ABSTRACT
Tolerance paradoxes imply a special kind of borderwork, one that is often highly intense. Despite their apparently neutral appearance (they seem to have a merely ‘logical’ or ‘linguistic’ nature), they frequently betray uncertainty. Tolerance paradoxes are a kind of borderwork that is especially like this. Let us put it this way: because they appear to be the products of reason or of language, tolerance paradoxes seem to lie outside the borderwork contexts that produce them. Both ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘tolerance’ are highly complex words, full of minor and major contradictions which make them difficult to interpret in isolation, outside the contexts in which they are used. The word ‘tolerance’ has a long history and, as with everything important in culture and society, history contains many clues and patterns that can help us to understand the complexity of the present. The meaning of the word ‘tolerance’ comes not just from modern contexts, but also from its earlier history.
