Delanty wants to show how Habermas’ theory of communicative action insensitivity to the particular challenges of cultural modernity, because of his push to purify rationality of instrumentalism, renders his moral universalism untenable (30). To rescue Habermas’ discourse theory, it must take account of culture more seriously and, in particular, be attuned to cultural transformation by connecting processes of identity formation and discursive practice (30).

Delanty, in particular, sees the problem with Habermas in the way his theory, especially the social pathology of the colonization of the lifeworld, is unable to explain cross-cultural conflict, the politics of identity and the politics of reconciliation (30). This is because Delanty believes these pathologies to be ‘endemic to the lifeworld’ (31). Thus, Delanty’s task is not to ‘refute the normative claims of Habermas’s social theory, but to reveal their sociological presuppositions’ in a bid to demonstrate the necessity of ‘bringing culture and identity to the foreground’ in a way that shifts Habermas’ theory from its sole focus on consensual agreement such that a new level of discourse is opened up for cultural understanding (31).

Delanty offers two critiques:

1. Strong critique: ‘Habermas’ concept of moral universalism is theoretically based on Occidental rationalism while it aspires to a more cosmopolitan status’ (31).
2. Weak critique: If the theory is to remain sociologically relevant it will have to accommodate forms of moral universalism at the level of discourse aimed at cultural understanding (31).

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This is a very rough draft of the first section which analyses the critiques of tolerance as put forward by Ghassan Hage. The next section, which is being written, will analyse the critiques put forward by Wendy Brown. However, I included part of the Brown section which PJ got and commented on, as well as what I have written in between sending it to her and getting her comments. Here are the overall comments we arrived at after discussing this draft and PJ’s comments: TBD.

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This post just contains a list of questions from PJ that I have highlighted as being important to the thesis and worthy of further reflection. I’ll typically add a brief explanatory note as to the context of the question. I’ll just be listing brief notes and/or links to other thoughts. The responses are not going to be elaborate for the moment.

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This is actually taken from an email I sent to PJ and HB. I include here a table of contents. Click through for the brief outline of each chapter.

Part I – Re-framing the problematic of toleration

Chapter 1 – Why is toleration in need of rescuing? The critiques

Chapter 2 – Why is toleration in need of rescuing? The alternatives

Chapter 3 – From dissent to difference: Recovering the neglected potentials of toleration

Chapter 4 – Toleration as a regulative ideal 1: Autonomy as/and discretion¹

Chapter 5 – Toleration as a regulative ideal 2: Acknowledging finitude and imperfection

Part II – A critical theory of toleration².

Chapter 6 – Toleration as a cultural resource: Formalising the techniques of toleration

NB: Have struck out parts because, as PJ has rightly suggested, the size of part 1 indicates that there is an equally sized part 2 and that is simply not the case. With this type of simple chapter structure, there is no need for parts.

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1. NB: Added the ‘/and’ after I sent the email to PJ because I don’t want to indicate that autonomy is reduced to discretion, but that toleration shows how the idea of individual autonomy must also account for the autonomy of others. [↩]
2. NB: This was also added after the email was sent [↩]

ABSTRACT

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

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On the 30th of June, 2010 at UNSW a one day symposium was held for invited guests to discuss an important text written by Maria Markus on the relationship between a civil and/or decent society. We had all been gathered on that day to celebrate Maria’s retirement from a formally active role in academic life and the papers that had been written in her honour, that are now published in a special Festschrift edition of Thesis Eleven.

An insightful paper was given by Martin Krygier, outlining an ongoing debate between he and Maria on the idea of civility and its social significance. Maria does not believe that civility has much social significance, especially in relation to the development of a decent and civil society. Martin, on the other hand, believes it to be a fundamental part of living in a society of strangers.

Filled with many notes and questions from the whole day, I left the symposium and began to write to both Maria and Martin, offering my own interpretation of civility that attempted to draw the connections between, what I thought, the equally valid but different points they make about civility. This post contains the text of that email.

I think it is going to find its way into my thesis, possibly in lieu of a discussion on autonomy and discretion. I want to use this as a way of responding to the critics of the depoliticising effects of tolerance to suggest that not all depoliticising effects are encountered as malignant and nor should they.

Maria responded saying it was a very interesting idea I had put forward, but that she nevertheless disagreed. She was going to give my note some careful consideration before responding. I’m anticipating a response from her soon, so I have posted my note so that I can later include her comments as a way of tracking what might need to be done in order to develop this idea.

