POL 4377 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Seeed, Fop, Totalitarianism
31 May 2016
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Document Summary
On first publication in 1965, herbert marcuse"s repressive tolerance (marcuse. 1969)1 was criticised both as anti-democratic and as defying the academic canon of value neutrality. However, marcuse"s argument is attracting renewed interest because, post 9/11, the thresholds and limits of tolerance are being contested. Marcuse"s essay sought to problematise dominant social conceptions of tolerance: that individual citizens tolerate government policy and that governments did not encourage debate and dissent. Marcuse demonstrated the social production of knowledge about tolerance. As marcuse was concerned about what counted socially as tolerance, and how it was socially defended and justified, repressive tolerance can be conceived as a helpful enactment of social epistemology. The aim of this paper is to examine marcuse"s analysis of the social organisation and structure of knowledge that served a particular form and function of tolerance. Marcuse"s rt engaged with what counted as the socially organised knowledge about tolerance and its implications.
