Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire »

Wendy Brown is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also a member of the Critical Theory Faculty. Her books include "Edgework: Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Politics Out of History", and "States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity" (all Princeton).

"This is a brilliant book. Wendy Brown has made the reader understand 'tolerance' in a new and more provocative way. Alerting us to its genealogy, she demonstrates the ambiguity of any politics that seeks to found itself on this much-touted liberal virtue. Regulating Aversion is a remarkable—and remarkably rigorous—contribution to the considerable literature on tolerance and the limits of the tolerable. Anyone wanting to think seriously about multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and democratic pluralism in our time must read it."—Talal Asad, CUNY Graduate Center

"Wendy Brown's Regulating Aversion is clear, rigorous, and unusually bold in an academic atmosphere that is now far from sympathetic to its kind of radical critique. Brown has done a wonderful job of orchestrating her argument, and it has been articulated with wit. The book is a worthy successor to her best and most politically astute contributions. This is an important work."—Paul Gilroy, London School of Economics

"In this fascinating and provocative book, Brown brings into sharp analytical focus a perplexing phenomenon: in political discourse since the late twentieth century, both the objects and content of tolerance have shifted. The sweep of Brown's analysis is impressive: she deftly weaves together critiques of contemporary politics with thoughtful explorations of the history of liberal thought on tolerance."—Melissa Williams, University of Toronto

Stanley Fish - Chronicle of Higher Education

The triumph of toleration as the central liberal value, and the attendant inability of liberals to see the dark side of their favorite virtue, is the subject of Wendy Brown's insightful and illuminating new book. . . . I find the analysis trenchant and the critique persuasive.