SUBJECTS OF TOLERANCEdent of culture and capable of being neutral with regard to culture, as well as innocent of
the particulars of political regimes. Each, importantly, presumes the autonomy of the
subject and the state from culture. And each so-called demand also figures a dark other
against which it obtains its own identity. The ‘‘rule of law’’ is opposed to rule by the
sword, religious leaders, or cultural custom; ‘‘limits on state power’’ are opposed to abso-
lutism or state power imbricated with other powers such as culture or religion; ‘‘respect
for women’’ is opposed to the degradation of women (by culture or religion) but also,
interestingly, the equality of women; ‘‘private property’’ is opposed to collective owner-
ship, national or state ownership, or public property; ‘‘free speech’’ is opposed to
controlled, bought, muffled, or conditioned speech; ‘‘equal justice’’ is opposed to differ-
entiated justice; and ‘‘religious tolerance’’ is opposed to religious fundamentalism. These
dark others, metonymically associated with each other, together signal the presence of
barbarism, liberalism’s putative opposite. This implies that liberalism itself is inherently
clear of all of these dark others, that each belongs exclusively to nonliberal regimes and
cultures, and moreover, that where liberalism does not prevail, neither does civilization.
This essay began with a consideration of the anxiety about organicist orders evident in
liberal thought, and it has explored Freud’s theory of group identity to plumb liberal
assumptions about the civilizational supremacy of orders featuring high levels of individ-
uation. Freud’s story reveals the ways in which liberal thought equates organicism with
primitivism, and especially with subjects who lack the capacity for self-regulation, con-
science, instinctual repression, and rational deliberation. Such organicism, I have been
suggesting, is equated with rule by ‘‘culture,’’ ‘‘religion,’’ and ‘‘ethnic identity’’; liberal
legalism is the sign that these things do not rule, the sign that a secular state and an
autonomous individual have usurped their power and put them in their appropriate
place.
Liberal tolerance, which simultaneously affirms the value of autonomy and conse-
crates state secularism, is understood to be a virtue available only to the self-regulating
individual, a political principle available only to secular states, and a good appropriately
extended only to individuated subjects and regimes that promote such individuation.
Conversely, those captive to organicism and organicist practices are presumed neither to
value tolerance, to be capable of tolerance, nor to be entitled to tolerance. The govern-
mentality of tolerance deploys the formal legal autonomy of the subject and the formal
secularism of the state as a threshold of the tolerable, marking as intolerable whatever is
regarded as a threat to such autonomy and secularism.
Yet, even as tolerance is mobilized to manage the challenges to this logic posed by
the eruptions of subnational identities in liberal polities occasioned by late modern trans-
national population flows, this invocation of tolerance also functions as a sign of the
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