Tolerance, toleration, and the liberal tradition

The tendency to use tolerance and toleration as roughly interchangeable terms has encouraged misunderstanding of the liberal legacy and impeded efforts to improve upon it. We can improve our understanding by defining ''toleration'' as a set of social or political practices and ''tolerance'' as a set of attitudes. This distinction reveals the possibility of four clusters of attitudes: tolerant toleration, exemplified by John Locke; intolerant antitoleration, exemplified by the first generation Massachusetts Puritans; tolerant antitoleration, exemplified by Thomas Hobbes; and intolerant toleration, exemplified by Roger Williams. An exploration of their views suggests two things for contemporary societies. First, universal tolerance is both impossible and unnecessary; location and neutralization of those strains of intolerance that threaten to deny citizenship rights to vulnerable groups is sufficient for maintaining social stability. Second since universal agreement is unlikely, the political task of liberal societies involves creating standards of behavior that permit fellow citizens to negotiate their inevitable differences peacefully.