Must Tolerance Include Those Who Reject Tolerance?

If tolerance means allowing different views to exist, must a tolerant society also tolerate people who want to remove the freedom of others? In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper formulated the “paradox of tolerance”: unlimited tolerance may allow intolerant forces to exploit open institutions and eventually destroy tolerance itself.

The idea is often reduced to “we must not tolerate the intolerant”, then used to justify suppressing any offensive opinion. Popper's qualification was more careful. While intolerant claims remain open to rational argument, he did not propose immediate suppression. The problem arises when their advocates reject argument and use threats, violence or coercion to prevent others from speaking and living. A society may then defend itself, not because an idea is distasteful, but because the conditions of common discussion are being attacked.

Someone who publicly criticises a religion is still offering a disputable view. Someone who organises violence to stop that religious group from meeting has moved from expression to the destruction of equal liberty. The label “intolerant” should not erase that difference.

My view is that tolerance is not approval of every claim. It is a set of rules that enables disagreement to continue. Its limits should be judged by verifiable conduct, capacity and actual danger, not by whoever controls the label of intolerance. Otherwise, defending tolerance can become another form of arbitrary exclusion.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.59272