James Tully

The way in which societies institutionalize “collective memory” is one of the most important aspects of contemporary politics, feeding directly into the constitution of individual and communal identities, and creating sources of discord and dialogue. This essay explores some of the most significant issues at stake in debates over the political uses of the past. I suggest that it is important to distinguish between three modes of historical consciousness, memory, mythology, and critical history. I then offer a critique of Avishai Margalit’s "The Ethics of Memory" (2002), arguing that in failing to allow space for “acknowledging” the plurality of communal myths his strong communitarian conception of mnemonic ethics leaves room for the perpetuation of asymmetric power relations and the imposition of hegemonic identities. Developing this line of thought, the essay then explores some of the ways in which agonistic democratic theorists might think through the relationship between past and present, myth and history. I argue that it is necessary to avoid procedures and institutions that entrench diverse identities while simultaneously establishing conditions in which different communities can freely propound their historical identity-constitutive claims.

This dissertation is inspired by the small but growing number of political and social theorists whose works have been highly influenced by the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.These authors developed their theories at least in part by taking Wittgenstein’s thought to have
normative implications on methodological and substantive issues in political and social theory.

The aim of this dissertation is to narrate and analyse the influence of Wittgenstein in political theory as a contribution to the intellectual history of twentieth century political thought. To that end, Hanna Pitkin’s “Wittgenstein and Justice” and James Tully’s “Public Philosophy in a
New Key” present an exemplary (in both senses of the word) pair of works that allow us to compare contrasting approaches to using Wittgenstein’s ideas and methods.

The dissertation begins with an introductory chapter that sets out the main problem: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s influence in political theory is fairly under-narrated and under-analysed, especially in a dissertation-length project. The purpose of this chapter is to give a brief historical overview of this identified gap in the literature. The second chapter provides a brief introduction to the concepts and methods of Wittgenstein’s later work, as well as an explanation of some of his basic philosophical commitments since the “Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus”. The third chapter is an exposition and analysis of Hanna Pitkin’s social
thought in Wittgenstein and Justice. I show how Pitkin built her social theory by taking Peter Winch’s and J. L. Austin’s methodological work to complement and expand the fundamental ontological and epistemological precepts she draws from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. The fourth chapter is an exposition and analysis of Pitkin’s political thought in “Wittgenstein and Justice”. I show how she built her political theory by taking Wittgenstein’s ontology to flesh
out and expand the fundamental political values she draws from Kant and Arendt.

The dissertation continues with James Tully. The fifth chapter is an exposition and analysis of James Tully’s social thought in “Public Philosophy in a New Key”. I show how the social theory of James Tully is primarily inspired by the post-structuralist works of Michel Foucault
and the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The sixth chapter is an exposition and analysis of James Tully’s political thought in “Public Philosophy in a New Key”. I show how Tully’s belief that the role of public philosophy is to address public affairs cashes out in i) critical surveys of practices and languages that set the context of practical social and political problems and their proposed solutions, and ii) historical or genealogical surveys that place those languages and practices in their larger contexts in order to see how forms of subjectivity are shaped by historically specific trends in thought and action. I end the dissertation with a concluding chapter that compares my findings about Pitkin and
Tully under the light of Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical commitments and his beliefs regarding the second-order nature of philosophy. I argue that Pitkin, in sailing too close the modernist wind, takes a narrower view of the political than Wittgenstein’s social ontology might suggest. And therefore, Tully’s work, by being more resolutely anti-theoretical and anti-foundational, is more consonant with Wittgenstein’s ethos. My final evaluation of Pitkin’s and Tully’s Wittgensteinian political theories will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of their diverging approaches, while holding on to the caveat that we need not agree with everything
Wittgenstein has laid out in order to find something useful from him that can help in our work.

A review essay on two books dealing with the White Australia Policy: the first was Keith Windschuttle's The White Australia Policy (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2005); and the second was Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Melbourne: Scribe, 2005).
Both books are criticized for their adherence to racial orthodoxy. Paradoxically, Windschuttle seeks to defend the White Australia Policy against charges that it was grounded in "racism". He maintains that it grew out of a long-established progressive program to extend both the freedom and the dignity of labour.
Tavan deals mainly with the demise of the White Australia Policy. She disagrees with Windschuttle on the origins of the policy, holding that it was based on a racist and xenophobic campaign to restrict immigration. But, like Windschuttle, she was struck by the ease with which the policy was dismantled.
The reviewer maintains that both authors refuse to recognize that the WAP was a soundly-based attempt to preserve the identity of the white, predominantly British, character of the Australian nation. They represent the "treason of the intellectuals" marching under the banner of managerial multiculturalism.