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One of the more powerful critiques of toleration comes from those who demonstrate the extent to which its political deployments disguise asymmetrical power relations and are, therefore, complicit in reproducing the social inequalities they create through ‘culture’. This is the best way of summing up the positions of both Brown and Hage. My approach, however, does not seek to find a justification for the political deployments of toleration. In fact these sorts of merely rhetorical usages of toleration are inherently prone to failure to begin with. Insofar as the political seeks to organise social life without reference to it, then there are grounds for legitimation problems¹ or the denial of recognition². With respect to toleration, this is what Forst refers to as the permission conception. It is exemplified by calls to tolerance in the face of violence or fierce demonstrations of prejudice which merely asks those who carry a superior attitude to not act upon it, rather than to change it. Often this can be part of a political calculus, where the votes of those who feel superior or are sympathetic to what such attitudes are responding to count more than the victims of such prejudice and violence. Toleration, here, provides a virtuous cover for reproducing the status quo that is not accepted by everyone. This is precisely the emphasis of Marcuse’s critique of pure toleration. For Marcuse, the benign nature of toleration is deceiving. Toleration is actively engaged in privileging some perspectives and ways of life over others – those of the tolerators. Hage goes further to show how the position of the tolerators is established via a cultural heirarchy and that toleration provides a form symbolic violence that disguises the underlying asymmetries of power. What these perspectives fail to acknowledge is that toleration itself is not always accepted because it denies the validity of the experiences of those who are at the receiving end of these attitudes of superiority. And, as Brown suggests, it immediately marks the tolerated as different, but in a dissenting way. Thus, it can often be the case, that when the tolerated resist their being tolerated that they are seen to be ungrateful in their rejection of the benevolence of the tolerators. To be sure, the way in which the state becomes the addressee for social problems between citizens has to be understood as a mediated discourse. This means that the extent to which the state denies or privileges some experiences over others reflects a serious systematic distortion of communication. Whether this is on account of the diminishing role or existence of the (esp. informal) public sphere is not important here. This is definitely, however, where our analysis must go – into the self-constituting and self-defining social spaces where individuals seek to develop shared understandings about how they can live their lives together. In the same way, this is where the theoretical underpinning of toleration must also go – into the realm of experience, the lifeworld, out of which a renewed sense of politics can be discovered. After all, politics now seeks to appropriate experience in the most selective ways as its source of legitimacy. In any attempt to keep toleration immune from such misappropriations it is also important to provide an adequate theoretical conception of toleration as an intersubjective accomplishment. At the same time, we need to re-evaluate the role toleration can play in contemporary societies if we are to be able to provide better grounds for its justification – in other words, we need to have a clearer sense of what toleration is responding to. This is a largely descriptive and sociological task – of finding the patterns in experience that expose the social structures that both enable and constrain such experiences. But, equally as important, is the job of finding a ground for toleration in intersubjectively constituted experience – that is to say that the grounds for toleration, especially to mitigate against its misappropriation, has to be located as a response to certain experiences.

1. Elaborate upon this [↩]
2. Because certain ways of life are not granted the type of esteem which would allow them to be accounted for in political decision-making (cf. Deranty’s politicizing Honneth). [↩]

Joas summarises the importance of a theory of action across psychology, economics, sociology and philosophy, with emphasis on how little they take notice of each other’s arguments (1-3). The purpose being that the frequency with which a theory of action crops up across disciplines goes to show just how important it is and just how much confusion exists (3).

Not that Joas is looking to solve all these problems, but to put forward his own sociological approach to a theory of action that proposes a third model of action in addition to the two predominant models of rational action and normatively oriented action (4). This third creative model of action should also be viewed as overarching all modes of human action, thus avoid the creation of residual categories of action that dismiss the tacit assumptions of the first two models of action (4-5). In other words, when we see creativity as central to all forms of human action, we may better locate the proper place for rational and normatively oriented action.

Chapter 1 traces marginalisation of the creative dimension of action theory in sociology (5). Chapter 2 looks at approaches that account for creativity, but also looks at their distortions or false generalisations (5). Chapter 3 looks at ‘reconstructing three tacit assumptions that remain latent in the models of rational action and normativwly oriented action: namely the teleological character of human action, corporeal control by the actor, and the autonomous individuality of the actor’ (5). The idea being to ground them firmly into a theory of action because they equally part of the discourse of modernity and so have ramifications further than theory (5). Chapter 4 looks at these consequences for analyses of collective action, as a response to the limitations of functionalism and postmodern diagnoses for responding to differentiation and social development (5-6).

