\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\input /home/arunc/disk3/tex/arun

\renewcommand{\familydefault}{ptm}	%% Times
\parskip=6pt\parindent=0pt

\usepackage{fancyheadings}	%% use the fancy headings package
\pagestyle{fancyplain}		%% default style
\cfoot{\rm\thepage}			%% pagenumber centered at foot
\headrulewidth 0pt 			%% eliminate default head rule

\lfoot{Herbert Marcuse}
\rfoot{{\em Repressive Tolerance}}

\begin{document}
\begin{center}
\section*{Repressive Tolerance\\
Herbert Marcuse\footnote{%
Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin on July 19,1898. After completing
his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922, 
he moved to
Berlin, where he worked as a bookseller. He returned to Freiburg in
1929 to write a habilitation (professor's dissertation) with Martin
Heidegger. In 1933, since he would not be allowed to complete that
project under the Nazis, Marcuse began work at the Frankfurt Institute for
Social Research.
He emigrated from Germany that same year, going first to Switzerland,
then the United States, where he became a citizen in 1940. During World
War II he worked for the US Office of Strategic Services (forerunner
of the CIA), analyzing intelligence reports about Germany (1942--45--51).
In 1952 he began a university teaching career as a political theorist,
first at Columbia and Harvard, then at Brandeis from 1954 to 1965,
and finally (already retirement-age), at the University of California,
San Diego.  
His critiques
of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Freud,
{\em Eros and Civilization}, and his 1964 book {\em One-Dimensional Man}) 
resonated with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960s. 
He had many speaking engagements in the US and Europe in the late 1960s and
in the 1970s. He died on July 29, 1979, after having suffered a stroke
during a visit to Germany.}\\
(1965)
}
\end{center}

\rightline{{\em This essay is dedicated to my students at Brandeis University.}}

This essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial
society. The conclusion reached is that 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. In other words,
today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the
beginning of the modem period---a partisan goal, a subversive liberating
notion and practice. Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as
tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving
the cause of oppression.

The author is fully aware that, at present, no power, no authority,
no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into
practice, but he believes that it is the task and duty of the intellectual
to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem to have become
utopian possibilities---that it is his task to break the concreteness of
oppression in order to open the mental space in which this society can
be recognized as what it is and does.

Tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination of violence, and the
reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and
animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation
of a humane society. Such a society does not yet exist; progress toward
it is perhaps more than before arrested by violence and suppression
on a global scale. As deterrents against nuclear war, as police action
against subversion, as technical aid in the fight against imperialism
and communism, as methods of pacification in neo-colonial massacres,
violence and suppression are promulgated, practiced, and defended by
democratic and authoritarian governments alike, and the people subjected
to these governments are educated to sustain such practices as necessary
for the preservation of the status quo. Tolerance is extended to policies,
conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because
they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence
without fear and misery.

This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against
which authentic liberals protested. The political locus of tolerance
has changed: while it is more or less quietly and constitutionally
withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with
respect to established policies. Tolerance is turned from an active
into a passive state, from practice to nonpractice: 
{\em laissez-faire}\footnote{{\em laissez-faire}: a doctrine
opposing governmental interference in economic affairs beyond the
minimum necessary for the maintenance of peace and property rights.}
the
constituted authorities.  It is the people who tolerate the government,
which in turn tolerates opposition within the framework determined by
the constituted authorities.

Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because
it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more
affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and
adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness
in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special
forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception
in merchandising, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and
aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as
a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the
alternatives. The authorities in education, morals, and psychology are
vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency; they are less
vociferous against the proud presentation, in word and deed and pictures,
of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs---the mature delinquency
of a whole civilization.

According to a dialectical proposition it is the whole which determines
the truth---not in the sense that the whole is prior or superior to its
parts, but in the sense that its structure and function determine every
particular condition and relation. Thus, within a repressive society,
even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to
the degree to which they accept the rules of the game. To take a most
controversial case: the exercise of political rights (such as voting,
letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations
with {\em a priori}\footnote{{\em a priori:} formed or conceived
beforehand.}
renunciation of counterviolence) in a society of total
administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying
to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have
changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case,
freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for
absolving servitude. And yet (and only here the dialectical proposition
shows its full intent) the existence and practice of these liberties
remain a precondition for the restoration of their original oppositional
function, provided that the effort to transcend their (often self-imposed)
limitations is intensified. Generally, the function and value of tolerance
depend on the equality prevalent in the society in which tolerance
is practiced. Tolerance itself stands subject to overriding criteria:
its range and its limits cannot be defined in terms of the respective
society. In other words, tolerance is an end in itself only when it
is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as well as by the ruled,
by the lords as well as by the peasants, by the sheriffs as well as by
their victims. And such universal tolerance is possible only when no
real or alleged enemy requires in the national interest the education and
training of people in military violence and destruction. As long as these
conditions do not prevail, the conditions of tolerance are ``loaded":
they are determined and defined by the institutionalized inequality
(which is certainly compatible with constitutional equality), {\em i.e.}, by
the class structure of society. In such a society, tolerance is {\em de facto}
limited on the dual ground of legalized violence or suppression (police,
armed forces, guards of all sorts) and of the privileged position held
by the predominant interests and their ``connections."

These \label{page-85} background limitations of 
tolerance are normally prior to the
explicit and judicial limitations as defined by the courts, custom,
governments, etc. (for example, ``clear and present danger," threat
to national security, heresy). Within the framework of such a social
structure, tolerance can be safety practiced and proclaimed. It is of
two kinds: (1) the passive toleration of entrenched and established
attitudes and ideas even if their damaging effect on man and nature is
evident; and (2) the active, official tolerance granted to the Right as
well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements
of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity. I call
this non-partisan tolerance ``abstract" or ``pure" inasmuch as it refrains
from taking sides---but in doing so it actually protects the already
established machinery of discrimination.

The tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always
partisan---intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive {\em status
quo}. The issue was only the degree and extent of intolerance. In the
firmly established liberal society of England and the United States,
freedom of speech and assembly was granted even to the radical enemies
of society, provided they did not make the transition from word to deed,
from speech to action.

Relying on the effective background limitations imposed by its class
structure, the society seemed to practice general tolerance. But
liberalist theory had already placed an important condition on
tolerance: it was ``to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their
faculties." John Stuart Mill does not only speak of children and minors;
he elaborates: ``Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state
of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being
improved by free and equal discussion." Anterior to that time, men may
still be barbarians, and ``despotism is a legitimate mode of government
in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and
the means justified by actually effecting that end." Mill's often-quoted
words have a less familiar implication on which their meaning depends: the
internal connection between liberty and truth. There is a sense in which
truth is the end of liberty, and liberty must be defined and confined by
truth. Now in what sense can liberty be for the sake of truth? Liberty is
self-determination, autonomy---this is almost a tautology, but a tautology
which results from a whole series of synthetic judgments. It stipulates
the ability to determine one's own life: to be able to determine what to
do and what not to do, what to suffer and what not. But the subject of
this autonomy is never the contingent, private individual as that which
he actually is or happens to be; it is rather the individual as a human
being who is capable of being free with the others. And the problem of
making possible such a harmony between every individual liberty and
the other is not that of finding a compromise between competitors,
or between freedom and law, between general and individual interest,
common and private welfare in an established society, but of creating the
society in which man is no longer enslaved by institutions which 
vitiate\footnote{vitiate: to make ineffective.}
self-determination from the beginning. In other words, freedom is still
to be created even for the freest of the existing societies. And the
direction in which it must be sought, and the institutional and cultural
changes which may help to attain the goal are, at least in developed
civilization, comprehensible, that is to say, they can be identified
and projected, on the basis of experience, by human reason.

In the interplay of theory and practice, true and false solutions become
distinguishable---never with the evidence of necessity, never as the
positive, only with the certainty of a reasoned and reasonable chance, and
with the persuasive force of the negative. For the true positive is the
society of the future and therefore beyond definition and determination,
while the existing positive is that which must be surmounted. But the
experience and understanding of the existent society may well be capable
of identifying what is not conducive to a free and rational society,
what impedes and distorts the possibilities of its creation. Freedom
is liberation, a specific historical process in theory and practice,
and as such it has its right and wrong, its truth and falsehood.

The uncertainty of chance in this distinction does not cancel the
historical objectivity, but it necessitates freedom of thought
and expression as preconditions of finding the way to freedom---it
necessitates tolerance. However, this tolerance cannot be indiscriminate
and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in
word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which
demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of
liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless
debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable
in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot
be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom
and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be
said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be
proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance
an instrument for the continuation of servitude.

The danger of ``destructive tolerance" (Baudelaire), of ``benevolent
neutrality" toward art has been recognized: the market, which absorbs
equally well (although with often quite sudden fluctuations) art,
anti-art, and non-art, all possible conflicting styles, schools, forms,
provides a ``complacent receptacle, a friendly abyss" (Edgar Wind,
{\em Art and Anarchy} (New York: Knopf, 1964), p. 101) in which the radical
impact of art, the protest of art against the established reality is
swallowed up. However, censorship of art and literature is regressive
under all circumstances. The authentic {\em oeuvre} is not and cannot be a
prop of oppression, and pseudo-art (which can be such a prop) is not
art. Art stands against history, withstands history which has been the
history of oppression, for art subjects reality to laws other than the
established ones: to the laws of the Form which creates a different
reality---negation of the established one even where art depicts the
established reality. But in its struggle with history, art subjects
itself to history: history enters the definition of art and enters into
the distinction between art and pseudo-art. Thus it happens that what
was once art becomes pseudo-art. Previous forms, styles, and qualities,
previous modes of protest and refusal cannot be recaptured in or against
a different society. There are cases where an authentic {\em oeuvre} carries a
regressive political message---Dostoevski is a case in point, But then,
the message is canceled by the {\em oeuvre} itself: the regressive political
content is absorbed, 
aufgeboben 
in the artistic form: in the work as
literature.

Tolerance of free speech is the way of improvement, of progress in
liberation, not because there is no objective truth, and improvement must
necessarily be a compromise between a variety of opinions, but because
there is an objective truth which can be discovered, ascertained only
in learning and comprehending that which is and that which can be and
ought to be done for the sake of improving the lot of mankind. This
common and historical ``ought" is not immediately evident, at hand:
it has to be uncovered by ``cutting through," splitting, ``breaking
asunder" ({\em dis-cutio}) the given material---separating right and wrong,
good and bad, correct and incorrect. The subject whose ``improvement"
depends on a progressive historical practice is each man as man, and
this universality is reflected in that of the discussion, which {\em a priori}
does not exclude any group or individual. But even the all-inclusive
character of liberalist tolerance was, at least in theory, based
on the proposition that men were (potential) individuals who could
learn to hear and see and feel by themselves, to develop their own
thoughts, to grasp their true interests and rights and capabilities,
also against established authority and opinion. This was the rationale
of free speech and assembly. Universal toleration becomes questionable
when its rationale no longer prevails, when tolerance is administered
to manipulated and indoctrinated individuals who parrot, as their own,
the opinion of their masters, for whom heteronomy\footnote{heteronomy: 
subjection to something else; especially: a lack of moral freedom 
or self-determination.} 
has become autonomy.\footnote{autonomy: self-directing freedom and
especially moral independence.}

