The Limits of Tolerance

Denis Lacorne (PhD, Political Science, Yale) is University Professor of History at l'Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris and Director of Research at CERI-Sciences-Po. He is the author of (translated into English) Religion in America: A Political History (Columbia, 2011) and The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception (Palgrave, 1990), the editor of The Measure and Mismeasure of Populations: The Statistical Use of Ethnic and Racial Categories in Multicultural Societies (Palgrave, 2011), and the co-editor (with Tony Judt) of With Us or Against Us: Studies in Global Anti-Americanism (Palgrave, 2005) and (with Tony Judt) The Politics of Language: Identity Politics in a Multilingual Age (NYU, 2004).Denis Lacorne is senior research fellow with the CERI (Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales) at Sciences Po, Paris. His books in English include Religion in America: A Political History (Columbia, 2011) as well as Language, Nation, and State: Identity Politics in a Multilingual Age (2004) and With Us or Against Us: Studies in Global Anti-Americanism (2005), both coedited with Tony Judt.

Jack N. Rakove, author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution:
Living in a religiously tolerant society, Americans no longer understand what the challenge of achieving religious toleration originally meant: learning to coexist with beliefs and practices that one detested. Denis Lacorne begins this critical survey by recalling the great Enlightenment voices for toleration: Locke, Voltaire, and the American founders. But he then examines modern European and American disputes to demonstrate why the struggle for toleration and free exercise remains so problematic—a fight that never quite ends but that we grasp much better after reading Lacorne's crisp and incisive chapters.

Mark Lilla, author of The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics:
I simply don’t know a book on toleration that compares to this one. Denis Lacorne has managed to weave together both an intellectual history of ideas about toleration and a wide-ranging international survey of policies related to it. Theory and practice come together in a very illuminating way and will expand the American reader’s horizon beyond our borders.