Intolerance: Premodern Roots and Modern Manifestations [Paperback]

Intolerance of ideas different from ones own seems to be a common attitude among human beings and, at the same time, something that seems to be more pronounced in recent years. In this volume, political theorists and philosophers consider some of the historical preconditions of modern intolerance and debate the sources of its recent manifestations.

From theories of religious intolerance during the Reformation to the contemporary suppression of religious symbols; from homophobia to attempts to ban it; from populism on the right to cancel culture on the leftthis book covers a variety of forms of intolerance, analysing not only its consequences but its causes and implications. Some of the chapters suggest means by which democracies may, through popular and judicial measures, defend themselves against intolerance, while others probe the philosophical grounding of intolerance in epistemological and metaphysical doctrines such as self-evident truth, divine revelation, inner illumination, na?ve realism, and the moral relativism attributed to analytic philosophy and postmodernism.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Review.

From theories of religious intolerance during the Reformation to the contemporary suppression of religious symbols; from homophobia to attempts to ban it; from populism on the right to cancel culture on the leftthis book covers a variety of forms of intolerance, analysing not only its consequences but its causes and implications as well.

Introduction: Intolerance, Power, and Epistemology 1. Consequences, Conscience, and Fallibility: Early Modern Roots of Toleration 2. Marx and Romanticism 3. Early Modern Epistemologies and Religious Intolerance 4. Citizens as Militant Democrats, Or: Just How Intolerant Should the People Be? 5. Philosophical Foundations of Contemporary Intolerance: Why We No Longer Take ls&