The {\em telos}\footnote{{\em telos:} an ultimate end.} 
of tolerance is truth. It is clear from the historical record
that the authentic spokesmen of tolerance had more and other truth in
mind than that of propositional logic and academic theory. John Stuart
Mill speaks of the truth which is persecuted in history and which does
not triumph over persecution by virtue of its ``inherent power," which in
fact has no inherent power ``against the dungeon and the stake." And he
enumerates the ``truths" which were cruelly and successfully liquidated
in the dungeons and at the stake: that of 
Arnold of Brescia, 
of Fra Dolcino, 
of Savonarola, 
of the Albigensians, 
Waldensians, 
Lollards,
and Hussites.\footnote{See notes at end for these references.}
Tolerance is first and foremost for the sake of the
heretics---the historical road toward 
{\em humanitas}\footnote{{\em humanitas}:} appears as heresy:
target of persecution by the powers that be. Heresy by itself, however,
is no token of truth.

The criterion of progress in freedom according to which Mill judges these
movements is the Reformation. The evaluation is {\em ex post}, and his list	
includes opposites (Savonarola too would have burned Fra Dolcino). Even
the {\em ex post} evaluation is contestable as to its truth: history corrects
the judgment---too late. The correction does not help the victims and
does not absolve their executioners. However, the lesson is clear:
intolerance has delayed progress and has prolonged the slaughter and
torture of innocents for hundreds of years. Does this clinch the case
for indiscriminate, ``pure" tolerance? Are there historical conditions
in which such toleration impedes liberation and multiplies the victims
who are sacrificed to the {\em status quo}? Can the indiscriminate guaranty of
political rights and liberties be repressive? Can such tolerance serve
to contain qualitative social change?

I shall discuss this question only with reference to political movements,
attitudes, schools of thought, philosophies which are ``political"
in the widest sense---affecting the society as a whole, demonstrably
transcending the sphere of privacy. Moreover, I propose a shift in the
focus of the discussion: it will be concerned not only, and not primarily,
with tolerance toward radical extremes, minorities, subversives, etc.,
but rather with tolerance toward majorities, toward official and public
opinion, toward the established protectors of freedom. In this case, the
discussion can have as a frame of reference only a democratic society,
in which the people, as individuals and as members of political and
other organizations, participate in the making, sustaining, and changing
policies. In an authoritarian system, the people do not 
tolerate---they suffer established policies.

Under a system of constitutionally guaranteed and (generally and without
too many and too glaring exceptions) practiced civil rights and liberties,
opposition and dissent are tolerated unless they issue in violence
and/or in exhortation to and organization of violent subversion. The
underlying assumption is that the established society is free, and that
any improvement, even a 
change in the social structure and social values,
would come about in the normal course of events, prepared, defined,
and tested in free and equal discussion, on the open marketplace of
ideas and goods.\footnote{%%
I wish to reiterate for the following discussion that, {\em de facto},
tolerance is not indiscriminate and ``pure" even in the most democratic
society. 
The ``background limitations" 
stated earlier in this article (on page \pageref{page-85})
restrict
tolerance before it begins to operate. The antagonistic structure
of society rigs the rules of the game. Those who stand against the
established system are {\em a priori} at a disadvantage, which is not removed
by the toleration of their ideas, speeches, and newspapers.}


Now in recalling John Stuart Mill's passage, I drew attention to the
premise hidden in this assumption: free and equal discussion can fulfill
the function attributed to it only if it is rational---expression 
and development of independent thinking, free from indoctrination,
manipulation, extraneous authority. The notion of pluralism and
countervailing powers is no substitute for this requirement. One might
in theory construct a state in which a multitude of different pressures,
interests, and authorities balance each other out and result in a truly
general and rational interest. However, such a construct badly fits a
society in which powers are and remain unequal and even increase their
unequal weight when they run their own course. It fits even worse when
the variety of pressures unifies and coagulates into an overwhelming
whole, integrating the particular countervailing powers by virtue of
an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of
power. Then, the laborer, whose real interest conflicts with that of
management, the common consumer whose real interest conflicts with that
of the producer, the intellectual whose vocation conflicts with that
of his employer find themselves submitting to a system against which
they are powerless and appear unreasonable. The ideas of the available
alternatives evaporates into an utterly utopian dimension in which it is
at home, for a free society is indeed unrealistically and undefinably
different from the existing ones. Under these circumstances, whatever
improvement may occur ``in the normal course of events" and without
subversion is likely to be improvement in the direction determined by
the particular interests which control the whole.

By the same token, those minorities which strive for a change of the whole
itself will, under optimal conditions which rarely prevail, be left free
to deliberate and discuss, to speak and to assemble---and will be left
harmless and helpless in the face of the overwhelming majority, which
militates against qualitative social change. This majority is firmly
grounded in the increasing satisfaction of needs, and technological
and mental coordination, which testify to the general helplessness of
radical groups in a well-functioning social system.

Within the affluent democracy, the affluent discussion prevails, and
within the established framework, it is tolerant to a large extent. All
points of view can be heard: the Communist and the Fascist, the Left
and the Right, the white and the Negro, the crusaders for armament and
for disarmament. Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media,
the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent
one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda
rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This pure toleration
of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that
nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and
capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all
contesting opinions must be submitted to ``the people" for its deliberation
and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument
implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable
of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must
have access to authentic information, and that, on this basis, their
evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.

