LARS TO/NDERpartisan politics and ideological commitments. It is important to be clear about this kind
of neutrality. It does not imply, for example, that our approach should be indifferent to
various ways of interpreting tolerance and toleration, like a skeptic who refuses to make
any kind of judgment about the world. Nor does it imply acknowledgment of the way in
which any approach to this world is deeply contestable. Rather, it implies that our ap-
proach should be available across a variety of beliefs and other commitments. This re-
quires a kind of intellectual superiority—one in which the standard of reason is the
ultimate arbitrator regardless of its own biases—which implicates the imperative of neu-
trality in its own kind of dogmatism. It assumes the possibility of placing a set of moral
and religious convictions beyond the realm of contestation.
My point about these three imperatives is not only that they situate Voltaire’s ap-
preciation of the embodiment of tolerance and toleration on the margins of contemporary
political theory but also that they contribute to the depiction of reason as that which
stands apart from our everyday involvement with the world. They do so by solidifying
the idea, which comes from Locke, that to think politically is to systematize, in a neutral
manner, what is essential and what is inessential to human happiness. Indeed, we might
say that the political theorist is like a Newtonian physicist, who operates under the as-
sumption that his or her movements are irrelevant to what he or she measures. There is
thus no real sense of tragedy or untimeliness in this image of reason. Moreover, the three
imperatives marginalize those political theorists who seek to follow a route different from
the one that Locke outlines. This is not because the Lockean theory is fully finished.
Among other things, Locke has neither established the autonomous nature of reason nor
freed the motivation of toleration from hedonism. Even so, the imperatives help to define
the Lockean theory as the starting point of political reasoning, limiting the diversity of
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to a question of securing the claims that Locke
could not secure. This is what turns Locke’s ‘‘theory of toleration without tolerance’’ into
an anticipation of what Kant (and those who follow him) has to say about this theory. It
is the task of Kant’s transcendental philosophy to complete what is incomplete in Locke.
The Purity of Toleration
Kant’s attempt to define what one commentator calls the ‘‘grounding of reason’’ makes
him the historical endpoint in the path toward the model of reasonable toleration.^23 It is
Kant who completes the image of reason that underpins this model, and it is Kant who
provides it with the authority needed to fend off competing images. The latter, however,
may also be why the Kantian project is an obstacle to a project that appreciates the unique
nature of both tolerance and toleration. The following seeks to show why this may be so,
beginning with the way in which Kant establishes toleration (but not tolerance) as a
demand of reason.
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