Abstract
This article investigates tolerance in its application to communities as a form of social capital. We argue that, although the building and sustaining of communities is widely viewed to be aided by infusions of tolerance, contemporary characterizations of tolerance are in fact at loggerheads with the work of social capital. We would supplant tolerance with transcendence and seek thereby to reconceive communication within communities as a pragmatic mode of civic interaction effected between self and other, self and community, and community and community. To these ends, we draw from communication literatures on tolerance and social capital and from pragmatist schemas that envision communication within communities as representing transcendence, not tolerance.