Discourses of Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Enlightenment

As Peter Hanns Reill puts it in his introduction, tolerance, in its modern, positive sense is very much “a child of the Enlightenment.”(3) It is not difficult to locate instances of limited religious coexistence or grudging toleration in the medieval and early modern periods but these aberrations invariably derived from pragmatism: temporarily, there was more social and political sense in putting up with diversity than in following the usual pattern of imposing uniformity of belief and expunging heresy and dissent. A principled philosophical belief in the virtues of pluralism would not arrive on the European intellectual scene before the late seventeenth-century at the very earliest. Since we, too, are all children of the Enlightenment, we tend to see toleration in a positive light. We might even be minded to identify it as a sign of progress.

As Reill explains, however, such optimism (which can easily morph into Whiggish triumphalism) has been questioned in recent decades. Some philosophers and historians have identified the darker side of toleration. They have pointed to “the omnipresent gaze of a centralized domination” (4) which the enforcement of toleration requires. To create a tolerant society, there is often a need for an attentive, interventionist state. New norms of behaviour have to be created and policed (which, in itself, breeds suspicion of otherness) and, with no small amount of irony, the very survival of tolerance requires a new brand of intolerance — intolerance of intolerance itself. To enjoy freedom is to submit to previously unheard of levels of surveillance and moral scrutiny and this, by some accounts, is a hefty price to pay.

To venture down this theoretical avenue is a perilous undertaking and, while it provides a necessary corrective, it can also lead to exaggerated, perhaps even paranoid conclusions. It does remind us of one cardinal fact, however. The history of the rise of Western toleration is not nearly as straightforward as we used to imagine. It is important to jettison the rose-tinted historical spectacles and pay more attention to the many tensions and ambiguities that stemmed from the Enlightenment’s cautious embrace of tolerationism. This edited volume, a model of its type, does precisely that, and the contributors are to be heartily commended for their efforts.

After Reill’s impressive introduction, Hans Erich Bödeker offers a prologue in which he asks some very important questions about how we should study tolerance. There are two standard methodologies: seeing toleration’s rise as the consequence of social, economic and political shifts, or locating it firmly in the realm of the history of ideas. Both approaches have their virtues and have produced a great deal of important work but both have their drawbacks. There are competing risks, for instance, of either lapsing into vague abstraction or poring over legislative measures at the expense of studying the lived, day-to-day reality of toleration (or its absence). Bödeker, eager to cleanse both the theoretical and empirical stables, suggests that we ought to study the subject in the round and a good first step would be to examine the “structures of thought, patterns of argumentation, and the conceptual categories” (21) that underpinned attitudes towards toleration. He is also insistent that we should move beyond the religious dimensions of the issue (though these remain vitally important) and he offers several pointers towards future areas of research. Happily, many of them are represented in the book’s subsequent chapters.

The interaction between tolerance and religious belief will always be of pivotal importance and it is well studied in the first two-thirds of the volume. Geoffrey Symcox takes us to Savoy, a proudly Catholic state that was always obsessed with the dangers of dissent: a result, perhaps, of the memory of Calvin and Geneva shrugging of its authority during the Reformation era. For all the tides of Enlightenment, such fixations did not evaporate during the eighteenth century. Two groups felt the pinch. The Savoyard chapter of the Waldensians’ history had been truly awful: a tale of massacre and persecution. Matters began to improve during the eighteenth century, but as Symcox is eager to point out, the arrival of attenuated toleration had precious little to do with a principled belief in religious pluralism. Rather, it was the result of Savoy’s rulers succumbing to external political pressure. Those rulers’ policies tended to “veer opportunistically with each shift in the political situation” (40). The region’s Jews, by contrast, had enjoyed a relatively untroubled past. They had endured social exclusion, they had not been entitled to worship in public, and they had been made to wear symbols on their clothes. They had been spared the trials of ghettoization, however, but this all began to change in the late seventeenth-century. As Symcox concludes, this is a signal reminder that the emergence of centralized governments driven by reason of state did not always lead to increased toleration: in some instances, it had precisely the opposite effect.

