On toleration
By: Michael Walzer.
Series: The Castle lectures in ethics, politics, and economics
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New Haven
Language: eng
Number of pages: 126
Subjects: Human rights; Toleration; Pluralism (Social sciences); Multiculturalism
Description: Michael Walzer examines five "regimes of toleration" - from multinational empires to immigrant societies - and describes the strengths and weaknesses of each regime, as well as the varying forms of toleration and exclusion each fosters. Walzer shows how power, class, and gender interact with religion, race, and ethnicity in the different regimes and discusses how toleration works - and how it should work - in multicultural societies like the United States.

Walzer offers an eloquent defense of toleration, group differences, and pluralism, moving quickly from theory to practical issues, concrete examples, and hard questions.

His concluding argument is focused on the contemporary United States and represents an effort to join and advance the debates about "culture war," the "politics of difference," and the "disuniting of America." Although he takes a grim view of contemporary politics, he is optimistic about the possibility of coexistence: cultural pluralism and a common citizenship can go together, he suggests, in a strong and egalitarian democracy.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-119) and index.