Freedom Redefined

Political philosophy, at least as practised by many of the most renowned and widely discussed English-speaking philosophers working in that field today, is a paradoxical practice. On the one hand, it deals with politics, that most concrete of human activities, through which human agents organize their communal lives. On the other, it is at times extremely abstract. Concepts such as freedom and equality are discussed in the writings of many contemporary philosophers without reference to the everyday concrete contexts in which they apply, or they are analyzed by means of thought experiments that would leave most ordinary citizens scratching their heads. It is often quite difficult to connect the abstract ruminations of philosophers with the concerns and strivings of ordinary citizens.

James Tully, who makes his academic home at the University of Victoria, and who over the course of his career has also taught at McGill University (where I had the good fortune of being his student) and at the University of Toronto, practises a very different kind of political philosophy, one that is committed to maintaining a strong connection between theory and political practice. Over the last couple of decades, he has been writing important essays with that connection in mind. They have now been collected in this two-volume work, which reveals the full shape and ambition of his intellectual project.

Put simply, Tully wants political philosophers to recast their enterprise. Rather than legislating abstract principles to political reality from on high, he invites us to take our intellectual starting points from the political practices of human beings engaged in the process of making and remaking their collective lives. Rather than thinking about what capital-F Freedom should be taken to mean as an abstract philosophical construct, better, in Tully’s view, to start from the multiple practices of small-f freedom engaged in by real world citizens. Rather than dictating on the basis of purportedly rational principles the political objectives that those engaged in political struggles ought to have, the “public” philosophers that Tully enjoins us to become should make themselves useful by giving voice to the political goals that political actors have themselves decided to pursue in the course of their political activities. Political philosophy should in other words renounce the lofty heights of abstraction to become practical and public.

It would be impossible in the context of a short review to do justice to all of the themes and ideas broached by Tully over the course of these 600-plus pages. To get a sense of what Tully is up to, we would do well to begin by considering the intellectual influences that preside over his intellectual enterprise. Someone once said that there are two kinds of philosophers: those who write as if they have never read anything, and those who write as if they have read everything. The first thing that strikes the reader of Tully’s work is the sheer scope and depth of his erudition. He actually does seem to have read everything. The resources of Greek tragedy as well as those of the most au courant contemporary social theorists are all marshalled, to say nothing of the canonical figures of the modern western philosophical tradition to which much of Tully’s previous work has been devoted.

But two influences loom largest and provide Tully with the building blocks of his philosophical method: the early 20th-century Austrian philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein and the French social theorist and historian Michel Foucault.

An important theme taken by Tully from the later work of Wittgenstein has to do with the irreducibly social nature of language, and of the “language games” in which human beings, as linguistic creatures, are enmeshed. Words and concepts are not, according to this view, timeless entities pointing back to some transcendent reality. Rather, they gain their meaning from their use in the myriad, diverse linguistic practices in which we engage on a quotidian basis.

Another important theme from Wittgenstein taken up in Tully’s work has to do with his debunking of the pretentions of philosophers. In Wittgenstein’s view, philosophers who engage in philosophy’s traditional theoretical pursuits have lost the ability to look directly at reality. They often have such an investment in a given theory that they tend to view reality through the distorting lens that the theory provides. They are, to use Wittgenstein’s evocative phrase, “in the grip of a picture.” Wittgenstein invites them to free themselves of these disabling theoretical constructs, to “look and see.”

From Foucault, Tully derives a number of ideas that nicely complement this Wittgensteinian picture. First is a view of political power, and a corresponding conception of freedom, that has become very influential in the last couple of decades. According to the conventional view, power is exercised over us by means of threats, sanctions, coercion or violence. Foucault wanted in his work to move our attention away from this superficial conception and toward one that emphasizes the many forces that constitute us as the subjects that we are. What’s more, he did so not in the name of some disembodied conception of freedom according to which we might be able to free ourselves completely from such forces. We are always in the grip of some set of forces that concatenate to make us the way we are. In Foucault’s view, revolutionary, liberationist politics risks becoming just as authoritarian as that it proposes to replace when it ignores this fact. A real politics of liberation does not try to achieve hegemony. Instead, it locates the interstices within existing regimes of power where everyday, homely practices of freedom can be engaged in by citizens.

Tully also draws from Foucault a heightened sense of historical contingency. When we look at the institutions within which we live, there is a tendency to think that they could not have been any other way. Our social realities—whether we are talking about the legal frameworks that surround us or the organization of our family lives—result from historical processes that could very easily have played out differently, no matter what the ideologues of these ways of life would have us believe. Realizing the degree to which our own ways of doing things are contingent is liberating, as it deflates the pretentions of those who stand in positions of authority within our institutions.

Put all these ingredients together and you get a fair idea of the methodology that Tully deploys in the various case studies that make up the bulk of the essays in these two volumes, and that is described in the first few essays of the collection. At the heart of it lies a commitment to unearthing the practices of freedom that are actually at work within the lives of subaltern peoples—those communities that are striving to achieve some margin of self-determination within the political and economic orders that have come to define modernity. These include national minorities such as the Québécois, Catalans, Basques and others, whose national aspirations have often been denied by excessively centralized states that have viewed power as indivisible; aboriginal peoples around the world who are still subject to “internal colonialism” through the legal and political forms that have been imposed upon them by colonial rulers; and the peoples of the global South—from Bangladesh to Mexico—who have become the subjects of neo-liberal economic globalization, which Tully views as the newest form of imperialism.

