Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Hardcover)

by Wendy Brown (Author)
Key Phrases: contemporary tolerance discourse, organicist orders, organicist societies, Beit Hashoah, United States, Wiesenthal Center (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
The triumph of toleration as the central liberal value, and the attendant inability of liberals to see the dark side of their favorite virtue, is the subject of Wendy Brown's insightful and illuminating new book... I find the analysis trenchant and the critique persuasive. -- Stanley Fish Chronicle of Higher Education This is a remarkable book ... made attractive by its passion, the lucidity of its negative critique, and its intelligence. -- John Hall Social Forces

Review
The triumph of toleration as the central liberal value, and the attendant inability of liberals to see the dark side of their favorite virtue, is the subject of Wendy Brown's insightful and illuminating new book. . . . I find the analysis trenchant and the critique persuasive.
(Stanley Fish Chronicle of Higher Education )

This is a remarkable book . . . made attractive by its passion, the lucidity of its negative critique, and its intelligence.
(John Hall Social Forces )

Wendy Brown has produced a richly textured and timely analysis of some of the darker elements lurking beneath the tolerance discourse of western liberalism.
(Vincent Geoghegan American Review of Politics )

[This is a] bold, erudite, and timely study.
(Ely Aharonson Criminal Law and Philosophy ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press; annotated edition edition (July 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691126542
• ISBN-13: 978-0691126548
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #711,687 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful critique of tolerance, September 3, 2006

By	critik (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

Brown delivers a compelling critique of tolerance. In a complex, yet accessible way, she argues that tolerance functions as an instrument of power by regulating group differences and by selectively and differentially integrating "others" into the civic space. Conferring and withholding tolerance can both function as differential modes of exclusion and regulation of difference.

The problem with tolerance is that it dissimulates its political role: tolerance relies on a power differential between those who tolerate and those who are tolerated. Yet this power relation is masked because "tolerance talk" individualizes racial, cultural, and sexual difference. It treats difference as something that should be confronted by civility and behavior: if only we all behaved responsibly and tolerated others, we could all happily live together. Unsatisfactory in this view - as Brown argues convincingly - is that it substitutes a vocabulary of civility for political problems and confrontations and thus sidelines demands for freedom, equality and justice. It individualizes social and political questions, as it substitutes the individual object of tolerance for the group (and simultaneously reifies difference and otherness by construing the subject as the product of a collective identity).

Brown traces the transformation of tolerance from its early modern inception (where it meant tolerating other beliefs) to its current instantiation, where it means tolerating (sexual, cultural, racial) difference. The central question of her book is how what she calls "tolerance talk" has become the beacon of multicultural justice and civic peace. Reminding readers that only a generation ago, tolerance was reviled as a thinly veiled form of racism - yet today it has emerged as the emblem of the good society.