In the Contemporary period, the democratic argument for abstract
tolerance tends to be invalidated by the invalidation of the democratic
process itself. The liberating force of democracy was the chance it
gave to effective dissent, on the individual as well as social scale,
its openness to qualitatively different forms of government, of culture,
education, work---of the human existence in general. The toleration of
free discussion and the equal right of opposites was to define and clarify
the different forms of dissent: their direction, content, prospect. But
with the concentration of economic and political power and the integration
of opposites in a society which uses technology as an instrument of
domination, effective dissent is blocked where it could freely emerge:
in the formation of opinion, in information and communication, in speech
and assembly. Under the rule of monopolistic media---themselves the mere
instruments of economic and political power---a mentality is created for
which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect
the vital interests of the society. This is, prior to all expression and
communication, a matter of semantics: the blocking of effective dissent,
of the recognition of that which is not of the Establishment which begins
in the language that is publicized and administered. The meaning of words
is rigidly stabilized. Rational persuasion, persuasion to the opposite
is all but precluded. The avenues of entrance are closed to the meaning
of words and ideas other than the established one---established by the
publicity of the powers that be, and verified in their practices. Other
words can be spoken and heard, other ideas can be expressed, but, at the
massive scale of the conservative majority (outside such enclaves as the
intelligentsia), they are immediately ``evaluated" ({\em i.e.}, automatically
understood) in terms of the public language---a language which determines
``a priori" the direction in which the thought process moves. Thus the
process of reflection ends where it started: in the given conditions
and relations. Self-validating, the argument of the discussion repels
the contradiction because the antithesis is redefined in terms of the
thesis. For example, thesis: we work for peace; antithesis: we prepare
for war (or even: we wage war); unification of opposites: preparing
for war is working for peace. Peace is redefined as necessarily, in the
prevailing situation, including preparation for war (or even war) and in
this Orwellian form, the meaning of the word ``peace" is stabilized. Thus,
the basic vocabulary of the Orwellian language operates as {\em a priori}
categories of understanding: preforming all content. These conditions
invalidate the logic of tolerance which involves the rational development
of meaning and precludes the closing of meaning. Consequently, persuasion
through discussion and the equal presentation of opposites (even where
it is really equal) easily lose their liberating force as factors of
understanding and learning; they are far more likely to strengthen the
established thesis and to repel the alternatives.


Impartiality to the utmost, equal treatment of competing
and conflicting issues is indeed a basic requirement for
decision-making in the democratic process---it is an equally
basic requirement for defining the limits of tolerance. But
in a democracy with totalitarian organization, objectivity may
fulfill a very different function, namely, to foster a mental
attitude which tends to obliterate the difference between true
and false information and indoctrination, right and wrong. In
fact, the decision between opposed opinions has been made before
the presentation and discussion get under way---made, not by a
conspiracy or a sponsor or a publisher, not by any 
dictatorship, but rather by the ``normal course of events," which is the
course of administered events, and by the mentality shaped in this
course. Here, too, it is the whole which determines the truth. Then
the decision asserts itself, without any open violation of objectivity,
in such things as the make-up of a newspaper (with the breaking up of
vital information into bits interspersed between extraneous material,
irrelevant items, relegating of some radically negative news to an obscure
place), in the juxtaposition of gorgeous ads with unmitigated horrors,
in the introduction and interruption of the broadcasting of facts by
overwhelming commercials. The result is a neutralization of opposites,
a neutralization, however, which takes place on the firm grounds of the
structural limitation of tolerance and within a preformed mentality. When
a magazine prints side by side a negative and a positive report on the
FBI, it fulfills honestly the requirements of objectivity: however, the
chances are that the positive wins because the image of the institution
is deeply engraved in the mind of the people. Or, if a newscaster
reports the torture and murder of civil rights workers in the same
unemotional tone he uses to describe the stockmarket or the weather,
or with the same great emotion with which he says his commercials,
then such objectivity is spurious---more, it offends against humanity
and truth by being calm where one should be enraged, by refraining from
accusation where accusation is in the facts themselves. The tolerance
expressed in such impartiality serves to minimize or even absolve
prevailing intolerance and suppression. If objectivity has anything to
do with truth, and if truth is more than a matter of logic and science,
then this kind of objectivity is false, and this kind of tolerance
inhuman. And if it is necessary to break the established universe of
meaning (and the practice enclosed in this universe) in order to enable
man to find out what is true and false, this deceptive impartiality
would have to be abandoned. The people exposed to this impartiality
are no {\em tabulae rasae},\footnote{{\em tabulae rasae:} the mind in
its hypothetical primary blank or empty state before receiving outside
impressions.} 
they are indoctrinated by the conditions under
which they live and think and which they do not transcend. To enable
them to become autonomous, to find by themselves what is true and what
is false for man in the existing society, they would have to be freed
from the prevailing indoctrination (which is no longer recognized as
indoctrination). But this means that the trend would have to be reversed:
they would have to get information slanted in the opposite direction. For
the facts are never given immediately and never accessible immediately;
they are established, ``mediated" by those who made them; the truth,
``the whole truth" surpasses these facts and requires the rupture with
their appearance. This rupture---prerequisite and token of all freedom
of thought and of speech---cannot be accomplished within the established
framework of abstract tolerance and spurious objectivity because these
are precisely the factors which precondition the mind against the rupture.

