Toleranz im Konflikt

"This is a book by Rainer Forst, a professor at the University of Frankfurt. He is part of a tradition of thinking there, which runs from Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, to Forst. He tells me, jokingly, that it’s about toleration ‘from Jesus to Forst’, which explains why it’s 900 pages long! But, more seriously, it’s a book about the role of toleration in defusing, ameliorating and regulating conflict, and about conflicts within the idea of toleration itself. It’s being translated into English at the moment and will be published by Cambridge University Press as part of the Ideas in Context series. What Forst wants to do is restore to some kind of centrality a figure called Pierre Bayle who’s quite well known in historical circles but less known by contemporary political theorists. Bayle was writing around the same time as Locke and both wrote about toleration in the 1680s in response to events in France – specifically, to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had granted toleration to generations of French Protestants. Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration was paralleled by Bayle’s Commentaire Philosophique , a book about one justification for trying to impose religious conformity. What Bayle was trying to do was to develop a different justification for toleration, against imposition, which revolved around respect for individual conscience. What Forst says, to put it very generally, is that we need to think about the reasons that could plausibly be given to ground coercion. His thought is that you can’t give any reasons that would be acceptable to everyone, to impose a single way of life on them. He calls this a respect concept of toleration and he roots it in Bayle in the first instance, but of course he sees it as having been developed in other ways by other thinkers too, not least Habermas. His book is partly about toleration in relation to the legitimate exercise of force and partly an argument for a certain view of toleration, which moves away from the Lockean view in a broadly similar direction. It’s certainly the most ambitious modern attempt to argue about toleration."