Through an analysis of the recent debate between Honneth and Fraser over a critical theory of justice, Forst provides his own alternative of ‘justificatory monism and diagnostic-evaluative pluralism’ which he calls the ‘first-things-first’ approach. “According to it, theories of recognition provide an essential sensorium for analyses of social suffering and of injustice, while with respect to the justification of justice claims, a discursive conception of justice is required” (291).

Such a model of justice presents itself requiring toleration as a particularly important expectation in the discursive component. (more…)

In commenting on the failure of autonomy-based liberalism to provide a justification for toleration, Mendus sees the problem of justification as follows:

Of necessity, toleration involves the dislike or disapproval of the tolerated thing, and the liberal must be mindful of the distinction between, on the one hand, toleration and unbridled licence and, on the other, toleration and apathy, if permission is not to be interpreted as praise, nor indifference to be confused with toleration (110).

To get to this, it is important to find out what type of society and state liberals favour (111).

Recap: autonomy-based toleration reverts to pragmatic justification rather than principled one when it comes to tolerating illiberal (not autonomy-valuing) things (111).

So, this chapter looks at a different approach to liberalism that does not invoke a fundamental or central value (like autonomy), but instead invokes a “shared picture of how states should conduct themselves” (112). This re-introduces notion of neutrality as a guiding political aim, rather than a philosophical foundation for liberalism (113). “The argument of this chapter aims to show that in practice the limits of toleration are ambiguously and indeterminately drawn within liberal society” (113).¹

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1. Really though: why is this a bad thing? That the limits of toleration are drawn and re-drawn only suggests that society is reflexively responding to dynamic and constitutive changes. One has to ask why it is that the state figures in the picture to begin with and what value there is in providing a political justification of toleration purely in terms of the extent to which it can be captured as a policy or law. Also, it is disturbing the extent to which society and state are seemingly synonymous throughout Mendus and those liberals she discusses. [↩]

Given the seemingly intimate connection between liberalism and toleration, Mendus seeks to explain this as well as whether or not the historical problems (esp. from Mill) persist in modern theories (70). Mendus argues that liberalism needs a theory of human nature for an adequate conceptual underpinning and that such a situation leads to potentially illiberal outcomes (70). Thus, Mendus wants to argue that “liberalism cannot deliver on its promise of a truly tolerant society” without giving way to socialist justifications or without reverting to a more narrow, pragmatic account of toleration such as the one offered by Locke (70).

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As much as Mill’s account of liberty appears to provide better grounds for justifying toleration, Mendus demonstrates how his appeals to human nature and attempts to justify limits to liberty lead towards illogical or illiberal outcomes. In the end, Mendus suggests that our interdependence and the nature of the society we live in need more prominence in any account of toleration.

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Mendus lays out basic political and conceptual issues attending to toleration: how do we find a justification for toleration given its paradoxical nature? Suggests that by properly defining its scope and limitations that a justification may be found that solves the paradox.

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Mendus draws out the main problems with Locke’s account of toleration: historically and issue specific, says nothing about morality, indifferent to rights of victims of intolerance. At the same time, Mendus suggests these do not render irrelevant the insights of Locke. It points to the importance of ‘comprehensive doctrines’ (beliefs), how toleration is and should remain distinct from liberty and equality and how moral theory needs to find alternative mechanisms to rights in order to understand and redress violations that do not fall neatly into its purview.

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This post will be used to collect initial, fairly unstructured thoughts and responses to my reading of the articles in the volume edited by Dario Castiglione and Catriona McKinnon on toleration and reasonableness as a new basis for a contemporary reformulation of toleration from a liberal perspective. I will provide a very brief exposition accompanied by some analysis or at least points of departure for analysis. I will be using this post as a way to test my initial analysis of the reasonableness reformulation of toleration summarised by Castiglione and McKinnon.

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The ambiguity of toleration is that it is seen by some as a “desirable state of mutual respect or esteem, while for others it is at best a pragmatic and at worst a repressive relation between persons or groups” (71). Forst seeks to explain and avoid these ambiguities. Central thesis: “toleration is a virtue of justice and a demand of reason” (71).

The concept of toleration and its paradoxes

General concept of toleration has six characteristics:

1. Context of toleration: refers to relation between tolerator and tolerated and that between subjects and objects of toleration (71).
2. Objection component (72).
3. Acceptance component: positive judgement that does not cancel out negative judgement but trumps it in the given context (something can be deemed wrong, but not intolerably wrong) (72).
4. Limits of toleration: lies “at the point where reasons for rejection become stronger than the acceptance reasons” (72). Actually, two limits: one between normative real of acceptable and tolerable practices; the other between tolerable practices and the normative realm of the intolerable (72). First paradox: The limits of tolerance implies intolerance (72). “To avoid this paradox, a conception of toleration must be able to show how far its limits can be drawn in a mutually justifiable and non-arbitrary way” (72).
5. “The exercise of toleration cannot result from compulsion, since the tolerating subjects would then be under an impossibility of voicing their objections and acting accordingly” [emphasis added] (72-3).
6. Toleration as a practice and tolerance as an attitude (73).

