What does it mean “to tolerate” in a post-Christian and post-secular state? This chapter argues that antecedents of contemporary conflicts over diversity in Europe can be found in early modernity, specifically in early modern practices of toleration, which impacted on both the belonging and the visibility of minorities. New forms of intolerance pertain to the position of religious, ethnoreligious, and sexual minorities in public life, echoing the concerns of the public visibility of minorities inhering in historical Christendom. The political articulation of certain groups as “other” to “the nation” is increasingly mediated through constitutional repertoires, such as constitutional revision and amendments, developments in the hermeneutics of constitutional concepts, or pseudo-constitutional behaviour. This chapter introduces the main themes: tolerance and intolerance, constitutionalism, secularisation, and their significance across the liberal–illiberal divide.

The introduction raises the question of how one ought to understand the challenge of God’s invisibility/visibility in the Fourth Gospel with regard to its stated purpose: ‘These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.’ Scholars and theologians have often taken God’s invisibility to be ‘absolute’, in the sense that it describes an immaterial, eternal God whose deity is invisible by nature. While John claims that no one has ever seen God, it also describes God as incarnate in Jesus Christ, the one in whom the Father may be seen. The introduction shows that scholars have not yet satisfactorily defined the nature of divine invisibility in John nor reckoned with the import of this important theme for John’s purpose. It proposes that, according to John, God must become physically visible in Jesus in order for belief to obtain.

A brief conclusion summarizes the argument as a whole, asserts that God is physically visible in Jesus’s body, considers the impact of this conclusion on Johannine scholarship, and suggests further areas of research.

The chapter explores the contemporary erosion of trust in human vision and its profound implications for the epistemological foundations of modern democracy. Ezrahi identifies the current skepticism surrounding the reliability of visual perceptions, asserting that this skepticism undermines the essential fictions and rituals sustaining claims of visibility and transparency in democratic systems. The notion of “visual commonsense” is introduced, referring to the façade concealing the complexities of vision as a source of knowledge and information about the physical and social worlds. He also asserts the active role of the human eye, brain, and sociocultural context in shaping perceptions. Ezrahi contrasts Einstein's dismissal of commonsense with the significance of commonsense facts in democratic political discourse. The argument is that there is a significant gap between the current epistemic condition and that of liberal democracies’ heyday. Ezrahi argues that technological innovations, instead of standardized reality, deepen cultural, religious, ideological, and gender diversities in visual perspectives. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that, in the midst of visual disarray, the human eye possesses the power to both disorient and guide, reflecting the complex interplay between perception, imagination, and the changing landscape of modern democracy.

This chapter examines the intricate relationship between visibility, epistemology, and political power in modern democracies. Based on Ezrahi’s previous research on the development of modern democratic visual culture and the impact of the scientific revolution on reshaping the role of human perception in knowledge acquisition, the chapter underscores the role of visibility in shaping democratic epistemology. It emphasizes how visibility, in conjunction with individualism, democratic causality, and the concept of public facts, form the epistemological foundations of democracy. Visibility plays a key role in objectifying politics, which allows citizens to be informed, make judgments about their leaders, and participate in the political process. The chapter highlights the importance of visible public facts as a form of political currency for government criticism and accountability. The chapter acknowledges that the common belief in the accuracy of visible perception, equating observables with reality, has given democratic citizens unwarranted confidence in navigating the political landscape. Paradoxically, these unfounded beliefs align with democratic norms and principles. The chapter suggests that the erosion of these illusions has contributed to the erosion of democratic values.

Tax-information reporting is an essential element of the tax compliance system. Despite the power of tax-information reporting to maximize the IRS’s ability to collect taxes owed, these rules also contain significant gaps. High-end taxpayers can often earn their income through transactions that do not require a third party to file tax-information reports with the IRS. This chapter demonstrates how the activity-based approach to information reporting often allows high-end taxpayers to engage in noncompliance with the tax law, while other taxpayers face significant automatic IRS scrutiny. It also shows that the government’s approach to tax-information reporting applies almost exclusively to specific activities, ranging from methods of earning income to designated transactions. This approach is consistent with the government’s design of other tax compliance rules that apply to certain types of activities, such as the use of tax shelters, offshore bank accounts, and transactions lacking economic substance to avoid tax liability.

Instrumental readings are of course vital when making weather observations, but non-instrumental ‘eye observations’ (such as cloud amounts and types) and brief notes (such as short weather diary entries) help to help build a more complete picture. This chapter sets out how to include these types of record, along with documentation regarding the occurrence of fog, snowfall, thunderstorms and other elements, in a practical and useful series.

Regularisation has been part of the French state's policy response to immigration since World War II. Since the end of labour migration in the mid-1970s, one of the key routes to legal immigration in France has been through regularisation by local administrations. These generally discreet practices reveal an intimate knowledge on the part of street-level bureaucrats of this supposedly invisible population. Alongside this generally low-key process, the French state has also organised more visible ‘mass regularisations’, notably in 1981, 1991 and 1998. This chapter explores the political dynamics shaping the French government’s approach to both ‘exceptional’ and ongoing regularisation. Through archival and interview data, it shows how the French authorities at the local and national level developed an array of strategies to manage the visibility of its regularisation policies.

