic and Huguenot parties during the French Wars of Religion"--