Wędrująca idea tolerancji
The travelling idea of tolerance

Summary/Abstract: As an idea, “tolerance” belongs to a category of notions that can be seen as a subjective phenomenon in the sense that the underlying semantics of its assumptions are greatly varied and variable. Tolerance is a travelling idea exactly because of this primary reason, for which the practice of verbalising tolerance influences the way it is being understood. Tolerance always forms a relation with a wide palette of similar notions, which decide on its particular semantic understanding. These include for example the notions of universality, relativity and cosmopolitism. Against this background, the difference between tolerance in theory (subjective) and tolerance in practice (objective, pragmatic) also becomes evident. The paper presents several important episodes from the specific journey of tolerance-as-an-idea in the history of European culture – beginning with the Ottoman Empire and ending with modern disputes on the status of tolerance in liberal democracies.

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