Easily the most imaginative rethinking of political tolerance since Stouffer's seminal study has been offered by Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus – imaginative, but possibly misleading.

Employed as a supplement, their analysis can be a valuable corrective, particularly in underlining that even people broadly disposed to tolerate others can find a particular group unacceptable to them. But Sullivan and his colleagues have adopted a more ambitious stance, taking the position that their conceptualization and analysis of political tolerance should replace the alternatives.

The fundamental premise of their approach is that political tolerance is sui generis. So they insist that, to be politically tolerant, a person must be willing to put up with a group they dislike, this being a root conception in the origin of political toleration of religious heterogeneity. For our part, a twentieth-century conception of tolerance has advantages over a seventeenth-century one: It is unreasonable, simply put, to insist that for a person to be racially tolerant, he or she must dislike blacks.

From our perspective, if the task is to understand how far ordinary people can undertake a commitment to a cornerstone value like tolerance, it is crucial to appreciate the nexus among forms of tolerance: political, racial, religious, and social. So in this chapter we supply a demonstration of how forms of tolerance that appear in their manifest content to be about quite different things – an acceptance of the political rights of controversial groups in one case and an acceptance of blacks in the other – share a common core because they share common causes. […]