Tolerance is often considered a practice of restraint motivated by either respect or benevolence. But might there be something else to the practice of tolerance that makes it more than a way of constricting the actions of citizens who disagree? In this pioneering book, Lars Tønder turns the attention to tolerance's sensorial side in order to clarify the circumstances in which tolerance can become a source of empowerment and pluralization that goes beyond the image of citizenship currently on offer in contemporary democratic theory. Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics develops an alternative account of tolerance by posing a theory suited to a world challenged by globalization and new information technology. Intertwining the theoretical and the empirical, the book examines contemporary cases such the Danish Cartoon Controversy and Dave Chappelle's resistance to racial inequality, and it offers fresh interpretations of both canonical thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant, and lesser-known thinkers such as Diogenes, Spinoza, and Merleau-Ponty. Central to Tønder's argument is a sensorial orientation to politics, one that looks closely at the role played by affect and perception in delimiting the range of powers available for contestation and innovation. In response to the relative neglect of affect and perception in contemporary theories of tolerance, Tønder focuses on how sensory perceptions help to define the lived experience of tolerance. Attention to sensory perception yields not only a better appreciation of the stakes invoked in becoming tolerant; it also helps to clarify the conditions under which tolerators can become agents of resistance and pluralization. This book is at once a sweeping account of the history of political thought and an invitation to rethink the meaning of tolerance within the sensorial conditions underpinning twenty first century democratic politics.

Tolerance develops this argument by mobilizing what I call a "sensorial orientation to politics." While a sensorial orientation does not refute the role of reason in democratic politics, it differs from its intellectualist counterpart by arguing that practices of reason-giving include ways of sensing the world, insisting that reason is always-already sensorial. A sensorial orientation, in other words, focuses on the embodied conditions of reasoning, which it takes to be neither completely synergistic nor immediately present, but reliant on representations, images, and memories, which situate sensory input within historically defined regimes of discourse and sensation, and which assume that sentient beings experience the world through both thought and action, mind and body. Theorists discussed in the book include Seneca, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marcuse, and Merleau-Ponty, together with Descartes, Locke, Kant, Mill, Rawls, Forst, Scanlon, Taylor, Brown, and Connolly. Tolerance draws on a critical consideration of these thinkers in order to shed new light on the role of tolerance in both contemporary democratic theory and contemporary public discourse. The aim is to show how tolerance once again can become a practice of empowerment and pluralization.