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SUBJECTS OF TOLERANCE

ing the ontologization of ‘‘blood and belonging’’ at play in the modern liberal theory and
practice of cultural tolerance.^13

Freud

InCivilization and Its DiscontentsandTotem and Taboo,^14 Freud is conventionally read as
explaining how men overcome what he posits as a natural asociality rooted in sexual
rivalry and primary aggression. As accounts of how men come to live together without
perpetual strife, these stories have been read as Freud’s version of the emergence of hu-
mans from a state of nature into social contract and from primary satisfaction of the
instincts to the instinctual repression productive (via sublimation) of civilization. But
another current cuts across Freud’s depiction of our struggle for sociality, one that con-
cerns how subjects progress not just from primary hostility to relative peaceability but
from organicist identities—groups—to civilized individuals. These two tales are neither
identical nor fully reconcilable—fact, they represent two different tropes of ‘‘the primi-
tive’’: the lone savage and the submissive tribal follower. The second figure is the problem-
atic ofGroup Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,^15 and it makes a shadowy appearance
inCivilization and Its Discontents, as well. It is the narrative of this figure, with its ‘‘ontog-
eny recapitulates phylogeny’’ trajectory from childlike primitivism to mature liberal cos-
mopolitanism, that can be detected at the foundations of most liberal tolerance talk.
Although this talk does not actually reference Freud, it remains convergent with Freud’s
accounts of what binds groups, what signals primitivism and civilization, what the ten-
sions are between the individual and the group, and what is so dangerous—internally
oppressive, externally threatening—about organicist societies. Together these accounts
coin tolerance as something available only to liberal subjects and liberal orders and consti-
tute the supremacy of both over the dangerous alternatives. They also establish organicist
orders as a natural limit of liberal tolerance, as intolerable in consequence of their own
intolerance.
Freud’s challenge to himself inGroup Psychology and the Analysis of the Egois to
explainMassenpsychologie—variously translated as mass, mob, or crowd psychology but
inherently pejorative across these translations—as consonant with, rather than a depar-
ture from, the individual psychology he devoted his life to mapping. Unlike others work-
ing on the problem (whom he considers at length in the book’s first chapter), Freud does
not treat group behavior or feeling as issuing from a structure of desire different from
that of individual affect. His concern here, in addition to ratifying the basic architecture
of the psyche he spent years theorizing, is to affirm the individual as a primordial unit of
analysis and actionand therebyto pathologize the group as a dangerous condition of
de-individuation and psychological regression. Freud’s beginning point, then, works nor-
matively to align maturity, individuation, conscience, repression, and civilization and to

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