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faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt.
Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a
promise from the Quaker.
(Voltaire 1734: 41)
Capitalism thus gives people plenty of incentives to ignore religion and
focus just on how someone else can help them make money. Indeed, as
Albert Hirschman argues in his classic work, The Passions and the Inter-
ests (1977), the early defenses of capitalism were based on the claim that if
people would pay more attention to their economic self-interest, they
would pay less attention to religious differences. The importance of com-
mercial ties for ameliorating tensions between communities is seen quite
dramatically in Lucknow in India where the economic ties between Hindu
textile traders and their Muslim workers seems to have prevented riots
where lesser provocations in other Indian cities led to widespread destruc-
tion (Varshney 2002: chs 7 8). Replacing  enthusiasm for religion with
the cool calculations of interest thus promotes social peace (see Holmes
1990). Toleration is simply a byproduct of this effort to redirect people s
social energies. Toleration is accepted because a person s religious beliefs
cease to be their sole source of identity and social worth.
As powerful as this argument is, it too fails to show that capitalism is
the crucial ingredient for toleration. First, unless enough people already
Establishing toleration 93
accept toleration, the workings of free markets will actually encourage
intolerance. In the segregated South, a white restaurant owner who seated
African-Americans in his restaurant would lose his white customers.
Likewise, the corporation that promoted a Black, no matter how well-
qualified, to a prominent position could lose all of its white and therefore
most prosperous customers. By itself, then, a free market does little to
promote toleration. Once toleration is in place, market pressures will force
corporations to cater to minority groups, so capitalism and toleration, like
democracy and toleration, may reinforce each other in a virtuous cycle.
But once again, the cycle has to be primed with toleration first.
Second, economic interests often exacerbate the differences between
religious groups, and the economic success of minorities often increases the
hostility towards them. We need only reflect on the long-standing resent-
ment of the Jews in Europe for their ability to make money to see the
problem. In fact, the Huguenots in France were resented by Catholics for
many of the same reasons (Scoville 1960: 47 57; Labrousse 1985: ch. IV).
With little hope for advancement in the traditional avenues of the army
and the judiciary, many Huguenots had turned to commerce, which their
religion unlike Catholicism encouraged. But that success hardly
endeared them to their Catholic neighbors, who felt that they competed
unfairly because they worked on feast days and were less skittish about
lending and borrowing money with interest, activities which were frowned
upon in the Catholic Church (Scoville 1960: ch. V). Free markets, then,
fanned the flames of intolerance.
Finally, structural elements within capitalism may work against tolera-
tion. If some Marxist analyses are even remotely correct, the interests of
capitalist classes are to keep the working class divided to maintain their
control of the markets and of the power that emanates from them.14 So,
for example, Marx argues that the antagonism between English and Irish
workers, a division flamed by their religious differences, was  kept alive
and intensified . . . by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes to
prevent the workers from understanding their common interests against
the capitalists (Marx 1870: 591 2; see Elster 1985: 21 2). Thus, the inter-
ests of the moneyed classes may be to promote religious intolerance in
order to divide the workers and to keep them from uniting against them.
In any case, the workings of capitalism certainly do not guarantee an
increase in toleration. Only if some toleration is already in place is such an
argument even plausible. So once again, we have identified a factor that
may aid the cause of toleration in some cases, but not one that makes the
initial conversion to toleration more likely.
Trust and conversions
Individual autonomy, democracy, and capitalism all seem to aid the cause
of toleration once toleration is established, but none seems capable of
94 Establishing toleration
facilitating the initial conversion to toleration. Other factors were prob-
ably more important for what actually happened in England and France,
factors which are not broad social or institutional trends that may have
universal significance, but contextual differences that were important in
the particular situations of seventeenth-century France and eighteenth-
century England.
Trivial differences
First, the English had one hundred years of additional religious conflict to
draw upon not the least of which was the failed experiment in France.
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was very much in the
minds of the English during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 though the
lesson most took from it was that Catholics could not be trusted. Perhaps,
more importantly, the successful toleration practiced in the Netherlands
with which William III was intimately acquainted provided inspiration.
De facto toleration had existed in the United Provinces since the beginning
of the century, and William and his Orange predecessors especially the
first stadtholder of the independent Netherlands, William I the Silent had
pursued a policy of religious peace (Israel 1995: 140 1, 192). Even so, tol-
eration was not well-established in the Dutch state: Catholics were prohib-
ited from public worship during the seventeenth century, and they often
had to pay  recognition money to local officials to worship in private;
like Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Catholics in the Nether-
lands were made to feel their subordinate status (Parker 2003). In addi-
tion, William III had to intervene personally to quash an anti-Catholic
measure in Holland in 1687 (Israel 1995: 646 7). Nevertheless, William s
homeland provided an example of a place where a fairly broad toleration
had not led to the state s ruin, but had actually helped the United
Provinces become a great trading nation.
Second, toleration in England had the continuing support of the powers
that be. From William III on, the monarchs supported toleration, and they
usually did not pursue even the prosecutions that were allowed under the
law. In France, on the other hand, Louis XIII and Louis XIV considered tol-
eration a nuisance, and they were quick to enforce the letter of the law over
its spirit and even to violate the letter whenever they were not distracted by
external concerns. A young Louis XIII had vowed to  work towards the
ruin of the Huguenots, if given the opportunity (quoted in Desplat 1991: [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]