Abstract
Abstract I will begin, like a good professor, by making a couple of distinctions. I am not going to focus in this essay (except at the very end) on the toleration of eccentric or dissident individuals in civil society or even in the state. Individual rights may well lie at the root of every sort of toleration, but I am interested in those rights primarily when they are exercised in common (in the course of voluntary association or religious worship or cultural expression) or when they are claimed by groups on behalf of their members. Eccentric individuals, solitary in their differences, are fairly easy to tolerate, and at the same time social repugnance for and resistance to eccentricity, while certainly unattractive, are not terribly dangerous. The stakes are much higher when we turn to eccentric and dissident groups.
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