ed. by Luca Di Blasi
and Christoph F. E. Holzhey

Cultural Inquiry, 9
Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2014 / NY: Columbia UP, 2014



We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of de-politicization?

Two major theoreticians of tolerance debate the uses and misuses of tolerance in a dialogue that is rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity.

Volume 9 of the series ‘Cultural Inquiry‘ with Turia + Kant
106pp., 12 EUR, ISBN 978-3-85132-731-1

The volume is being simultaneously published in North America by Columbia University Press.
112 pages, $15.00, ISBN 978-0-231-17019-2

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley. Her work in political theory focuses on questions of power, the making of subjects and citizens, sovereignty, democracy, and de-democratization; she also has longstanding interests in theories of capitalism and in feminist and critical race theory. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt a. M. and Co-Director of the Research Cluster on the ‘Formation of Normative Orders’ of the Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Justitia Amplificata’. His work focuses on questions of justification, justice, and toleration. In 2012, he received the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Price of the German Research Foundation.