Given Tully’s Foucauldian assumptions, he does not spend much time pondering over how the world might be remade wholly anew so as to end the hegemony of these orders. Reading Tully, one gets the sense that he thinks that they are here to stay, or at the very least that their passing will result from the linkage of historical forces rather than from the intentional actions of any agent or group of agents. This might make for depressingly fatalistic reading, but not so when one is, as Tully is, impressed with the variety of ways in which subjects have turned themselves into citizens by crafting practices of freedom in the interstices of the orders to which they are subjected, and at times by engaging in struggles leading to the renegotiation of the terms in which these orders deploy themselves.

Such an approach to the study of freedom views freedom not as an achievement—something that we acquire when our political struggles succeed— but rather as a process—something that we achieve as we engage in political activity. Tully is in general skeptical of political philosophies that view the ideal end result of political struggles, negotiations and debates as lying in the attainment of consensus. Consensus is an inherently unpolitical notion, since it presupposes the eradication of conflict and difference, whereas politics is all about the negotiation and management of difference. Democratic politics should aim not to paper over our differences, but rather to allow us to share political space in the full acknowledgement of such differences. Tully’s is an agonistic conception of democracy, one that realizes that conflict, negotiation and pro-visionality are the stuff of politics much more than consensus, deliberation and permanence are.

So what becomes of the political philosopher who has heeded Tully’s plea for humility before the creative democratic imagination of citizens? Has Tully written us out of a job?

Not quite. There is still a great deal of work to be done on Tully’s views of the tasks of political philosophy. Let me briefly name three such tasks, which Tully engages in to telling effect throughout these essays. First, the political philosopher can fulfill a public, practical role by acting as a cartographer of the large and seemingly impersonal regimes of truth and power that human agents are caught within. For instance, one can (as Tully does in some of the most striking essays in these collections) meticulously describe the workings of the “internal colonialism” to which aboriginal peoples are still subjected through the operations of the seemingly fair and impartial institutions of the liberal-democratic state, or of the digital networks that have so profoundly transformed social relations and human subjectivity in the last 30 years or so.

Second, the political philosopher can unmask the pretentions that such regimes have of being uniquely rational, and reveal their full historical contingency. Immanuel Kant comes in for particularly withering criticism in this connection, having (according to Tully’s interpretation) produced supposedly rational arguments for the western-style liberal state that present it as if it were the most highly evolved form of political organization, compared to which the political forms devised by other peoples are viewed as deficient. Kant is taken to task for—consciously or not—having laid the intellectual foundations of western colonialism and imperialism.

Third, the political philosopher can act as a kind of honest broker, expressing the grievances and concerns of subaltern peoples in terms that might at least in principle allow for respectful dialogue between them and their oppressors. Tully’s political optimism is indeed nowhere more apparent than in his insistence on the possibility of dialogue even in the most politically unpromising contexts, and in his willingness to bring his considerable philosophical resources to bear on the task of laying the foundation for such dialogue. The papers in this collection charting a possible course forward in the relation between First Nations and the Canadian state should be taken as a blueprint for respectful dialogue between nations. Tully’s philosophy is agonistic, to be sure, but his ideal of agonism is one of respectful intellectual combat, rather than of all-out war.

What should we make of the transformation that Tully invites political philosophers to undergo? The first thing to say in answer to that question is that Public Philosophy in a New Key is a truly important work that should be read both by practising political philosophers and by concerned citizens everywhere. It is one of only a handful of works published in the last generation that really show us a new and original path down which political philosophers might choose to travel.

I found myself agreeing with many of the ideas and arguments contained within these pages. In particular, I believe that political philosophers have been led down a blind alley in the insistence upon rational agreement and consensus that has characterized the works of theorists as different as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and American “deliberative democrats” such as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. Tully’s reminder of the fact that politics is about managing ongoing conflict rather than about its eradication is salutary.

But political philosophers are a notoriously cantankerous and contrarian lot, so it will come as no surprise that I was not entirely convinced by every step in Tully’s arguments.

A first concern has to do with the fact that many of the political conclusions reached by Tully in the book actually converge with those of the old-style political philosophers from whom Tully wants to distance himself. To take but one example: Tully believes that the pretentions of the unitary modern state, possessed of absolute undivided sovereignty, should be debunked so as to accommodate the demands for recognition and for self-determination of the diverse citizen bodies that make up just about every modern state. That is almost certainly correct, but this is precisely what many liberal political philosophers believe they have been doing for years now in spelling out the implications of such abstract liberal values as autonomy and equality. Liberal philosophers such as Will Kymlicka and others can look at the claims made on behalf of the unitary state in the name of such values and claim that they are simply mistaken as interpretations of what autonomy and equality entail. When it comes to concrete political conclusions, it may be that Tully’s approach is not as different from those of more old-fashioned political philosophers.

Moreover, it could be that Tully’s conclusions implicitly rely on the kind of old-fashioned political philosophy he claims no longer to be doing. Although Tully’s tone is always measured and moderate, an undercurrent of anger and indignation runs through the essays dealing with the plight of aboriginal peoples and the subaltern people of the global South. That is perfectly appropriate. The people who are at the heart of Tully’s concerns have been the victims of grave injustices and crimes.

But there is a lack of fit between this indignation and Tully’s view that there are no standards of justice that are independent of historically contingent language-games. Surely, our anger at the treatment of the subaltern peoples of the world stems from our sense that they have been—and continue to be—treated unjustly. Aren’t judgements about the horrific treatment visited upon the planet’s most vulnerable peoples actually fuelled by a sense of what justice requires, rather than by what justice happens to mean in this or that language game?