The factual barriers which totalitarian democracy erects against the
efficacy of qualitative dissent are weak and pleasant enough compared with
the practices of a dictatorship which claims to educate the people in the
truth. With all its limitations and distortions, democratic tolerance is
under all circumstances more humane than an institutionalized intolerance
which sacrifices the rights and liberties of the living generations for
the sake of future generations. The question is whether this is the only
alternative. I shall presently try to suggest the direction in which an
answer may be sought. In any case, the contrast is not between democracy
in the abstract and dictatorship in the abstract.

Democracy is a form of government which fits very different types of
society (this holds true even for a democracy with universal suffrage
and equality before the law), and the human costs of a democracy are
always and everywhere those exacted by the society whose government it
is. Their  range extends all the way from normal exploitation, poverty,
and insecurity to the victims of wars, police actions, military aid, etc.,
in which the society is engaged---and not only to the victims within its
own frontiers. These considerations can never justify the exacting of
different sacrifices and different victims on behalf of a future better
society, but they do allow weighing the costs involved in the perpetuation
of an existing society against the risk of promoting alternatives
which offer a reasonable chance of pacification and liberation. Surely,
no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a
democracy such a right is vested in the people ({\em i.e.}, in the majority of
the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a
subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized
repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently
undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of
speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive
policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race
and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social
security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of
thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and
practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods
and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe
of discourse and behavior---thereby precluding {\em a priori} a rational
evaluation of the alternatives. And to the degree to which freedom of
thought involves the struggle against inhumanity, restoration of such
freedom would also imply intolerance toward scientific research in
the interest of deadly ``deterrents," of abnormal human endurance under
inhuman conditions, etc. I shall presently discuss the question as to who
is to decide on the distinction between liberating and repressive, human
and inhuman teachings and practices; I have already suggested that this
distinction is not a matter of value-preference but of rational criteria.

While the reversal of the trend in the educational enterprise at least
could conceivably be enforced by the students and teachers themselves,
and thus be self-imposed, the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward
regressive and repressive opinions and movements could only be envisaged
as results of large-scale pressure which would amount to an upheaval. In
other words, it would presuppose that which is still to be accomplished:
the reversal of the trend. However, resistance at particular occasions,
boycott, non-participation at the local and small-group level may perhaps
prepare the ground. The subversive character of the restoration of freedom
appears most clearly in that dimension of society where false tolerance
and free enterprise do perhaps the most serious and lasting damage,
namely, in business and publicity. Against the emphatic insistence on the
part of spokesmen for labor, I maintain that practices such as planned
obsolescence, collusion between union leadership and management, slanted
publicity are not simply imposed from above on a powerless rank and file,
but are tolerated by them---and by the consumer at large. However, it
would be ridiculous to speak of a possible withdrawal of tolerance with
respect to these practices and to the ideologies promoted by them. For
they pertain to the basis on which the repressive affluent society rests
and reproduces itself and its vital defenses---their removal would be
that total revolution which this society so effectively repels.

To discuss tolerance in such a society means to re-examine the issue of
violence and the traditional distinction between violent and nonviolent
action. The discussion should not, from the beginning, be clouded
by ideologies which serve the perpetuation of violence. Even in the
advanced centers of civilization, violence actually prevails; it is
practiced by the police, in the prisons and mental institutions, in
the fight against racial minorities; it is carried, by the defenders of
metropolitan freedom, into the backward countries. This violence indeed
breeds violence. But to refrain from violence in the face of vastly
superior violence is one thing, to renounce {\em a priori} violence against
violence, on ethical or psychological grounds (because it may antagonize
sympathizers) is another. Non-violence is normally not only preached
to but exacted from the weak---it is a necessity rather than a virtue,
and normally it does not seriously harm the case of the strong. (Is
the case of India an exception? There, passive resistance was carried
through on a massive scale, which disrupted, or threatened to disrupt,
the economic life of the country. Quantity turns into quality: on such
a scale, passive resistance is no longer passive---it ceases to be
non-violent. The same holds true for the General Strike.) 
Robespierre's\footnote{Robespierre: 1758--1794. French revolutionary;
recognized as leader of radical Montagnards and responsible for much
of Reign of Terror; overthrown and guillotined by Thermidorians.}
distinction between the terror of liberty and the terror of despotism,
and his moral glorification of the former belongs to the most convincingly
condemned aberrations, even if the white terror was more bloody than the
red terror. The comparative evaluation in terms of the number of victims
is the quantifying approach which reveals the man-made horror throughout
history that made violence a necessity. In terms of historical function,
there is a difference between revolutionary and reactionary violence,
between violence practiced by the oppressed and by the oppressors. In
terms of ethics, both forms of violence are inhuman and evil---but
since when is history made in accordance with ethical standards? To
start applying them at the point where the oppressed rebel against the
oppressors, the have-nots against the haves is serving the cause of
actual violence by weakening the protest against it.

\begin{quote}
Comprenez enfin ceci: si la violence a commence' ce soir, si
l'exploitation ni l'oppression n'ont jamais existe' sur terre, peut-etre
la nonviolence affichee peut apaiser la querelle. Mais si le regime
tout entier et jusqu'a vos nonviolentes pensees sont conditionnees par
une oppression millenaire, votre passivite' ne sert qu'a vous ranger du
cote' des oppresseurs. (Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon, {\em Les Damnes de
la Terre}, Paris: Maspero, 1961, p. 22).
\end{quote}