Since its rise to prominence among hip hop producers thirty years ago, digital music sampling has become a popular method of music production for musicians across multiple genres. Yet case law, copyright laws, and standard music industry practices have produced a legal environment that discourages the creation of sample-based music. Artists who sample must either confront myriad obstacles inherent in obtaining permission to use samples or release unlicensed sample-based works that risk engendering expensive copyright infringement lawsuits. This has brought forth a multidecadal body of scholarship replete with various solutions to the sampler’s dilemma. But after twenty-five years of work highlighting the problems inherent in the legal environment surrounding sampling and the development of comprehensive solutions to address them, the dilemma remains. This paper seeks to explain why such reform has not happened and imagine what would be required to achieve it.

Traducción de Tully, James, “The struggles of Indigenous peoples for and of freedom”, in Public Philosophy in a New Key, Volume I: Democracy and Civic Freedom (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2008), pp. 257-288.
En Descolonizar el Derecho. Pueblos Indígenas, Derechos Humanos y Estado Plurinacional, eds. Roger Merino Acuña and Areli Valencia (Palestra: Lima, Perú, 2018).

An assessment of James Tully's contribution to political thought/international political theory, focusing on his recent account of global citizenship. I examine (a) his view of empire, past and present, and (b) his understanding of political violence. I argue that his vision can be seen as a radical (agonistic) form of republicanism, oriented towards the expansion of democratic freedom. However, I suggest that there is a mismatch between his optimistic account of the potential for instituting novel forms of citizenship and his analysis of the grim legacy of western imperialism.

[He replies to this chapter in the conclusion to the book]

This is the volume:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/on-global-citizenship-9781849664929/"

What would it mean to have a suitably ‘realistic’ account of political liberty?  What does it mean to exercise control, or to be self-guiding, in the kind of world we live in today?  One response to these challenges and our current social and political context, of course, is to embrace a kind of anti-humanism; to claim that the regulative ideals of human agency underpinning our dominant conceptions of freedom today rest on an ultimately illusory, essentialist humanism.  However, there has also been a kind of return to humanism in recent years, on at least two fronts. First, to a corporeal or ‘mortalist’ humanism, grounded in our shared mortality and vulnerability to suffering. And second, to an ‘agonistic humanism’, grounded in a contestatory stance towards that which is claimed to be in our nature or as normative for us . Any conception of the political entails not only a distinctive mode of collective human activity, but also of agency, and a domain in which power and disagreement are central to any proper understanding of it. Thus, grasping liberty as a political value is also to explore the different ways in which we want this value to actually shape our practices and institutions.

In this chapter we will see how Tully’s philosophical commitments and social science methods cash out in defeasible critical surveys of practices and languages that set the context of practical social and political problems and their proposed solutions, and defeasible genealogical surveys that place those languages and practices in their larger context, so that we can have a perspicuous representation of how forms of subjectivity are shaped by historically specific and therefore contingent human conventions. Examples of the specific applications of his brand of public philosophy are imperialism and the rights of indigenous peoples. Yet, since I argue in the previous chapter that his justification of Foucauldian methods by Wittgensteinian social ontology is based on an inaccurate reading of Wittgenstein, the question remains whether this inaccuracy might create insurmountable philosophical problems for Tully. After a survey of Tully’s general political principles and how they cash out in real case studies, this chapter will argue that while Tully’s actual studies fit under the rubric of interrogating Foucauldian ‘limits’, they do so without doing too much violence to Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘pictures’, as feared in the previous chapter. While Tully was inaccurate in conflating ‘limits’ with ‘pictures’, his studies have not, in my view, suggested change to anything which might be part of the facticity of our being in the world - those ‘pictures’ which, as Hanna Pitkin says, the political theorist would be foolish to attempt to change.

My aim in this essay is to elaborate a mode of political theorizing that is not beholden to the “how do you know?” question. Rather than focusing on epistemic arguments, I propose that people interested in studying political theory address the partiality of aspects that emerge when engaging works, and the participation of media in the creation of political concepts. Central to my elaborations is the aesthetic notion that there is no overarching rule that will determine how objects, peoples, and events relate to one another and stand out as relevant to political theory, and that there are no necessary qualifications for participation in political theorizing. The essay is comprised of three sections. The first engages three thinkers of the interpretive turn in political theory: Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner, and James Tully. The second section assembles three images of thought drawn from three different expressions of three diverse thinkers: Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Derrida. In the third section I depart from the theoretical experimentation and interpretive work of the previous sections and redirect attention to the participation of media in political theorizing. I conclude the essay by suggesting that political theory is process of mediation between and amongst a diversity of elements that have no common measure.

PLEASE NOTE: This essay is forthcoming in New Literary History. These are the page proofs.

