On Toleration

What kinds of political arrangements enable people from different national, racial, religious or ethnic groups to live together in peace? This book discusses the politics of toleration. Michael Walzer examines five "regimes of toleration" - from multinational empires to immigrant societies - and describes the strengths and weaknesses of each regime, as well as the varying forms of toleration and exclusion each fosters. Walzer shows how poor, class and gender interact with religion, race and ethnicity in the different regimes and discusses how toleration works - and how it should work - in multicultural societies. Walzer offers a defence of toleration, group differences and pluralism, moving quickly from theory to practical issues, concrete examples and hard questions. His concluding argument is focused on the contemporary United States and represents an effort to join and advance the debates about "culture war", the "politics of difference", and the "disunity of America". Although he takes a grim view of contemporary politics, he is optimistic about the possibility of coexistence: cultural pluralism and a common citizenship can go together, he suggests, in a strong and egalitarian democracy.