James Tully

This introduction orients readers of European Journal of Political Theory who have not read the book, and helps all readers understand the differences between the first section of the book and other similar approaches – such as Melissa Williams’ Deparochializing Political Theory mode of disclosure. It also orients readers to the book's second section on dialogue and decolonization with reference to both the contrapuntal ensemble (Said) and governmentality (Foucault), and the contributions of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Richard Gregg's contra racism, capitalism, militarism, and anthropocentric ecocide—as well as their pro “democratic countermodernity” mode of disclosure.

This is the first comprehensive evaluation of Charles Taylor's work and a major contribution to leading questions in philosophy and the human sciences as they face an increasingly pluralistic age. Charles Taylor is one of the most influential contemporary moral and political philosophers: in an era of specialisation he is one of the few thinkers who has developed a comprehensive philosophy which speaks to the conditions of the modern world in a way that is compelling to specialists in various disciplines. This collection of specially commissioned essays brings together twelve distinguished scholars from a variety of fields to discuss critically Taylor's work. The topics range from the history of philosophy, to truth, modernity and postmodernity, theism, interpretation, the human sciences, liberalism, pluralism and difference. Taylor responds to all the contributions and re-articulates his own views.

James Tully: To Think and Act Differently collects classic, contemporary, and previously unpublished examples of public philosophy in action from across James Tully's four decades of scholarship.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.

We know that law is a major enabler of the human activities that cause climate change, biodiversity destruction, and related ecosocial crises. We also turn to the law to regulate, mitigate, and attempt to transform these unsustainable human activities and systems. Yet, these regulatory regimes are often “recaptured” or “overridden” in turn by the very anthropogenic processes causing the crises. The resulting vicious cycles constitute the global trilemma of the twenty-first century that is rapidly rendering the living earth uninhabitable for humans, in radically unequal ways, and for thousands of other species. Integral, non-violent, sustainable democratic constitutionalism is one modest, experimental, trial-and-error response to this trilemma

In The Idea of Justice (2009), Amartya Sen advocates democracy defined as ‘public reasoning’ and ‘government by discussion’. Sen’s discursive approach facilitates the exercise of political freedom and development of one’s public capacities, and enables victims of injustice to give public voice and discussion to specific injustice. It also responds to the contested nature of ‘universal human rights’ and the need to clarify and defend them via public reasoning. However, Sen’s approach leaves intact the hegemony of a liberal form of democracy that prioritizes political and civil rights over social and economic rights and thus precludes alternative democratic forms, most notably a form of cooperative democracy that politicizes social and economic activities in the pursuit of local and global justice. Sen’s ‘government by discus- sion’ must combine with cooperative democracy and a global ethos emphasizing cooperation (and action) over privatization in order to address our most serious global injustices, including exploitation, inequality and poverty in the Global South, accelerating destruction of the environment and biodiversity, and global warming and climate change.

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.

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

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.