The very notion of false tolerance, and the distinction between right
and wrong limitations on tolerance, between progressive and regressive
indoctrination, revolutionary and reactionary violence demand the
statement of criteria for its validity. These standards must be
prior to whatever constitutional and legal criteria are set up and
applied in an existing society (such as ``clear and present danger,"
and other established definitions of civil rights and liberties),
for such definitions themselves presuppose standards of freedom and
repression as applicable or not applicable in the respective society:
they are specifications of more general concepts. By whom, and according
to what standards, can the political distinction between true and
false, progressive and regressive (for in this sphere, these pairs are
equivalent) be made and its validity be justified? At the outset, I
propose that the question cannot be answered in terms of the alternative
between democracy and dictatorship, according to which, in the latter,
one individual or group, without any effective control from below,
arrogate to themselves the decision. Historically, even in the most
democratic democracies, the vital and final decisions affecting the
society as a whole have been made, constitutionally or in fact, by one
or several groups without effective control by the people themselves. The
ironical question: who educates the educators ({\em i.e.} 
the political leaders)
also applies to democracy. The only authentic alternative and negation
of dictatorship (with respect to this question) would be a society in
which ``the people" have become autonomous individuals, freed from the
repressive requirements of a struggle for existence in the interest
of domination, and as such human beings choosing their government and
determining their life. Such a society does not yet exist anywhere. In
the meantime, the question must be treated {\em in abstracto}---abstraction,
not from the historical possibilities but from the realities of the
prevailing societies.

I suggested that the distinction between true and false tolerance,
between progress and regression can be made rationally on empirical
grounds. The real possibilities of human freedom are relative to
the attained stage of civilization. They depend on the material and
intellectual resources available at the respective stage, and they are
quantifiable and calculable to a high degree. So are, at the stage of
advanced industrial society, the most rational ways of using these
resources and distributing the social product with priority on the
satisfaction of vital needs and with a minimum of toil and injustice. In
other words, it is possible to define the direction in which prevailing
institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to
improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and
a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on
poverty, oppression, and exploitation. Consequently, it is also possible
to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance,
and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive
ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.

The question, who is qualified to make all these distinctions,
definitions, identifications for the society as a whole, has 
now one logical answer, namely, 
everyone ``in the maturity of his faculties"
as a human being, everyone who has learned to think rationally and
autonomously. The answer to Plato's educational dictatorship is the
democratic educational dictatorship of free men. John Stuart Mill's
conception of the {\em res publica}\footnote{{\em res publica:}
commonwealth.} 
is not the opposite of Plato's: the
liberal too demands the authority of Reason not only as an intellectual
but also as a political power. In Plato, rationality is confined to the
small number of philosopher-kings; in Mill, every rational human being
participates in the discussion and decision---but only as a rational
being. Where society has entered the phase of total administration and
indoctrination, this would be a small number indeed, and not necessarily
that of the elected representatives of the people. The problem is not
that of an educational dictatorship, but that of breaking the tyranny
of public opinion and its makers in the closed society.

However, granted the empirical rationality of the distinction between
progress and regression, and granted that it may be applicable to
tolerance, and may justify strongly discriminatory tolerance on political
grounds (cancellation of the liberal creed of free and equal discussion),
another impossible consequence would follow. I said that, by virtue
of its inner logic, withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements,
and discriminatory tolerance in favor of progressive tendencies would
be tantamount to the ``official" promotion of subversion. The historical
calculus of progress (which is actually the calculus of the prospective
reduction of cruelty, misery, suppression) seems to involve the calculated
choice between two forms of political violence: that on the part of the
legally constituted powers (by their legitimate action, or by their tacit
consent, or by their inability to prevent violence), and that on the part
of potentially subversive movements. Moreover, with respect to the latter,
a policy of unequal treatment would protect radicalism on the Left against
that on the Right. Can the historical calculus be reasonably extended to
the justification of one form of violence as against another? Or better
(since ``justification" carries a moral connotation), is there historical
evidence to the effect that the social origin and impetus of violence
(from among the ruled or the ruling classes, the have or the have-nots,
the Left or the Right) is in a demonstrable relation to progress (as
defined above)?

With all the qualifications of a hypothesis based on an ``open" historical
record, it seems that the violence emanating from the rebellion of
the oppressed classes broke the historical continuum of injustice,
cruelty, and silence for a brief moment, brief but explosive enough to
achieve an increase in the scope of freedom and justice, and a better
and more equitable distribution of misery and oppression in a new social
system---in one word: progress in civilization. The English civil wars, the
French Revolution, the Chinese and the Cuban Revolutions may illustrate
the hypothesis. In contrast, the one historical change from one social
system to another, marking the beginning of a new period in civilization,
which was not sparked and driven by an effective movement ``from below,"
namely, the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, brought about a
long period of regression for long centuries, until a new, higher period
of civilization was painfully born in the violence of the heretic revolts
of the thirteenth century and in the peasant and laborer revolts of the
fourteenth century.\footnote{%
In modern times, fascism has been a consequence of the transition
to industrial society without a revolution. See Barrington Moore's
forthcoming book {\em Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy}.}

With respect to historical violence emanating from among ruling classes,
no such relation to progress seems to obtain. The long series of dynastic
and imperialist wars, the liquidation of {\em Spartacus} in Germany in 1919,
Fascism and Nazism did not break but rather tightened and streamlined the
continuum of suppression. I said emanating ``from among ruling classes":
to be sure, there is hardly any organized violence from above that does
not mobilize and activate mass support from below; the decisive question
is, on behalf of and in the interest of which groups and institutions
is such violence released? And the answer is not necessarily {\em ex post}: in
the historical examples just mentioned, it could be and was anticipated
whether the movement would serve the revamping of the old order or the
emergence of the new.

