In Toleration as Recognition Anna Elisabetta Galeotti offers up a sympathetic critique of liberal toleration and suggests a modification to the theory that she believes necessary in order to bring cultural minorities into the public sphere as equal citizens. This carefully argued book marks a timely contribution to the debate over group rights and multiculturalism.

Galeotti acknowledges at the outset that liberal principles have on the whole been a great success. Embodied in liberal constitutions and translated into a system of rights, the liberal ideal of toleration that emerged during the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries today allows for the peaceful coexistence of persons who differ profoundly in matters of religion, lifestyles, moral and aesthetic values, and so on. Liberal toleration seeks to accommodate the pluralism of modern societies by constructing an expansive sphere of personal liberty that is off-limits to direct political intervention. As Rawls and other advocates of political liberalism argue (echoing Locke's position in the Letter Concerning Toleration), citizens of the liberal state need not approve of one another's personal beliefs or private conduct in order to affirm as reasonable the public conception of justice that guarantees an equal liberty to all. The limits to liberal toleration are defined, however imprecisely, by the harm principle and society's right of self-defence. Conduct injurious to other individuals or inimical to the survival of the liberal state receives no protection. Short of that, people are free to live as they choose subject at worse to the disapprobation of their fellow citizens. As Galeotti remarks, minor infringements of toleration remain all too common in liberal democracies; “but, regrettable as they are, they do not usually raise genuine theoretical and political problems, as the theory and the practice of toleration is generally equipped to answer them” (3).

Importantly, however, she contends that there are several “genuine, non-trivial” cases of toleration roiling contemporary politics that the theory and practice of liberal toleration cannot adequately address. “Contemporary non-trivial cases that raise issues of tolerance typically involve situations in which members of a new minority exhibit their differences in some public-political space—differences that are regarded by the cultural majority as unfamiliar and strange, often outrageously excessive, and potentially threatening to the standards of proper behaviour and civility of that society” (85). Among the examples she gives are l'affaire du foulard in France, the controversy over gays in the military in the United States, and the suppression of hate speech in Europe and North America. Galeotti argues that these cases prove resistant to the logic of liberal toleration because they involve differences between groups rather than between individuals. Each results from asymmetries in social standing, status, respect, and public recognition that effectively exclude members of culturally insurgent minority group from full citizenship or the full enjoyment of rights. Liberal toleration fails to grasp what is really at stake in these cases, because it assumes (incorrectly in Galeotti's view) that equal liberties suffice to ensure equal public standing for all. Thus, if minorities have difficulty gaining access to the public sphere it must be because they suffer an unjust legal disability or lack the resources that would enable them to participate more fully. From this perspective the problem appears to be one of distributive justice, not toleration. Galeotti objects, however, that minorities do not have to be deprived of legal entitlements or of resources and opportunities in order to be excluded from the public sphere. The fact is, she argues, that disfavoured minorities are made into second-class citizens simply because they are the bearers of certain identities. Insidiously, public disrespect for their collective identity prevents the members of socially stigmatized groups from developing self-esteem and self-respect, “two crucial conditions for being fully functioning social agents and citizens” (112). The only viable solution is to remove the social stigma attached to membership in the group.

Galeotti proposes that this be accomplished through public acts of recognition that legitimate and normalize minority differences, setting them on a par with the behaviours, traits, practices and values associated with the majority culture. This, she thinks, is very different from the conventional liberal approach, which seeks to render cultural differences irrelevant by constructing citizenship as a universal identity. Indeed, the liberal principle of neutrality, which is usually understood to mean that the state should be blind to differences, presents an obstacle to putting toleration as recognition into effect. Galeotti responds by arguing that difference blindness hardly results in impartiality when the dominant majority, whose culture pervades the public sphere, fails to show respect for new immigrant groups or historically oppressed minorities that must disguise themselves, or become invisible to the majority, if they want to appear inoffensive. She further contends that symbolic acts of recognition by the state do not necessarily violate the neutrality principle. Public recognition “neither says nor implies that the difference in question is intrinsically valuable, beautiful, or important for the human good, but it does imply that there are many different codes of dress, lifestyles, religious rituals, and so on among the viable options in society at large” (104–5).

In the realm of symbolic politics, policy matters less for what it is than for what it says. Thus, it is important to Galeotti that toleration be extended for the right reasons. It will not suffice to treat l'affaire du foulard as a violation of individual rights, as a Lockean or a Rawlsian might do, for that approach fails to give due recognition to the cultural significance of the Islamic headscarf and will not advance the acceptance of Muslims immigrants on equal terms with the French majority. Or will it? Galeotti emphasizes the importance of symbolic action by the state at the risk of ignoring the real gains to be had by affording members of vulnerable minority groups the right to assert their identity publicly. Galeotti herself admits that public recognition will not magically erase the stigma minorities suffer on account of their identity, but she believes that “symbolic recognition indirectly redraws the map of the standards of action and belief a society accepts” (105). Perhaps, but so does the physical presence of persons who demand respect for themselves by daily affirming their identity in the public eye. Liberal rights make their self-affirmation possible. Far from consigning differences to the private sphere where they become invisible, as Galeotti claims, liberal rights enable the public display of personal and group differences. Recall that for Locke the whole point of religious toleration was the public worship of God by religious nonconformists. In the end, it's difficult to see any practical difference between Galeotti's call for the symbolic recognition of French Muslims and a liberal approach affirming their religious liberty.

There are other soft spots in Galeotti's argument. For example, it is possible to quibble with her insistence that symbolic acts of recognition legitimate but do not valorize group differences. (Surely, same sex marriage, which Galeotti champions as a contribution to overcoming the stigma felt by gays and lesbians, will be perceived by religious conservatives as public endorsement of behaviour they deem sinful.) Toleration as recognition also raises any number of practical questions. Will it prove an easy thing to make a symbolic statement in opposition to racism by criminally penalizing hate speech without inviting greater censorship? Will it be possible to prevent the inclusive politics of recognition from degenerating into a socially divisive identity politics? It is safe to predict that Galeotti's answers to these and other questions will not fully satisfy her critics, this reviewer among them, but it is impossible to deny that she brings a keen and humane intelligence to modern problems of toleration.