James Tully

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James Tully: To Think and Act Differently collects classic, contemporary, and previously unpublished examples of public philosophy in action from across James Tully's four decades of scholarship.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

The paper is a critical survey of the last ten years of research on the principles of legitimacy of constitutional democracy and their application in practice in Europe and North America. A constitutional democracy is legitimate if it meets the test of two principles: the principles of democracy or popular sovereignty and of constitutionalism or the rule of law. There are three contemporary trends which tend to conflict with the principle of democracy and thus diminish democratic freedom. There are three responses to the lack of legitimacy of these three trends. The first is to downplay the principle of democracy in order to endorse the three trends. The second is to uphold the principle of democracy, in the form of deliberative constitutional democracy, in order to criticise aspects of the three trends and to call for further democratisation. The third trend deepens this critical response by tying the test of democratic legitimacy more closely to case studies of attempts by citizens to exercise their democratic freedom.

The article suggests that Gandhi’s integrated thought and practice is of great significance today. It focuses on three arguments that Gandhi put together and tested in practice, and presents them in the way that R. B. Gregg explicated them. The first is Gandhi’s critique of the problems of Western industrial civilization: increasing global inequality; increasingly destructive cycles of war and violence; and the relentless domination and exploitation of human beings, communities and ecosystems. The second argument is the alternative Gandhi developed: his idea of a ‘countermodernity’ or ‘alternative civilization’ that is grounded in the power of nonviolence, equality, and mutual cooperation. The third and most original argument he put forward and lived every day of his adult life is the nonviolent way (or ways) of life that has the capacity to transform modern social systems of inequality, violence and domination into alternative social relationships and systems in which equality, nonviolence and self-organising democratic cooperation would become paramount.

This article argues that we need to learn from the living earth how living systems sustain themselves and use this knowledge to transform our unsustainable and destructive social systems into sustainable and symbiotic systems within systems. I first set out what I take to be four central features of sustainable living systems according to the life and earth sciences. Secondly, I set out what I take to be the main features of our unsustainable social system that cause damage to the ecosphere on the one hand and give rise to the illusion of independence from it on the other hand. I then turn to several ways of responding to the sustainability crisis that are informed by this way of thinking about our interdependent relationship in and with ecosocial systems. These are ways of dis-engaging from our unsustainable practices, beginning to engage in practices of re-engaging and reconnecting socially and ecologically, and thus beginning to bring into being unalienated and sustainable ways of life on earth. If the symbiotic interdependency thesis of the first section is true, then participants in these connecting practices should be empowered in reciprocity by the interdependent relationships they connect with, and thus initiate expanding virtuous cycles. This reciprocal empowerment is discussed in the final section.

I would like to address the question of social and ecological value by bringing two approaches to this question into conversation with one another and show their connections. The two approaches are those of Jonathan Schell and Akeel Bilgrami. The connection between the two approaches is their shared interest in the ‘conditions that sustain life’ on earth. The answer to the question of what are the conditions that sustain life is, in my opinion, ‘life sustains life’: that is, living ecological systems sustain themselves and the living systems with which they interact (symbiosis).

I would like to discuss two interconnected projects of reconciliation. The first is the reconciliation of indigenous and non-indigenous people (natives and newcomers) with each other in all our diversity. The second is the reconciliation of indigenous and non-indigenous people (human beings) with the living earth: that is, reconciliation with more-than-human living beings (plants, animals, ecosystems and the living earth as a whole). I will not discuss formal reconciliation procedures carried on by governments, courts and commissions. Rather I focus on more basic, informal and transformative practices of reconciliation and the shared responsibilities we all have to engage in these two projects of reconciliation. This first section sets out the general argument and the following three sections explore aspects of it.

In this chapter I explore some of the roles of trust, mistrust, and distrust in deeply plural or diverse societies. Section One sets out the features of deeply diverse societies that provide the contexts of trust and distrust. Section Two proposes that social relationships in diverse societies need to have two qualities to be full of intersubjective trust (trustful) and, thus, worthy of trust (trustworthy) of the members of the relationships: cooperative and contestatory quality, and self-sustaining and co-sustaining quality. Section Three suggests that such trustful relationships are grounded in and draw on a second type of trust: pre-existing co-operational trust. Section Four argues that trustful relationships and co-operational trust are co-sustained by a third type of trust: an interactive ethics or ethos of trust of the members within which they exercise judgements of trust and mistrust. These three types of trust form a triad that sustains virtuous (autopoietic) systems of trust and peacefulness (nonviolence). Throughout the sections the features of virtuous systems of trust are contrasted with vicious systems of distrust.

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.

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.