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from
the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope
of this tolerance and intolerance: \ldots\ it would extend to the stage of
action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of
word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no
longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation
of the theater audience when somebody cries: ``fire." It is a situation in
which the total catastrophy could be triggered off any moment, not only by
a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by
a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances,
the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue
to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action,
between the organization and its release on the people had become too
short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before
it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the
future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance
of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present
danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of
tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print,
and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free
assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme
danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation,
and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions
and ``philosophies" can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and
persuasion on rational grounds: the ``marketplace of ideas" is organized
and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual
interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed
the ``end of ideology," the false consciousness has become the general
consciousness---from the government down to its last objects. The small
and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness
and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more
important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant
constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities. It should be
evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don't have
them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent
their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes
suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.

Withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become
active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally,
intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled
conservatives, to the political Right---these anti-democratic notions
respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has
destroyed the basis for universal tolerance. The conditions under which
tolerance can again become a liberating and humanizing force have still to
be created. When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation
of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to
render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance
has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the
individual, in his consciousness, his needs, when heteronomous interests
occupy him before he can experience his servitude, then the efforts to
counteract his dehumanization must begin at the place of entrance, there
where the false consciousness takes form (or rather: is systematically
formed)---it must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this
consciousness. To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but
openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates
the free media. Where the false consciousness has become prevalent in
national and popular behavior, it translates itself almost immediately
into practice: the safe distance between ideology and reality, repressive
thought and repressive action, between the word of destruction and the
deed of destruction is dangerously shortened. Thus, the break through
the false consciousness may provide the Archimedean point for a larger
emancipation---at an infinitesimally small spot, to be sure, but it is
on the enlargement of such small spots that the chance of change depends.

The forces of emancipation cannot be identified with any social
class which, by virtue of its material condition, is free from false
consciousness. Today, they are hopelessly dispersed throughout the
society, and the fighting minorities and isolated groups are often in
opposition to their own leadership. In the society at large, the mental
space for denial and reflection must first be recreated. Repulsed by the
concreteness of the administered society, the effort of emancipation
becomes ``abstract"; it is reduced to facilitating the recognition of
what is going on, to freeing language from the tyranny of the Orwellian
syntax and logic, to developing the concepts that comprehend reality. More
than ever, the proposition holds true that progress in freedom demands
progress in the consciousness of freedom. Where the mind has been made
into a subject-object of politics and policies, intellectual autonomy,
the realm of ``pure" thought has become a matter of political education
(or rather: counter-education).

This means that previously neutral, value-free, formal aspects of learning
and teaching now become, on their own grounds and in their own right,
political: learning to know the facts, the whole truth, and to comprehend
it is radical criticism throughout, intellectual subversion. In a world in
which the human faculties and needs are arrested or perverted, autonomous
thinking leads into a ``perverted world": contradiction and counter-image
of the established world of repression. And this contradiction is not
simply stipulated, is not simply the product of confused thinking or
phantasy, but is the logical development of the given, the existing
world. To the
degree to which this development is actually impeded by the sheer weight
of a repressive society and the necessity of making a living in it,
repression invades the academic enterprise itself, even prior to all
restrictions on academic freedom. The pre-empting of the mind vitiates
impartiality and objectivity: unless the student learns to think in
the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the
predominant framework of values. Scholarship, {\em i.e.} the acquisition and
communication of knowledge, prohibits the purification and isolation
of facts from the context of the whole truth. An essential part of the
latter is recognition of the frightening extent to which history was
made and recorded by and for the victors, that is, the extent to which
history was the development of oppression. And this oppression is in
the facts themselves which it establishes; thus they themselves carry
a negative value as part and aspect of their facticity. To treat the
great crusades against humanity (like that against the Albigensians)
with the same impartiality as the desperate struggles for humanity
means neutralizing their opposite historical function, reconciling the
executioners with their victims, distorting the record. Such spurious
neutrality serves to reproduce acceptance of the dominion of the victors
in the consciousness of man. Here, too, in the education of those who
are not yet maturely integrated, in the mind of the young, the ground
for liberating tolerance is still to be created.

Education offers still another example of spurious, abstract tolerance
in the guise of concreteness and truth: it is epitomized in the concept
of self-actualization. From the permissiveness of all sorts of license
to the child, to the constant psychological concern with the personal
problems of the student, a large-scale movement is under way against the
evils of repression and the need for being oneself. Frequently brushed
aside is the question as to what has to be repressed before one can be
a self, oneself. The individual potential is first a negative one, a
portion of the potential of his society: of aggression, guilt feeling,
ignorance, resentment, cruelty which vitiate his life instincts. If
the identity of the self is to be more than the immediate realization
of this potential (undesirable for the individual as human being), then
it requires repression and sublimation, conscious transformation. This
process involves at each stage (to use the ridiculed terms which here
reveal their succinct concreteness) the negation of the negation,
mediation of the immediate, and identity is no more and no less than
this process. ``Alienation" is the constant and essential element of
identity, the objective side of the subject---and not, as it is made to
appear today, a disease, a psychological condition. Freud well knew the
difference between progressive and regressive, liberating and destructive
repression. The publicity of self-actualization promotes the removal
of the one and the other, it promotes existence in that immediacy which,
in a repressive society, is (to use another Hegelian term) bad immediacy
({\em schlechte Unmittelbarkeit}). It isolates the individual from the one
dimension where he could ``find himself": from his political existence,
which is at the core of his entire existence. Instead, it encourages
non-conformity and letting go in ways which leave the real engines of
repression in the society entirely intact, which even strengthen these
engines by substituting the satisfactions of private and personal
rebellion for a more than private and personal, and therefore more
authentic, opposition. The desublimation involved in this sort of
self-actualization is itself repressive inasmuch as it weakens the
necessity and the power of the intellect, the catalytic force of that
unhappy consciousness which does not revel in the archetypal personal
release of frustration---hopeless resurgence of the {\em Id} which will sooner
or later succumb to the omnipresent rationality of the administered
world---but which recognizes the horror of the whole in the most private
frustration and actualizes itself in this recognition.

