2007 Leo Strauss Award

For the best dissertation completed and accepted during 2005 or 2006 in the field of political philosophy.

Award Committee: John E. Seery, Chair, Pomona College; Bonnie Honig, Northwestern University; Andrew Sabl, Harvard University

Recipient: Lars Tønder, Northwestern University

Dissertation: “Experiences of tolerance: Immanence, transcendence, hilaritas”

Dissertation Chair: William E. Connolly, The Johns Hopkins University

Citation: Lars Tønder’s dissertation explores the ethical dispositions that inform the institutional practices of toleration under democratic liberalism. Tønder stresses a link that, he argues, current theories efface: toleration as a policy or principle versus tolerance as an experience linked to suffering and pain. For Tønder, toleration is rendered potentially uncomfortable due to these links with tolerance. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s notion of bodily sense-perception, Tønder proposes a phenomenological account of the experience of tolerance. He turns to Spinoza’s conception of hilaritas as one way of extending or deepening political, constitutional, and religious practices of tolerance beyond formal proceduralism. The committee recognized the dissertation’s innovative contribution and its potential for turning the literature on liberal tolerance in a new direction.