ABSTRACT
As an idea that inhabits contemporary western political thinking, toleration has its origins principally in the European Reformation of the sixteenth century. Ideas and practices of toleration have a much longer pedigree going back to the ancient and medieval worlds (Nederman 2000) and beyond the European world (Lauren 1999), but, in the west of the modern era, the Reformation and the religious divisions it created provided the main stimulus for thought about toleration. Religious difference remains an important focus for the theory and practice of toleration in virtually all parts of the contemporary world, but the idea of toleration is now applied much more widely, for example, to differences of culture, ethnicity, political opinion, life-style, sexuality and sexual conduct, forms of dress, and so on. “Tolerant,” “tolerance” and “toleration” are generally used as terms of commendation, while “intolerant” and “intolerance” are typically pejorative terms, but that should not mislead us. There is much that we should not tolerate and therefore much of which we are rightly intolerant.