I have tried to show how the changes in advanced democratic societies,
which have undermined the basis of economic and political liberalism,
have also altered the liberal function of tolerance. The tolerance which
was the great achievement of the liberal era is still professed and
(with strong qualifications) practiced, while the economic and political
process is subjected to an ubiquitous and effective administration in
accordance with the predominant interests. The result is an objective
contradiction between the economic and political structure on the one
side, and the theory and practice of toleration on the other. The altered
social structure tends to weaken the effectiveness of tolerance toward
dissenting and oppositional movements and to strengthen conservative and
reactionary forces. Equality of tolerance becomes abstract, spurious. With
the actual decline of dissenting forces in the society, the opposition
is insulated in small and frequently antagonistic groups who, even where
tolerated within the narrow limits set by the hierarchical structure
of society, are powerless while they keep within these limits. But the
tolerance shown to them is deceptive and promotes coordination. And on
the firm foundations of a coordinated society all but closed against
qualitative change, tolerance itself serves to contain such change rather
than to promote it.

These same conditions render the critique of such tolerance abstract and
academic, and the proposition that the balance between tolerance toward
the Right and toward the Left would have to be radically redressed
in order to restore the liberating function of tolerance becomes
only an unrealistic speculation. Indeed, such a redressing seems to
be tantamount to the establishment of a ``right of resistance" to the
point of subversion. There is not, there cannot be any such right for
any group or individual against a constitutional government sustained
by a majority of the population. But I believe that there is a ``natural
right" of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use
extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate. Law
and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect
the established hierarchy; it is nonsensical to invoke the absolute
authority of this law and this order against those who suffer from it
and struggle against it---not for personal advantages and revenge, but
for their share of humanity. There is no other judge over them than the
constituted authorities, the police, and their own conscience. If they
use violence, they do not start a new chain of violence but try to break
an established one. Since they will be punished, they know the risk,
and when they are willing to take it, no third person, and least of all
the educator and intellectual, has the right to preach them abstention.


\subsubsection*{Notes}

{\bf Arnold of Brescia}:
c.1090--1155, Italian monk and reformer, b. Brescia. A priest of
irreproachable life, Arnold studied at Paris, where according to tradition
he was a pupil of Peter Abelard. He first gained prominence in a struggle
at Brescia between the bishop and the city government. Arnold became
sharply critical of the church, declaring that secular powers only ought
to hold property; he opposed the possession of property by the church
because he believed it was being tainted by its temporal power. At
the Synod of Sens (1140), dominated by St.~Bernard of Clairvaux,
Arnold and Abelard were adjudged to be in error. Abelard submitted,
but Arnold continued to preach. Pope Innocent II ordered Arnold exiled
and his books burned. In 1145, Pope Eugene III ordered him to go to
Rome in penitence. There the people had asserted the rights of the
commune and had set up a republic. Arnold was attracted to their cause
and became their leader, eloquently pleading for liberty and democratic
rights. The republicans under Arnold forced Eugene into temporary exile
(1146). Arnold was excommunicated by the pope in 1148 but continued
to head the republican city-state even after Eugene III was permitted
to reenter Rome. When Adrian IV became pope, however, he took stern
measures. By placing Rome under an interdict in Holy Week, 1155, he forced
the exile of Arnold. When Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I came to Rome,
his forces at the pope's request seized Arnold, who was then tried by
the Roman Curia as a political rebel (not a heretic) and executed by
secular authorities. To the end he was idolized by the Roman populace.

{\bf Fra Dolcino}: in 1300 headed the Apostolic Brothers, and outlawed
religious sect that was forcibly suppressed; he was burned at the
stake by the Catholic Church in 1307.

{\bf Girolamo Savonarola}: (1452--98), popular and briefly powerful
Florentine preacher, renowned both for his eloquent attacks on
Catholic church laxity and for his extreme severity; he was eventually
hanged and burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for heresy.

{\bf the Albigensians}: Also known as Albigenses, or Albigensians, a
heretical southern French religious sect that flourished in the 12th
and 13th centuries but disappeared under the combined assault of the
Catholic Inquisition, missionary preachings, and Pope Innocent III's
crusade against them in 1209.

{\bf Waldensians}: Also known as Waldenses, or Waldensians, after
their leader Pierre Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, France, who in
the 12th century gave away his wealth and organized an ascetic and
heretical religious sect which was strongly persecuted by the Catholic
Church bur survived to merge with the German Protestants in the 16th
century.

{\bf Lollards}: Members of an ascetic and anti-sacerdotal English and
Scottish movement for ecclesiastical reform led by John Wyclif
(1324--84), and popular among both middle and lower classes until
driven underground by suppressive measures of the Catholic Church.

{\bf Hussites}: Followers of Juhn Huss (1369?--1415), who led a
popular movement in Bohemia and Moravia that was strongly influence by
the religious teachings of Wycliffe but also involved a national
struggle between Czechs and Germans, and a social struggle against
feudalism; its influence was dissipated by internal schism, military
defeat, and widespread defection, but remnants of the groups survived
to unite with the 16th century Reformers.

\end{document}