James Tully

To what extent is the development of modern constitutional democracy as a state form in the West and its spread around the world implicated in western imperialism? This has been a leading question of legal scholarship over the last thirty years. James Tully draws on this scholarship to present a preliminary answer. Part I sets out seven central features of modern constitutional democracy and its corresponding international institutions of law and government. Part II sets out three major imperial roles that these legal and political institutions have played, and continue to play. And finally, Part IIsIu rveys ways in which the persisting imperial dimensions can be de-imperialized by being brought under the shared democratic authority of the people and peoples who are subject to them

Les luttes pour la reconnaissance des identités nationales dans les sociétés multinationales et démocratiques subissent une réorientation fondamentale. Puisque les sociétés multinationales, après de longues et épuisantes luttes pour la reconnaissance, se sont avérées incapables de s’entendre sur des formes de reconnaissance constitutionnelle définitives, l’enjeu n'est plus d’établir des formes de reconnaissance permanentes (une question de justice), mais plutôt de s’assurer qu’une démocratie constitutionnelle demeure ouverte aux luttes pour et contre des formes spécifiques de reconnaissance (une question relative au droit des peuples à l’autodétermination). Cette réorientation est perceptible dans l’avis de la Cour suprême au sujet de la sécession du Québec.

Les premières conférences John Robert Seeley, données par James Tully en 1994, traitaient des six types de demandes de reconnaissance culturelle qui sont au coeur des conflits les plus insolubles de notre époque : les associations supranationales, le nationalisme et le fédéralisme, les minorités linguistiques et ethniques, le féminisme, le multiculturalisme et l'autonomie gouvernementale des Autochtones. Ni les écoles actuelles du constitutionnalisme occidental moderne ni le constitutionnalisme post-moderne n'offrent d'outil équitable pour juger ces demandes diverses de reconnaissance parce qu'elles reposent sur des suppositions indéfendables, héritées de l'époque de l'impérialisme européen. Toutefois, en effectuant une étude critique et historique de quatre cents ans de constitutionnalisme européen et non européen, et en prêtant une attention particulière aux populations autochtones d'Amérique, James Tully élabore une philosophie et une pratique post-impériales du constitutionnalisme. Elles consistent à concilier des demandes de reconnaissance à travers le temps grâce à des dialogues constitutionnels qui permettent à des citoyens de se mettre d'accord sur des formes adéquates d'accommodements de leurs différences culturelles, guidées par des conventions constitutionnelles communes. Cette forme de constitutionnalisme a la capacité de résoudre des conflits de notre époque et d'apporter la paix au vingt et unième siècle.

In this brief comment on Chandran Kukathas’s “Ethical Pluralism from a Classical Liberal Perspective,” I present the other side of the liberal dialogue on diversity. It sets out the responses of deliberative liberals to the difficulties of pluralism where these responses are different from those presented by Kukathas’s liberals. One of the best examples of this other strand of classical liberalism today is John Rawls’s “political liberalism,” a view of liberalism founded on the ideal of the exchange of public reasons among ethically plural citizens. Of course, both types of liberals share a great deal and most are members of both schools under some descriptions. However, important differences remain and their continuous contestation within liberalism make this a living and evolving tradition. The aim of this comment is thus to supplement Kukathas’s excellent account by bringing in these other liberal voices where they dissent from the views of the minimal liberals on pluralism.

James Tully: To Think and Act Differently collects classic, contemporary, and previously unpublished examples of public philosophy in action from across James Tully's four decades of scholarship. The book provides readers with a perspicuous representation of public philosophy as an ongoing experiment with reconstructing the practice of political theory as a democratizing and diversifying dialogue between scholars and citizens. This volume offers an overview of this participatory mode of political philosophy and political change by reconstructing the arc of Tully's intellectual trajectory in contexts, illuminating moments of clarification and transformation, and the ways it continues to shed new insights into the challenges of citizenship in the present. Topics discussed include approaches to the history of political though, constitutionalism, democratic theory, comparative political theory, intercultural dialogue and translation; Indigenous political thought; settler colonialism and empire; climate change and sustainability; modernity; nonviolence; and mutual aid. It will be of interest to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, constitutional law, Indigenous studies, intellectual history, and ecological humanities. It will be of interest to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, constitutional law, Indigenous studies, intellectual history, and ecological humanities.

Les notions républicaines de liberté des citoyens et de liberté des peuples sont d’une aide précieuse pour qui veut comprendre les luttes contemporaines pour la reconnaissance. Ces luttes visent à modifier les normes, jugées trop contraignantes, qui régissent la participation des citoyens. La solution n’est pas, comme le croient les auteurs libéraux, de définir une fois pour toutes les normes régissant la participation dans les milieux multiculturels, puisque les différences identitaires chères aux citoyens changent avec le temps. Il s’agit plutôt d’instituer une forme de démocratie constitutionnelle dont les normes publiques de reconnaissance des citoyens ne sont pas fixes mais souples et au sein de laquelle les citoyens seraient libres de contester, de négocier et de modifier les normes dominantes de la participation. La réponse ne réside pas dans une théorie de la justice, mais dans des pratiques républicaines de liberté renouvelées.

This is a German translation of '"Public Philosophy as a Critical Activity", chapter one of 'Public Philosophy in a New Key. It sets out a method of political philosophy that begins with a historical genealogy of political problem in the present. It then shows how this contectualised redescription of the problem can be approached by the citizens who are subject to it in ways that enable them to think and act differently with respect to it. The essay also explains the schools of political philosophy that have helped me to develop this method.

These two ambitious volumes from one of the world's most celebrated political philosophers present a new kind of political and legal theory that James Tully calls a public philosophy, and a complementary new way of thinking about active citizenship, called civic freedom. Professor Tully takes the reader step-by-step through the principal debates in political theory and the major types of political struggle today. These volumes represent a genuine landmark in political theory from the author of Strange Multiplicity, one of the most influential and distinctive commentaries on politics and the contemporary world published in recent years. This first volume of Public Philosophy in a New Key consists of a presentation and defence of a contextual approach to public philosophy and civic freedom, and then goes on to study specific struggles over recognition and distribution within states.

The article addresses the following question: Can a people change their form of government and law and bring them permanently under their shared democratic authority by nonviolent, participatory democratic means? It examines this question through the example of the nonviolent Egyptian Spring. It also addresses the questions of whether this is a new form of the right of self-determination of peoples as well as an alternative to the current models of transitional justice. The means used to address these questions are adapted from the methods of legal and political pluralism, the politics of nonviolence and participatory democracy. Its objective is to place the nonviolent Egyptian Spring in the broader context of nonviolent and democratic regime transformation since Decolonization.

This article is an attempt to answer the following two questions: What is the specific form of imperialism today? And, is it possible for individual and collective actors to adapt and exercise Trudeau’s civic ethos within and against it in the name of another freedom and another world? Section one is an analysis of the rise of networks as the defining form of communicative and social organization in the present. Section two is an analysis of the forms of control, exclusion, hierarchy and concentration of power that have developed along with communication networks and govern the transmission of knowledge and information. Section three is an analysis of the possibility of critical and effective forms of “social, political and cultural action” within the array of networks and controls in which we are both enabled and constrained to communicate and interact today. These critical and effective forms of action are examples of the emerging form of civic communicative freedom of the governed that I call “democratic communicative action.” It is a new form of civic freedom appropriate to being governed through the types of imperial networks and controls discussed in sections one and two. The enactment of democratic communicative freedom in and against concentrations of network power and their communicative barriers, I will argue, is one way of adapting and applying Trudeau’s civic ethos to the present.