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Concerned with two ways of thinking about which political principles to adopt (and why): expectations about ways persons ought to relate to each other in political discourse (Rawls – constructivist) and values around which people ought to structure their lives (Raz – perfectionist) (54). The argument involves examining the different assumptions about the character of pluralism that informs each approach that relate to interpersonal attitudes that can be expected of people facing shared problems of justice in conditions of pluralism (55). “I shall argue that these are assumptions are not implicit in…and cannot be derived from assumptions about the nature of pluralism, but must instead be argued for separately” (55). (more…)

Introduction

According to Rawls, the ‘fact of pluralism’ is the result of the use of reason which stands under burdens (38).¹ It is these burdens that make pluralism reasonable (38). Following Rawls, liberal impartialists have insisted on the injustice of imposition – of insisting on the superiority of and imposing a conception of the good that others do not share (39).

But, the injustice of the imposition does not simply follow from the reasonableness of pluralism, as suggested by Rawls and his followers – rather, it needs some further claim, like equal respect (39). Thus, there are epistemological and moral aspects of reasonableness (39).

Aim of the chapter is to examine two arguments that claim to underpin the move from the reasonableness of pluralism to the injustice of imposition – the method of avoidance, or epistemological restraint, advocated by Rawls and followers; that of scepticism, exemplified by Barry (39). The conclusion drawn is that neither argument is successful – “Both scepticism and avoidance are epistemological arguments, and the move from the reasonableness of pluralism to the injustice of imposition requires a moral, not an epistemological, foundation” (40).² (more…)

1. The burdens of judgement:
   1. The evidence is conflicting and complex, and thus hard to assess and evaluate.
   2. Disagreement about weight of considerations.
   3. Indeterminacy of political and moral concepts requires us to rely upon interpretation and judgement.
   4. Our judgements are shaped by fairly unique total experiences.
   5. Different normative considerations on different sides.
   6. Social institutions limited in the values they can admit so some selection is necessary (38).

   [↩]

2. Is this where Habermas becomes more useful? [↩]

At the moment, I am considering the critical perspectives on toleration in order to determine to what ends it can be put and to what extent a reformulation is required. Thus, the idea is to show the limitations of the critiques or how they help to peel away the problematic layers of the concept of toleration so that we can more clearly get to its normative core. I have grouped these perspectives according to whether or not they seek to provide a defence of toleration. Thus, the affirmative critiques are still trying to find justifications for toleration, whereas the negative critiques are, at the very least, not concerned with this aim. Within the negative critiques there are two approaches to this problematic. The first that still seeks to justify toleration directly as virtuous and the second that seeks an indirect route. This note concerns my criticisms of the second approach within the affirmative critiques, exemplified by Rawls and elaborated upon by many in the McKinnon and Castiglione (2003) volume, The culture of toleration in diverse societies. The primary reason for this note is to document my analysis of these critiques without having read all the literature in this area, especially Rawls. As I continue reading I’ll need to come back and test the propositions here. (more…)

This is what I’m currently working on: my thesis in summary form. Basically, I’m writing a very unplanned, unstructured and under-elaborated version of my thesis as it stands right now. I’m focusing more on what I want to say rather than what others have said in a bid to find some way of organising my own thoughts. This amounts to a very meandering line of argumentation that reads more like a set of loosely related points. But, again, it’s mainly about me trying to figure out what I want to say.

2009-10-20

• Have added PJ’s comments as footnotes.
• Have added my preliminary responses to PJ’s remarks.
• A few things stand out:
  • The idea of the ‘logics of toleration’ is not clearly elaborated and I need to think this through properly.
  • The organisation of the ideas in this paper are not always coherent, although at certain points PJ is able to put together the pieces. I need to look at her specific comments and see how the provision chapter outline attends to these issues.
  • PJ has identified various cases of toleration that I have not adequately considered – these need to be attended to.
  • The distinction between morals and ethics is not properly elaborated. For one, I need to make sure my interpretation of how others conceieve of the distinction is accurate. I also, need to make clear the sense in which a different conception of the distinction is made apparent in toleration – a conception that is underappreicated and often undermined by the application of toleration itself.

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