Alexander Livingston's collection James Tully: To Think and Act Differently, a recent volume released in the Routledge Innovators in Political Theory series, opens with a fitting description of an intersubjective exercise titled the “Tully Circle.” Inspired by James Tully's work, the Tully Circle is an exercise in which individuals listen and share experiences, seeking greater understanding of one another and the socio-political environment in which they live and building through difference to community. Livingston's collection on Tully does a facsimile of the same.
Consolidating and thematizing a collection of Tully's articles, book chapters and speeches from disparate sources, Livingston weaves the story of Tully's career through Tully's own words. Foregrounded in this volume's narrative are the theoretical structures and normative justifications for the very innovation that led to the creation of the Tully Circle: Tully's public philosophy. It is the objective of Livingston's collection to connect this public philosophy to Tully's innovations and discoveries, in order to “provide 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” (2).
This objective is accomplished by way of the volume's three thematized sections. The first section explores Tully's understanding of public philosophy and its practice. In essays such as “Deparochialising Political Theory and Beyond: A Dialogue Approach to Comparative Political Thought,” Tully rejects abstract theorizing of political philosophy, establishing the irresolvable entanglement of theory and practice and eschewing traditional elevations of the former over the latter.
This brings the volume to its second section, which articulates new conceptions and contours of citizenship and freedom in “downshifting” toward grassroots political engagement. What is citizenship if not bound to membership in the institution(s) of a nation-state? What is freedom when not lashed to legal structures? Essays such as “The Agonistic Freedom of Citizens” and “Two Meanings of Global Citizenship: Modern and Diverse” sketch Tully's answers, putting flesh onto the bones of public philosophy and situating these answers within crises such as “diversity blindness” (5) that permeate liberal democracies.
The collection's final section brings together Tully's writings on ongoing crises that threaten civic freedom, explicating necessary shifts in thought and praxis that can help circumvent their persistence and far-reaching effects. Works such as “A View of Transformative Reconciliation: Strange Multiplicity and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii at Twenty” address familiar themes and concerns of colonialism present throughout Tully's career. However, this section also contains essays on less explicit parts of Tully's work, such as an intriguing reflection on political and existential nonviolence titled “Integral Nonviolence: Two Lawyers on Nonviolence: Mohandas K. Gandhi and Richard B. Gregg.”
Balancing accessibility and precision, the collection captures broad themes of Tully's public philosophy without losing granular theoretical details. For instance, while Tully's work is still largely tied to thinkers such as Wittgenstein or Foucault, Livingston draws out the crucial contributions of the “minor” influences in Tully's theoretical pantheon such as Karl Polanyi and Peter Kropotkin, both through written works of Tully's in which the two appear and through Livingston's introduction to the book and his interview with Tully. The volume's chosen writings, organization and original contributions show the ways that those like Polanyi and Kropotkin, by influencing Tully's ideas on modern subjects or the importance of mutual aid, act more as a supportive theoretical substratum for Tully's work than as passing influences. This kind of attention to detail and approachability makes the collection a valuable acquisition for graduate students and senior academics unfamiliar with Tully's work and for those returning to Tully's thought after a hiatus.
Despite including several previously unpublished writings, this collection might offer less for those familiar with Tully's work. More companion volume for the unfamiliar than replacement for Tully's major works, it contains few new works. While the structure of such a collection might prefigure limits to such possibilities, the volume seems surprisingly monological, given the repeated stress within Tully's own work (and the volume) on the importance of the dialogical quality of democratic politics. This impression is sharpened by the volume's conclusion on an interview of Tully by Livingston, granting a medium for additional original contributions and a protracted back-and-forth. Unfortunately, the succinctness of this interview is punctuated by revisiting well-trodden ground, with some minor additions, leaving the feeling of a missed opportunity. Given Livingston's own rich work on democratic theory, with writings on pragmatists such as William James (Livingston, Reference Livingston2016), the interview could have provided a space to discuss things further afield such as—to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein via Tully—“family resemblances” (47) between Tully's and James's thinking. How might Tully and James be speaking to the same phenomena of “pluralism” or “diversity”? Does Livingston see a similar structure and persistence of imperialism to Tully? While this might seem a specific referent, James's “successor” to the pragmatist tradition, John Dewey (Ferguson, Reference Ferguson2007), is briefly mentioned in Livingston's introduction, and with similarities between James and Tully in the deployment of ideas such as the “pluriverse” (49) (James, Reference James1909; Ferguson, Reference Ferguson2007), these and many other topics could have been further discussed. This could have engaged Tully himself in the Tully Circle he so inspired and contributed additional insights unique to the volume for those more familiar with Tully's work.
Niche criticisms aside, Livingston has done a service by consolidating such important writings. As guides to Tully's innovations in political thought, collections of his works are instructive for those in the discipline and assist in finding public philosophy's “new key.”