How might attention to the mechanisms of stage licensing help us to think specifically about the politics and aesthetics of on- and off-stage space in eighteenth-century drama? This essay addresses this question by looking at John St. John’s The Island of St. Marguerite, a musical afterpiece first staged at Drury Lane in November 1789. Using a spectacular retelling of the ‘Man in the Iron Mask’ story to mount a barely coded staging of the storming of the Bastille, this play was the first attempt by one of London’s royal playhouses to respond directly to the early events of the French Revolution. But the two Larpent manuscripts for Island show just how much had to be expunged and changed before the examiner of plays would license it. In particular, this essay argues, the cuts and annotations of the examiner (and possibly also John Philip Kemble, Drury Lane’s acting managing) disclose an institutional discomfort with the off-stage spaces – besieged walls, subterranean prison cells, sites of execution – that the audience are never taken to and yet must picture for themselves if what is actually unfolding before them is to make sense. Attention to these manuscripts thus takes us towards a deeper understanding of the play of visibility, of the texture of sensory and extra-sensory experience, in the Georgian theatre.

This chapter explores how the concept of visibility is politically crucial to practice theorizing within IR. It does so by drawing on recent work in social theory to demonstrate how practices of making certain persons, objects, or phenomena seen or unseen work to establish socio-political hierarchies. Specifically, we show how regimes of visibility endow actants with greater or lesser (in-)visibility ‘capital’ that structures what can be seen, heard, and felt about the world. We empirically explore the effects of regimes of visibility through the case of extraordinary rendition (and torture) in the United States and the Syrian Arab Republic, and the affective, political, and social effects of regimes of visibility in this case. Drawing on that discussion, we conclude that practices of making seen or unseen are regimes that predefine the focal point of any (scientific or not) mode of observation or analysis. As a result, the study of any other set of practices are filtered through regimes of visibility and – hence – practices of visibility fashion the way we see all practices. We argue that this central role of regimes of visibility makes their consideration within international practice theory crucial for its research programme.

This chapter develops how surveillance shapes cleaners’ everyday work life. Cleaners experience being watched by clients, security guards, CleanUp management, and even co-workers. Surveillance constitutes an attack on their sense of worth. It stands for distrust in their work ability and efforts, and the resulting need to control them. Cleaners respond to surveillance by engaging in tactics ranging from what I term turning off and away from surveillance to turning against those who watch them. Cleaners’ urge to counter surveillance in order to retain a sense of dignity – no matter how fragile and short-lived – can surpass the fear of getting into trouble. Surveillance can come with a degree of thrill, excitement and even a sense of superiority in the hunt for ways to outwit and resist it. However, it can also summon feelings of degradation and indignity, especially when cleaners get caught. But no matter how strenuously cleaners resist surveillance, it does not follow that they resist work too. Indeed, for cleaners, maintaining dignity requires a balancing act of outwitting surveillance, finding autonomy, and working hard enough to uphold a work ethic and related sense of self-worth.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, both the public and scholarly understanding of capitalism was governed by a logic of individual visibility. This angle, however, can easily obscure the fact that invisibility helped shape German society as a capitalist society too. The chapter thus argues that a focus on the interplay of visibility and invisibility can improve our understanding of capitalism in Germany and beyond. By way of example, it analyzes the investment practices of the ultra-wealthy industrialist Thyssen family. It elucidates their opportunities of keeping capital invisible by concentrating public attention to specific family members within the bounds of a nation or Europa, thereby enabling hidden networks of less prominent family members and asset managers to act globally. Although these practices emerged within the specific historical context of the interwar period, they remain relevant today. The chapter thus highlights the long-standing history of exploiting invisibility in capitalist societies.

Chapter 7 shows that the struggles concerning the claimant’s potential ‘discretion’ have remained the same since Grahl-Madsen’s groundbreaking 1966 book. On the one hand, it may be the persecutor who defines what and who is persecuted. In this case, it is relevant whether harm is differentially inflicted due to the fact that the persecutor imputes or assumes a political opinion, irrespective of the claimant’s ‘actual’ convictions. On the other hand, it may be the claimant who defines group membership. Here, it is relevant whether the claimant has a deeply held political opinion. The task for the decision-maker is then to establish the deep conviction. The approaches do not necessarily map onto each other. When what is defined as the protected group does not equal the persecuted group as defined by the persecutor, ‘discretion’ logics emerge: Ultimately, in all these approaches, the protected group is made up of those who have been or are deemed at risk of being discovered by the persecutor – that risk being deduced either from their identity or their conduct, but always linked to their past or presumed future visibility. Those deemed ‘unrecognisable’ fall outside the protected group and are returned to (continued) ‘discretion’.

Chapter 8 addresses the competing definitions of the Convention ground ‘particular social group’: the ‘protected characteristics’ approach and the ‘social perception' approach. Whereas both are capable of encompassing sexuality-based claims, they each hold the potential for ‘discretion’ reasoning in different ways. The ‘protected characteristics’ approach is designed to exclude ‘trivial’ claims. If claimants fear harm for what is considered a non-fundamental aspect, they can be returned to be ‘discreet’. The ‘social perception’ test in contrast, which would more appropriately be called the ‘persecutor’s perception’ approach, in principle precludes any a priori exclusion of certain particular social groups. In this approach, it is the persecutor who defines what is persecuted. Yet the chapter shows that even this broader approach is prone to ‘discretion’ logics: the limit that is reverted to is the ‘singling out’ requirement, providing protection only to those who are singled out for persecution whereas those deemed able to pass unnoticed can be returned. As such, in both approaches, the protected group is not the same as the persecuted group, such that those who are persecuted but not protected must remain ‘discreet’.