ABSTRACT
When we drop our attachment to the dogma of modern Western, essentially liberal exclusivity, and cast our net broadly for principles of tolerance, what we discover are, as Horst Dreitzel has said of the seventeenth century, “different theories, even if these theories partially or fully contradict one another.”78 I do not mean to suggest that there is nothing in common between these diverse approaches to toleration, that they are merely discrete doctrines that happen, coincidentally, to converge around the promotion of tolerant practices. Rather, we may fruitfully conceive of disparate paths to tolerance in the manner of Wittgensteinian “family resemblances.” There is no single conceptual characteristic that all theories of toleration share, but instead we must speak of similarities that lead us to bundle or group them together in contradistinction to the family of intolerant doctrines (of which a multiplicity also exists). Modernity’s insistence that it constitutes the unique path to tolerant principles cries for a pluralistic critique. The historical examples examined above reveal the need to surrender the contention that there is but a single “true” principle of tolerance, a single overriding reason (whether rights or liberty or autonomy) for societies and individuals-regardless of time and place-to be tolerant. Historians of modern thought and practice would do well to keep this precept in mind when considering the history of toleration.
