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Chapter 2 discusses the continued resilience of nationalism and national identity and explores how theorists of nationalism from the liberal tradition have constructed an argument to the effect that sub-state national societies constitute a discrete category of policy. The liberal nationalist argument defended in this first part of the book is that their historical and societal particularity, coupled with the dissatisfaction felt by many sub-state national societies with regard to their current institutional arrangements, entitles these societies to distinctive constitutional accommodation within the host states, in particular, by way of recognition, representation, and autonomy. This chapter develops two additional parts of this argument which build upon the notion of sub-state national societies as a particular type of polity. In constructing this argument, the chapter critiques the failure of traditional liberalism to recognize the role played by sub-state national societies in the lives of their members, and its tendency to stereotype sub-state nationalism in a negative way.

This book is about democracy. It attempts to consider how to think about democracy and the obstacles to hope. There is an elitism at the heart of philosophical reflection on democracy. The politics of traditional liberalism confirm a hierarchical view of society in which the members of that society are thought as individuals pursuing disparate and unrelated ends that the state helps them more or less to achieve. The idea of Jacques Rancière forms the framework of this book. Rancière's political and aesthetic views are beginning to hold in political thought in the English-speaking world. The distinction he draws between the police and politics is not drawn simply along the normatively bad-normatively good axis. His approach to politics cannot be absorbed into liberal theory. All of the central aspects of Rancière's depiction of democracy are presented. An overview of the chapters included in this book is finally given.

This final chapter summarizes the main arguments of the book. After outlining once again the three challenges that need to be addressed in any defence of toleration and traditional liberalism: The Multicultural Challenge, The Despotism Challenge, and The Neutrality Challenge. the chapter argues for an understanding of toleration that is justified through freedom, one that applies to diversity in its broadest sense, one that is permissive, and one that is clearly tied to traditional liberalism. The chapter concludes that toleration is worthy of our respect as it provides the fairest and widest accommodation of the complex diversity that exists, and will likely persist, in our contemporary societies.

This first chapter introduces the main premises and ideas for the book. It begins by outlining three challenges that need to be addressed in any defence of toleration and traditional liberalism: The Multicultural Challenge, The Despotism Challenge, and The Neutrality Challenge. The chapter argues for an understanding of toleration that is justified through freedom, and applies this to diversity in its broadest sense—that is, not simply cultural or belief-dependent. It introduces the idea of toleration as permissive, and grounds its understanding in traditional liberalism. The importance of distinguishing between different agents of toleration is drawn out—in this case, the state or the citizen. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the role of principles in political theory.

Because I have argued that toleration and neutrality are values that need to be balanced with other things held as important, it might seem that in practice they may be quickly outweighed. The chapter begins by defending the important weight of the practice of toleration and neutrality in relation to other potential considerations, and in the process further defends the culturally thin view of the state. It uses two cases studies—welfare redistribution and national defence—to show the robustness of a traditional liberal approach. This understanding of toleration is then applied to several contemporary examples of politically challenging diversity, and it is shown that the understanding of toleration put forward in the book is not only theoretically sound, but has practical application. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the boundaries of toleration.