Tomasz Jarymowicz

The article is an extended argument for a positive conception of toleration. First, it examines and ultimately rejects reductive interpretations of toleration proposed by David Heyd and Wendy Brown that stem from deflationary and deconstructive readings respectively. It is argued that deconstructive reading is not satisfactory because it perpetuates and amplifies rather than solves paradoxes of toleration, whereas Heyd’s reading does not recognise the importance of toleration for political processes. The author advocates a normative conception of toleration proposed by Rainer Forst, instead. Such a regime of toleration is based on the right to justification in which everyone affected should participate in delineating its limits as free and equal citizens. This conception not only solves the paradoxes of toleration but also does justice to its political importance.

Deliberative democracy’s approach with its emphasis on a multidimensional conception of freedom is very well suited to offer a sophisticated and critical account of freedom of speech in the democratic public sphere. Nevertheless, it has rarely engaged other competing free speech theories in order to offer a valuable social critique of other ways of thinking about freedom of expression. This article tries to fill this gap by critically engaging Robert Post’s theory of freedom of speech based on democratic self-government. On Post’s account, the key to effective democratic self-government is political autonomy, which he reduces to negative liberty and formal equality. I argue that this reduction creates serious problems. A purely procedural account of democracy makes it difficult to politicize new issues in the public sphere and also makes a dominant discourse resistant to contestation. Further, given his theory, Post does not have enough normative resources to offer an account of public justification, which would expand effective political liberty.

Seyla Benhabib in her book The Rights of Others focuses on the tension between the universal claims of human rights and the localized democratic regimes which are based on the rule of majority. In Benhabib’s opinion the tension between these two is constitutive of existing democratic states and can be resolved only provisionally through democratic deliberations. The article looks to the theory of deliberative democracy for a way of conceptualizing sexual minorities politics which would appeal to human rights and their universal claims. Along with Benhabib the paper recognizes the need on the part of all minorities to negotiate their rights within the ruling majority, which would hopefully enhance both learning processes within society and influence its changing self-interpretation. Benhabib’s contribution to the problem of cultural conflicts is all the more valuable that she not only remains within the critical theory paradigm but opens it up to the challenge of poststructuralism by taking advantage of some of its insights such as Jacques Derrida’s concept of iterations.