Call for Papers: Toleration and the Challenges to Liberalism

MANCEPT WORKSHOPS 2017, 11-13 September 2017, Manchester


Conveners: Johannes Drerup (University of Koblenz-Landau); Gottfried
Schweiger (University of Salzburg)


Toleration is among the most pivotal and the most contested liberal
values and virtues. Debates about the conceptual scope, justification,
and political role of toleration are accordingly closely aligned with
historical and contemporary philosophical controversies on the
foundations of liberalism. Since there is neither a canonical
understanding of toleration nor of liberalism in contemporary
political theory, the precise role of toleration in liberalism and the
nature of a distinctively liberal conception of toleration, however,
remain disputed. Despite this diversity of approaches, many aspects of
competing conceptions of toleration and of liberalism seem to share
the same conceptual and normative structure and thus face similar
theoretical and political challenges. The normative limits of
toleration, for instance, usually also constitute the limits of
liberalism (and vice versa). Justifications of these limits result in
similar paradoxes (e.g., paradox of liberalism; paradox of drawing the
limits of toleration; foundational paradox of toleration) and tend to
evoke related criticisms (critiques of `illiberal´ forms of liberalism
or `non-tolerant´ theories of toleration etc.). Moreover, both
liberalism and toleration are ideas and ideals brought forward to
enable and regulate civilised political disagreement and conflict,
while they are at the same time also the objects and sources of
disagreement and conflict. As allied and deeply ambivalent ideas, they
constitute responses to the fact of pluralism and simultaneously
reflect this pluralism in terms of a diversity of competing
conceptions and justifications.

Following up on the 2015 workshop (The Politics and Ethics of
Toleration), this workshop aims to shed light on the nexus between
different versions of liberalism (e.g., political liberal; liberal
perfectionist) and toleration (e.g., respect conception) by focussing
on their shared theoretical and political challenges. We welcome
contributions from the standpoint of ideal and non-ideal theory on
issues such as the following:

-          historical controversies on the relation between liberalism
and toleration (e.g., Augustinus, Bayle, Locke, Voltaire, Mill,
Humboldt)

-          contemporary challenges to liberalism and toleration in
different cultural and societal contexts (e.g., the rise of right-wing
populism as decidedly anti-pluralistic doctrines across the European
Union and in the United States; the Hindutva Movement in India)

-          the relation between liberalism and intolerant and/or
illiberal groups

-          universalist vs. particularist justifications of liberal
toleration/ liberal toleration and human rights

-          critiques of liberal conceptions of toleration (e.g.,
power-theoretical critiques; critiques of repressive tolerance;
postcolonial critiques; communitarian critiques; republican critiques)

-          competing conceptions of pluralism and their relation to
liberalism and toleration

-          religious toleration and liberalism

-          the relation between democracy/democratic citizenship,
liberalism, and toleration

-          multiculturalism, liberalism, and the toleration of groups
and within groups

-          liberal justifications of education and of education to tolerance

-          toleration, liberalism, and identity politics

-          modus vivendi, liberalism, toleration, and moral progress

-          the role of facts and a commitment to truth in theories of
toleration and in liberal approaches to politics

-          toleration, liberalism, and state neutrality

-          the place of autonomy and/or liberty in liberal conceptions
of toleration

-          liberalism, toleration, and political emotions

-          applied issues (e.g., debates about sex education,
headscarf debates, debates about migration)



Papers are welcome that address any of these and related issues.
Please send your proposal (350-500 words) until June 1, 2017 to
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--
Dr Gottfried Schweiger
Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research
University of Salzburg
www.gottfried-schweiger.weebly.com