Boundaries of Toleration by Taylor Charles Stepan Alfred

Boundaries of Toleration by Taylor Charles Stepan Alfred

Author:Taylor, Charles, Stepan, Alfred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL011000, Political Science/International Relations/General, PHI019000, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-02-24T16:00:00+00:00


NOTES

I would like to thank the participants of the seminar on toleration at Columbia University with whom I discussed prior versions of this chapter. Moreover, I would like to express my profound debt of gratitude to Carlo Invernizzi Accetti and Luke MacInnis, whose critical observations have been important in the completion of this chapter.

1. Supports of the motion to have explicit reference to God in the Treaty of Lisbon (2007) were particularly strong in Ireland, which rejected the treaty in 2008 along with France and Holland (a second Irish referendum in October 2009 allowed ratification).

2. “I underlined my opinion that we need a European identity in the form of a constitutional treaty and I think it should be connected to Christianity and God, as Christianity has forged Europe in a decisive way”; Chancellor Merkel’s words cited in euobserver.com, August 29, 2006.

3. This transformation seems to correspond to what Charles Taylor has defined as “secularity” or the passage from a secularist ideology to a secular age in A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap, 2007); see in particular the introduction.

4. Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the ‘Public Use of Reason’ by Religious and Secular Citizens,” in Between Naturalism and Religion, trans. Ciaran Cronin (London: Polity, 2008), pp. 136–38.

5. In the course of the debate, delegates and politicians from Germany, Italy, Poland, and Slovakia lobbied for a phrase in the treaty, adapted from the Polish constitution, which would argue that “the Union’s values include the values of those who believe in God as the source of truth, justice, good and beauty as well as those who do not share such a belief but respect these universal values arising from other sources.” On December 17, 2007, the preamble of the treaty was amended as follows: “Drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.”

6. Joseph Lecler, Histoire de la tolérance au siècle de la Réforme, 2 vols. (Aubier: Montaigne, 1955), 2:40. Yet this view persisted beyond humanism; see, for instance, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), trans. Anne M. Choler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), bk. 25, chs. 9 and 10.

7. Cf. Joseph Lecler, “Les origins et le sens de la formule: Cujus Regio, Ejus Religio,” in Recherches de Science religieuse 38 (1951): 119–31, and Histoire de la tolérance, 2:36–43.

8. It is interesting to notice that Habermas criticizes John Rawls for being too close to classical liberalism precisely because he is too faithful to the dualism implied in classical liberalism. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” pp. 119–28. “With the establishment of modern liberal states … the state is expected to be neutral rather than restrained in its treatment of conflicts of value or religions…. Equality before the law and respect for the rights of individuals and minority groups tend to make toleration politically redundant.



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