Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (review)

Toleration in Enlightenment Europe. Edited by Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2000) 270 pp. $59.95.

The twelve contributions to this volume can be grouped in two categories. The first four chapters discuss treatments of toleration by moral philosophers and political theorists in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts, assuming a cosmopolitan dissemination and reception of these works across the national boundaries of "Enlightenment Europe." The final eight essays, however, assess the levels of tolerance in state policies within discrete national contexts. This dual view of a cosmopolitan and a nationalistic Enlightenment derives, in part, from the difficulties of assessing the history of European toleration at the end of the 1990s. In their preface, the editors allude to the tragic results of religious and ethnic intolerance in the Balkans during the past decade (ix), and contributors to this volume are conscious of nationalist-inspired criticism of European union. Such contemporary parallels have allowed the authors to treat eighteenth-century theories and practices of toleration in provocative ways that do not always accord with a "heroic" view of Enlightenment.

Many of the essays show that philosophers, kings, and bureaucrats were all aware of the conundrum implicit in the concept of toleration: Should state toleration extend to those who wish to overthrow the regime? Should the state tolerate intolerance on the part of its subjects? By the end of the eighteenth century, as Western European political and economic structures began to shift into more modern forms, some observers questioned the continued viability of "toleration theory." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for example, proclaimed that "to tolerate is to insult" (190), and Thomas Paine declared that "both [tolerance and intolerance] are despotisms" (46). Such comments reflected the inroads made by natural-rights theory during the eighteenth century: The future would lie in the acknowledgment of the rights of citizens who were equal before the law, rather than in the granting of toleration to the minority subjects of absolutist rulers.

According to most of the contributors who assess national variations in European practices of toleration, however, kings and their administrators were most likely unaware of, or indifferent to, the argument that toleration as a political principle had reached a dead end by the end of the 1700s. They were more interested in pragmatic solutions to religious and political discord that would facilitate demographic and economic growth, ultimately benefiting state coffers. This volume reveals that toleration as a moral and political principle was not embraced wholesale by enlightenment philosophes, and that the application of toleration theory proceeded in unexpected ways on the ground.

These conclusions reflect current debates on the meaning and interpretation of the Enlightenment as a whole at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a polemic clearly on view in the two most provocative contributions to the collection. In his self-consciously anachro-nistic essay, "Multi-Culturalism and Ethnic Cleansing in the Enlightenment," Robert Wokler sets out to defend Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the High Enlightenment against the charges of intolerance levied against them by critics on the left and the right since the end of World War II. The Enlightenment can be held accountable neither for the Holocaust, nor for the "vacuous morality of atomistic individualism" (76). Instead, the intellectual project spawned by these thinkers has served, and can continue to serve, as a bulwark against superstition and ignorance in public affairs.

In contrast, Sylvana Tomaselli's "Intolerance: The Virtue of Princes and Radicals," suggests that most eighteenth-century thinkers viewed toleration as a means to an end, not as a virtue, and that the demands of realpolitik encouraged rulers and their advisors to be intolerant of those whose actions and words threatened existing structures. In other words, tolerance, and by implication other supposedly morally superior aspects of Enlightenment thought, were little in evidence during the period.

In these essays, and in the collection as a whole, we find not only the echoes of the 1990s...