tolerance

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

political scientist

university professor

UC Berkeley

innovator in the field of

political science

post-structuralist

is a tool with which to manage the threat of difference as a genial neighborly value while clearly serving more ominous political purposes of stratification, licensing and regulation.

Brown also notes how in the lexicons of domains as diverse as statistics, engineering, physiology (plant and human), policing and prosecution, invoking the word tolerance always implies that a contaminant, a foreign body or something dangerous is stirring. Tolerance is then applied as a 'mode of incorporating and regulating the presence of the threatening Other within.'34 Seen through this lens, tolerance is arguably a tool with which to 'manage' the threat of difference and thus simultaneously ensure the continuity of the dominant substance/body/force/identity, depending on the context. Brown then goes on to discuss that the brilliance and effectiveness of tolerance as such an instrument of difference management is that it appears merely as a 'genial neighbourly value'35 while clearly serving more ominous political purposes of stratification, licensing and regulation.

is like patience, necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist. It is ultimately a strategy for coping rather than an offer of resolution or transcendence.

Like patience, tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist [. . . ] In this activity of management, tolerance does not offer resolution or transcendence, but only a strategy for coping [. . . ] As compensation, tolerance anoints the bearer with virtue, with standing for a principled act of permitting one's principles to be affronted... it provides a gracious way of allowing one's tastes to be violated. It offers a robe of modest superiority in exchange for yielding.30

is a word which, a generation ago, was code for 'mannered racialism' and 'polite racism.' Today it is a key liberal virtue of Western society.

In her recent book Regulating Aversion, Wendy Brown remarks that 'a mere generation ago, tolerance was widely recognized in the United States as a code word for mannered racialism.'28 The central thread of her work thus asks how a term designating 'polite racism' came to signify, in today's world, a key liberal virtue of Western society. Taking up a manifestly foucauldian approach, Brown's project traces the complex inter-involvement of tolerance with power and attempts to grasp the manners in which tolerance has 'effects that exceed its surface operations of [. . . ] reducing conflicts or of protecting the weak or the minoritized.'

Wendy BrownThinkers

Wendy Brown