Tolerance

Tolerance is one of the most representative works of history and letters by the Dutch-American author Hendrik Willem van Loon. First published in 1925, it has crossed nearly a century on the strength of its profound insight and still shines with intellectual brilliance today. This is not a religious history or a history of ideas in the strict sense, but a grand narrative of humanity's mental shackles and liberation, with "tolerance" as its thread. In his characteristic style, which fuses deep learning with vivid prose, Van Loon leads the reader from the dawn of reason in ancient Greece, through the long night of the Middle Ages, to the difficult first stirrings of the modern scientific spirit. The tragedies wrought by "intolerance" in these pages—from the death of Socrates to the fires of the Inquisition, from the stake of Servetus to the trial of Galileo—are all heartrending and thought-provoking. Van Loon's profundity lies in his refusal to blame intolerance simply on human wickedness; instead, he sharply identifies its roots in "laziness, ignorance, and selfishness," above all the fear of the unknown and the blind defense of the established order. Reading Tolerance is not only to learn the sweeping history of intellectual struggle but also to examine one's own prejudices and cognitive limits. In an age of information overload and ever sharper polarization of opinion, Van Loon's call—that tolerance is "the allowance of the free exercise of action and judgment to others, the patient and impartial tolerance of views different from one's own or from traditional ones"—feels especially precious and urgent. This Shanghai Translation Publishing House edition is fluent and accurate, preserving the flavor and force of Van Loon's original to a considerable degree.