Again: Tolerance, Democracy, Pluralism

I. Comment by Philip Green

To an observer, the recent controversy over tolerance in the pages of DISSENT has shed more heat than light—chiefly for the reason that the disputants have been talking about different things while seeming to be talking about the same thing. I would like to attempt to offer some clarifying distinctions about “tolerance”—both the word and the act.

One—but only one—aspect of Mill’s plea for tolerance in On Liberty may be taken as a plea for tolerance of idiosyncratic personal behavior; of, in a word, difference. Mill speaks primarily of acts within the boundaries of one culture. Since his time, this conception of tolerance has been steadily further extended under the rubric...