Toleration does gradually spread, observes Denis Lacorne, a French historian. It can also suddenly vanish
Columbia University Press; 296 pages; $35 and £27.a strange but indispensable civic virtue. It requires people to accept and live calmly with individuals and practices of which they disapprove. Some take it for spineless laxity in the face of what ought to be fought or forbidden. Others see it as a demeaning fraud that spares prohibition but withholds approval. The tolerant themselves are not immune to its tricks and subtleties.
Faced by decades of confessional warfare and the bald fact of religious disunity, later defenders of toleration built on those two ideas. This is where Mr Lacorne’s story begins. Locke argued that you could coerce only public assent, not private conviction; that suppression encouraged revolt; and—a new element—that religious persecution was bad for trade. Bayle stressed the pacifying effect of having many sects, none strong enough to dominate.
For five centuries, meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire was widely regarded as a model of confessional peace, its “millet” system serving a vast trading bloc in which Muslims were a minority until the mid-19th century. Millets were religious communities with their own courts and practices. The Ottomans recognised and protected Jews, Christian and Muslims alike, though they were not treated equally. For Islam, in Muslim eyes, was the only true religion.
This rich historical tour may leave liberal-minded readers disheartened. Evidently the intellectual and commercial characteristics of modernity on which the Enlightenment placed such hope have not, in the end, made the puzzles of toleration go away. But they can take heart from the weaknesses of toleration’s enemies. Noisy as they are, they are even less coherent than its defenders.
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