Repressive Tolerance
Description
By Geoff Shullenberger:
"In 1965, the German-born philosopher Herbert Marcuse published the essay “Repressive Tolerance.” The apparently oxymoronic title encapsulates the text’s central claim that the liberal value of tolerance has become an illiberal means of repression within the “totally administered society” he had diagnosed in his book from the previous year, One-Dimensional Man. Under these conditions, Marcuse argues, “the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” That is to say, “pure tolerance” of all views should be replaced with “liberating tolerance,” which, he states, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”
At the core of Marcuse’s argument is a distinction between tolerance as an end in itself and the “objective of tolerance” or its original “telos,” which, he claims, was social progress. Referring to the 18th and 19th century struggles for freedom of speech, assembly, and related rights, he states that “[t]he tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan – intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” In other words, advocacy for these freedoms was not an assertion of a neutral value for its own sake, but a tactic of opposition to politically dominant forces – a tactic that, he says, has now become obsolete. This is because unlike the ancien régime once opposed by liberal reformers and revolutionaries, the “repressive status quo” now benefits from the norm of “pure tolerance.”
(https://outsidertheory.com/right-marcuseanism/)
Discussion
Big Tech Against the Right
By Geoff Shullenberger:
"More than Popper, Marcuse would seem to provide something like a systematic rationale for tech platforms’ recent escalation of censorship of the right – most dramatically, of the outgoing president – with the vigorous support of much of the left side of the political spectrum. Some have made the case that he did. For instance, in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff assert that Marcuse’s argument in “Repressive Tolerance” laid the groundwork for the censorious leftism that first arose in academia and has become more influential in the broader culture.
Arguably, recent developments have made some of the essay’s proposals less utopian and more plausible. Consider the debate last year around the New York Times’s publication of Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed arguing for the deployment of the National Guard in response to the widespread rioting underway in many American cities, which led to the resignation of the newspaper’s op-ed editor, James Bennet. A sitting senator is, by most estimations, more powerful than the Times staffers who agitated against the publication of his article. Yet as Marcuse recommended, by fervently advocating for the withdrawal of “tolerance” from right-wing views, they managed to score a symbolic victory against Cotton and his party (although his article remains up, it now has a remarkable five-paragraph editorial note attached to it stating that it “fell short of our standards and should not have been published”).
The recent removal of former president Trump from almost every social media platform might be viewed in similar terms. By gaining power and leverage within the various entities that control the means of ideological reproduction, the left has succeeded in tipping the scales of tolerance against the right, much as Marcuse counseled it should attempt to do. The shift from an ostensibly neutral public sphere, in which all opinions are at least supposed to be treated equally, to one in which various figures and views are subject to overt and aggressive “intolerance” due to the dangers they allegedly pose, seems to follow his prescriptions.
Yet the apparent success of this approach also reveals its limitations."