The title of this book could also have been 'On the outdatedness of tolerance' to express the strength of a concept that, over time, has been deemed inadequate to represent the cultural and religious fragmentation and differentiation that has gradually taken hold in the West. Concepts, however, like life, do not destroy or perish, at most they are transformed. The basic idea of this research is that the principle of tolerance can still help shed the light of reflective and self-critical reason on some of the dark sides of that 'return to religions' that characterises contemporary democracies.