It is commonly asserted that the core teaching of Machiavelli’s political philosophy is that “the ends justify the means.” While numerous scholars of Machiavelli have disputed this interpretation and pointed out that Machiavelli never wrote this phrase, most of that scholarship has focused on the role of “ends” in Machiavelli’s thought, and questions about whether or not Machiavelli was a consequentialist. Far less attention has been paid to the role of justifications in Machiavelli’s political thought. This essay argues that attributing the phrase “the end justifies the means” to Machiavelli is inaccurate because justification is not Machiavelli’s central concern in his two most famous writings The Prince and the Discourses. Instead, I argue that when Machiavelli evaluates actions, he is more likely to use the language of excuses than the language of justification. The first part of the essay examines the frequency and context in which Machiavelli uses the words excuse (scusa) and justification (iustificazione) as well as their cognates. Machiavelli uses excuse five times more frequently than he uses justification in these two texts. Furthermore by looking at the context in which these words are used, I demonstrate that Machiavelli never justifies an action, but he does occasionally excuse a morally dubious action. The second section considers the difference between justifying and excusing an action with through J. L. Austin’s essay “A Plea for Excuses.” My central claim in this section is that freedom is not simply a capacity an actor possesses, but that freedom is a dimension through which others assess the responsibility for an action. The more freedom an actor has, the more responsible that actor is held for an action. An actor that is held responsible for an act must justify the action when it somehow goes astray. Conversely an actor who is not held responsible for an action is more likely to offer excuses for an action. The final section links this exploration of excuses and freedom to James Tully’s work on agonistic freedom. In Tully’s work, the act of re-describing an existing norm is one way in which agents can exercise their freedom. My claim is that an attempt to excuse a morally dubious action in the way that Machiavelli does in The Prince and The Discourses is one example of Tully’s account of freedom as the ability to “think and act differently.”

This paper puts three discourses about resistance and violence in conversation, highlighting the distinctive non-violent features of Indigenous movements, among other aims. Nelson Mandela holds the first discourse, offering a dialectical view of resistance, where the oppressor sets the terms of the confrontation and where violence is an allowable mode of resistance. James Tully holds the second, focussing on civic citizenship as the nonviolent engagement of political agents with the terms of their governance. The third is that of Indigenous theorists whose work focuses on resurgence, offering a disjunctive view of resistance, as transgressive and generative of a distinct Indigenous world. The last part of this paper braids these discourses to reveal overlaps, missed aspects, or disagreements about the relationship each affirms between resistance and violence.

This is the PDF-Powerpoint of the paper I exposed on Friday 4 December 2020 during the Webinar HISTORY OF LEGAL SCIENCE: TRANSFORMATION OF IDEAS AND IMAGES, II International Scientific-Methodological Seminar, organised by the Department of History of State and Law of the Kutafin Moscow State Law University (MSAL). The title of the Webinar was: MYTHOLOGEMS OF LAW: IRRATIONAL IN LAW. The title of my paper was: Individual rights, group rights, cultural rights: Genesis and Essence. The whole webinar can be watched on YouTube. For further information see on the web-site http://msal.ru/en/news/a-new-impulse-in-legal-science-transformation-of-ideas-and-images/

Multiculturalist thoughts have migrated from their original context to broader one, where they have often been taken as “theories” which could have universal validity. Those “theories”, however, were originally political ideas developed in a specific society at a specific time. Therefore, contextualized examination is necessary for precise evaluation of their validity. Based on this insight, the paper examines the liberal multiculturalist thought of Will Kymlicka, repositioning it into the context of Canadian Indigenous politics in which it was originally embedded.
    This examination involves comparing Kymlicka’s ideas with critical Indigenous thoughts. Confronting the political situation to which Kymlicka responded, Indigenous thinkers have viewed and responded to it differently. The limitation of his thought becomes clearer by taking it not only within the liberalist framework, but by contrasting it with Indigenous thoughts deriving from different traditions. The paper pays special attention to Indigenous thoughts of “resurgence”, especially those of Taiaiake Alfred and Leanne Simpson, and compares them with Kymlicka’s argument. As the axes of comparison, I focus on the differences in their responses to (1) the “politics of recognition” institutionalized by the colonial state and (2) restrictions of individual freedom by gendered norms. What is proposed through this “dialogue of political thoughts” is a fundamental turn in the arguments on cultural multiplicity, from pursuing whatever “ism” or “theory” for pushing multiplicity into the single value world toward dealing with the multiplicity of value worlds themselves.

Using the example of cross-cultural philosophy’s relation to disciplinary philosophy, this article seeks to think through some of the issues relevant to diversifying philosophy as an academic discipline. Guided by James Tully’s ruminations on non-domination, it attempts to make a case for a practice of philosophy which is more attuned to its social situatedness in a postindustrial, liberal society. Within this context, it argues that disciplinary philosophy must seek to contribute to making meaning of our place in the world.