HENT DE VRIESarticulation. Scherer’s contribution inscribes itself into the broader project of retracing a
‘‘politics of persuasion’’ that, against the historical background of the tradition of spiritual
exercises and moral perfectionism—constructs itself via prophetic, saintly, and creative
forms of (and, indeed, appeals to) ‘‘conversion.’’
Little attention has been paid to the fact that the long tradition of tolerance—whose
central concern has accompanied classical modern political theory and concepts of politi-
cal liberalism up to the present day—has a deeply ambiguous genealogy (a nuance that
Tønder seeks to capture in the terminological distinction betweentolerationandtoler-
ance). Tønder asks what religious and moral sensibilities and normative claims underlie
the concept, the function, and the practice of ‘‘tolerance’’ or are solicited by it. He aims
to think through the concept’ssui generischaracter—that is to say, its irreducibility to
other constitutive concepts of the political, such as ‘‘freedom,’’ ‘‘justice,’’ and ‘‘truth’’—by
drawing on an unorthodox canon of eighteenth-century Enlightenment and twentieth-
century phenomenological thinkers, including Locke, Kant, Voltaire, and Merleau-Ponty,
whose writings have not often been studied in conjunction. These thinkers allow him to
explore the hypothesis that in early modern political thought the concept of tolerance
finds its most significant articulation less in classical discussions concerning the institu-
tional separation between church and state than in shifting contrasts between religious
vocabularies expressive of philosophies of immanence and transcendence. The concept of
tolerance thus emerges as a critical and privileged category for modern democratic
thought, which comes into its own when analyzed in terms of human embodiment and
the accompanying emotion—or ‘‘affect’’—that it presupposes. In the larger project of
which this is part, Tønder goes on to ask what it means to experience tolerance phenome-
nologically and spells out the premises of a political theory of the sensibilities.
Scherer reads the icon of modern liberal thinking against the backdrop of what Rawls
would have called a ‘‘comprehensive doctrine,’’ namely, that of saintliness. Ironically, the
political liberalism that prides itself on a certain neutrality in matters of faith requires for
its understanding and the propagation of its central claims the very structure of valuation
whose historical premises and existential thickness it brackets out for the sake of the
intellectual integrity—and modernity—of its philosophical project. Scherer’s contribution
is distilled from a larger project concerning the public role of motifs of prophetic, saintly,
and creative conversion and the forms of persuasion and loyalty they inspire. In it, he
devotes careful attention to the rhetorical underpinnings of political discourse, construing
a conversation between philosophical authors and political theorists who have usually
been studied in separate disciplinary realms, in unrelated methodological registers, and
with different normative aims. He thus opens a whole new area of inquiry, which brings
out surprising comparisons and unexpected alliances in twentieth-century and early-
twenty-first-century approaches to political and democratic processes in relation to the
broader horizon of motivational, affective, and, last but not least, religious orientations.
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