1 WOULD DEFINE TOLERANCE AS THE DEGREE TO WHICH WE ACCEPT things of which we disapprove. Such a definition is only to define roughly, for the moment, what we are talking about, it does not settle any argument and it will require elaboration before it can be shown, as I hope to, that it is an important subject for historical and social research, hitherto neglected or often treated most superficially, that is either shallowly or purely on the level of ideas. ‘Tolerance’ I will use as a specific term-we are tolerant of this and that. ‘Toleration’ I will use for explicit theories or doctrines which state that we should be tolerant (or as tolerant as possible) of wide classes of actions or types of belief and behaviour. All societies accept to some degree, however small, some things of which government, public opinion or tradition disapprove. Many of these latter are trivial, both in contemporary and subsequent perspectives; but there are plainly many cases of significant and important degrees of tolerance existing in societies long before theories or doctrines of toleration emerge – which fundamentally are no older than the 16th century and do not become commonplace until the I 8th. Indeed, in many ways, as I will argue later, degrees of tolerance in autocracies are more interesting to study (and have been less studied) than intolerance in politicaldemocracies, or whatever term one chooses to use for modern polity.

IN THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION WE ARE CONCERNED WITH tolerance, not as a physical problem, but as a problem of human relations. In this context, ‘to tolerate’ generally means to endure, suffer or put up with a person, activity, idea or organization of which or whom one does not really approve. One can ‘put up with’ an item both when one can and cannot do anything about it. For example, one can ‘put up with’ the excesses of a ruler whose behaviour one has no power to amend. Equally, one can ‘put up with’ the excesses of a child even where one has no need to do so. In the second case, one has control; in the first, one does not. Both cases could be advanced as instances of ‘tolerance’. But cases of the first sort (powerlessness) I shall label as instances of ‘acquiescence’ or ‘sufferance’ or ‘endurance’, since it is obvious that acquiescence typically flows from powerlessness. I shall label cases of the second sort (powerfulness) as instances of tolerance. It is clear in any event that these two types of case are distinct, and, for the purposes of this discussion, at least, differential labelling is essential. In this context, an agent will be said to ‘tolerate’ an item where the item is disliked or disapproved and is yet voluntarily endured. On this definition it is plain that tolerance requires some form of self-restraint by the tolerator.

COMPARED WITH THE 19TH CENTURY, OURS IS AN AGE OF intellectual dishonesty. The 19th century did not invent the modern vision of the world, nor did it work out its implications. All that was already done in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it was in the 19th century that the awareness of these implications became widespread, partly through the sheer lapse of time, and more significantly, through the emergence of a large literate middle class which possessed the means, in various senses, for contemplating the new vision. The consequences of this are well known. The 19th century satisfied the demand and produced the secular prophets who wrestled, heroically, with the problem of finding a new meaning for life, honestly acceptable in the light of new critical standards and of the new knowledge.

IN THIS COMMENT ON THE TWO TREATISES ON TOLERATION COMPOSED for us by Preston King and Bernard Crick, I wish to raise three quite familiar questions. The first is how far the growth of toleration in the past, its prevalence in the present and its fostering in the future, may be related in any society to the general level of information,education and enlightenment, of rational knowledge and discourse, there obtaining. This vague issue can only be handled superficially in so short a space, but it has to be faced, though not directly tackled by King and Crick, because it seems to me to be entailed by the other two. They are, how far specifically political knowledge about present and past actions, beliefs and behaviour – political science in fact – is itself related to the tendency towards toleration. Finally, how effective the raising of the extent of enlightenment, general or politicalscientific, is likely to be in creating tolerant attitudes and tolerant practice.

1 SHALL ARGUE THAT TOLERANCE IS CENTRALLY A MORAL CONCEPT (although it is also used in a variety of non-moral ways). My differences with the two papers, with which I in many ways agree, derive from this observation. I shall argue that the definition they use must be extended to allow for claims to legitimacy characteristic of cases of tolerance, and I shall further argue (against Dr King) that tolerance characterizes social groups in a less formal sense than he allows, and (against Professor Crick) that tolerance is primarily a social rather than a political phenomenon.

DR KING AND PROFESSOR CRICK ARE BOTH MAINLY CONCERNED TO discuss the concept of tolerance as the deliberate acceptance of what is disapproved. They wish to reserve the use of the word ‘toleration’ for a variation upon this general idea, but their proposals are not quite the same. Dr King wants to use ‘toleration’ as ‘a label for those ideas, doctrines, ideologies or movements’ which have opposed specific types of intolerance. The dictionary label for this is ‘tolerationism’. Toleration is what the ideas, doctrines, etc. advocate; it is not a label for the ideas and doctrines themselves. Professor Crick, at the beginning of his paper, says that he too will use the word ‘toleration’ for ‘theories or doctrines’ which advocate a form of tolerance. But his actual usage later on suggests that he did not intend the word to mean the theories or doctrines; rather that he proposed to say a doctrine was a doctrine of toleration if it advocated a certain kind of tolerance. His distinction between ‘tolerance’ and ‘toleration’ is intended to restrict ‘toleration’ to tolerance in general, tolerance of wide classes of action, and not to use it for tolerance of one specific type, e.g. tolerance of religious worship (which is how it is in fact used in the Act of Toleration and in Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration).

I HOPE I SHALL OFFEND NEITHER PROFESSOR CRICK NOR DR KING if I do not discuss their papers in detail. With almost all they say I have no disagreement; and to what they say I think I have little to add. The first thing I wish to do is pursue a point which Crick makes early on in his paper and then drops. Crick says there that one aspect of toleration is ‘putting up with’ whatever it might be; to say that the weather, one's colleagues, or last night's party were ‘tolerable’ amounts to saying that one could put up with them. Of course, as he and King agree, to call any of these tolerable certainly implies that we did not actually like or enjoy it or them; whatever we regard with favour we do not simply tolerate. Crick thinks there is not much to be done with the notion of ‘putting up with’ something; but I shall try to show that we can get further than he thinks.