A comparable warning is provided by Hartmut Lehmann’s chapter on dissenting Protestants in Württemberg. Tolerance here was much more expansive; echoing one of the themes of the introduction, Lehman explains, however, that this came at a cost: namely, ever-tightening political control and oversight. Sometimes, he opines,” the progress of Enlightenment cannot and should not be equated with a steady progress of religious tolerance.” (126) Similar hermeneutic spanners are thrown into the works by Frances Malino’s and David Sorkin’s chapters on the Jews of France and Germany. The most important is the reminder that, while the period witnessed increased toleration of Judaism, this was sometimes a double-edged sword. When it came to extending civil rights to Jews, there was a widespread notion that a quid pro quo was required. Jews would have to go through a process of ‘improvement’ and ‘regeneration’ and rid themselves of their ‘alien’ and ‘barbarous’ qualities in order to take their place as fully-fledged citizens. If this was toleration, it was of a decidedly repugnant variety.

The remaining chapters in the first part of the book offer some surprises. The late and much-missed Richard Ashcraft set himself the task of rehabilitating and revitalising John Locke’s reputation. He had two bugbears. The first was scholars who dismiss Locke because his philosophising was wrong-headed; the second, those who claim that his theories are no longer relevant. Ashcraft challenged any assumption that “arguments are, as it were, frozen in historical time and cannot be resuscitated for use by later thinkers.” (54) Richard Popkin also has assumptions to slay: in this case the belief that millenarian thought was always associated with intolerance. Popkin seeks to trace a tradition of “benign egalitarian millenarianism” (100) encapsulated by Ezra Stiles, the Chilean Jesuit Immanuel Lacunza, and Abbé Henri Gregoire.

Finally, Terence Ball tackles the often neglected subject of the emergence of political parties. This, he argues, was “a moral and intellectual achievement of no small importance” (73) and one of the crucial planks of modern toleration. Open, principled and heated debate was a sine qua non. For centuries the concept of factionalism had haunted the Western political imagination but, starting with Hobbes and progressing through the thought of Locke, Toland and Hume, a new paradigm began to emerge. The notion that principled opposition and political squabbling did not always have a deleterious impact began to take hold: a process, by Ball’s account, which culminated in the political activities of Jefferson and Madison.

The book’s second, shorter section moves into the social arena. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink analyses how talk of tolerance and rights influenced debate about race and slavery. Madelyn Gutwirth homes in on the fascinating subject of how eighteenth-century writers approached the “issue of exotic alterity through female personae” (170). She provides some insightful readings of Voltaire’s Zaïre, Marivaux’s La Colonie, and Staël’s Mirza and ends with the cheering thought that, while the period (including the French Revolution) did not secure many concrete victories for the cause of female equality, it at least unleashed a rhetoric that would be put to good use by women in the future. The book ends with two treatments of marginality — often a difficult concept to contemplate or locate in tolerationist discourses. Ann Goldberg looks at mental illness and the methods by which male masturbation was pathologised and demonised. By establishing a negative image of the male masturbator (defined by weakness, laziness and effeminacy) a dominant ideal of masculinity (defined by strength and discipline) was brought into sharper focus. Finally, Peter Becker introduces us to the German criminal subset of the Gauner: an expert in property crimes who was roundly condemned during the nineteenth century. Becker compares the attack on the Gauners with the relatively indulgent treatment of female prostitutes: a class perceived as a necessary evil and an outlet for male sexual passion. It is an appropriate way to end the volume because it reminds us that toleration only ever stretched so far and, even when it was advocated, the motives had at least as much to do with good, old-fashioned pragmatism as with enlightened theorising.

This is a first-rate contribution to the literature. Unlike so many edited volumes, it is much more than a random assemblage of essays. It asks fundamental questions about toleration: how was it defined, what was the difference between theory and practice, what was the precise trajectory of its arrival in various, different locations and social milieus? All of the contributions orbit this interpretative core and, as a result, the book possesses a winning coherency. It is essential reading for any student of the subject.