It is difficult to think of a contemporary political and constitutional theorist more adept at practising the “art of thinking otherwise” than James Tully. The art of thinking otherwise – practised, according to Tully, in earlier times by figures such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Wittgenstein – consists in the creation of alternatives not only to that which “we” already recognise to be problematic, but in the course of problematising that which has been so familiar to “us” for so long that we no longer see it (this art is subtly and passionately described in the first three chapters of volume I). Of course, as indicated by the scare-quotes, who the “we” and the “us” are here is crucial; indeed, whereas for some the creation of a certain alternative may be just that – an alternative they have not previously considered (nor felt any need to consider) – for others, particularly the oppressed and vulnerable, it is likely to have been a dream, or at best a hope, for a brighter future.

But Tully is not merely creating alternatives for the sake of an intellectual exercise – though this in itself would be valuable and important. He is also one of the most vocal advocates of minorities and other vulnerable persons and communities, particularly the Aboriginal people in Canada. The case of the latter dominates the first volume. In it, Tully offers not only much-needed reminders of the different forms of domination of Aboriginal peoples in Canada, both past and present, but also constructive, and in some cases, both original and controversial, possibilities for non-colonial relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (possibilities that may also apply outside Canada – though Tully himself is careful to warn against ignoring cultural and historical specifics).

One of these possibilities is the suggestion of a “two-confederation” structure for Canada. The first confederation would be that of “the treaty confederation of the First Nations with the crown and later with the federal, and to some extent, provincial governments”; the second would be “the constitutional confederation of the provinces and federal government” (vol. I, pp.236–7). The background to this proposal is that Tully believes that a “multinational democracy” is not free and legitimate unless the peoples that form constituent nations have “the right of self-determination in some appropriate constitutional form, such as the right to initiate constitutional change” (vol. I, p.219). Peoples must belong, but belonging is not the end-state of gaining some form of recognition (vol. I, p.180); nor is it based on perfect consensus formed in an ideal speech situation (vol. I, p.181); rather, belonging – or citizenship – “is an identity that members acquire through exchanging reasons in public dialogues and negotiations over how and by whom political power is exercised” (vol. I, p.163). What is emphasised throughout is the never-diminishing need for openness and responsiveness to the voices of all those who claim to be suffering an injustice; but not merely an openness and responsiveness in the form of a right to free speech and protest, but, crucially, a “right to initiate political, legal or constitutional change”, accompanied by the duty of other members to “enter into negotiations in good faith to rectify the injustice” (vol. I, p.235).

As noted above, the art of thinking otherwise is not only a matter of creating alternative possibilities; it is also a matter of seeing what may need to be problematised. In other words, alternatives are created in the course of problematising (that camouflaged, and now invisible) power, which has been embedded into the background (and which thereby also directs which issues are propelled into the spotlight). According to Tully, and following Wittgenstein (amongst others), seeing that power – that realm of the natural, obvious, self-evident, normalised, etc – is enabled by looking at the “rough ground” of political activities. This rough ground includes “the full range of strategic, communicative, deliberative, negotiated and decision-making interactions” (vol. I, p.308). Perhaps the clearest and most powerful illustration of this way of looking is provided in chapter 8 of the first volume, “Indigenous peoples and freedom”, where Tully discusses the historical processes of “internal colonization” and the “arts of resistance”, i.e., “these unnoticed contextual struggles of concrete human freedom in the face of techniques of government and strategies of legitimation” (vol. I, p.288). It is a way of looking that is sorely needed, and all too often eschewed in favour, as Tully puts it, of “the big, abstract questions of normative legitimation” (vol. I, p.288) or “the idealised, calm and non-strategic exchange of an agreed-upon range of public reasons” (vol. I, p.309).

The pursuit of making the world safe for difference, and resistance to the imperialism of the same, are continued in the second volume's focus on a wide variety of issues. In fact, in light of that variety, it must be said that the second volume reads less cohesively than the first. For example, the first three chapters of volume two cover a lot of ground: 1) a critique of the Kantian idea of Europe (on the basis it is not as cosmopolitan as it claims; readers interested in Europe should also look at chapter 8 of volume two, which offers an alternative to the usual “seeing like a state” or “seeing like a corporation” models of understanding integration in the EU (vol. II, p.240)); 2) a “sketch” (as Tully himself puts it) of some of the forms of democracy in the context of contemporary globalisation (this is also the theme in chapter four of volume two, where Tully claims that global regulatory regimes, such as NAFTA and the WTO, as well as national and transnational corporations, are “non-democratic and often anti-democratic” (vol. II, p.101 and p.115)); and 3) a blueprint for “ecological ethics” that, in keeping with the tenor in the rest of the work, learns from, but also criticises, the two dominant approaches to environmental justice (and, of course, other issues), namely cosmopolitan democracy (principally through David Held) and consensus-based discourse models (per Rawls and Habermas). Not offering (or setting out to offer) fully-worked out positions, these chapters read best as promising examples of Tully's vision for renewing public philosophy – though, for this reviewer's money, this vision was already brilliantly articulated in the first three chapters of volume one. Of course, this is one of the dangers of putting together previously published papers (save for chapter 9 of volume II, which offers an excellent and substantial summary – expressed in the language and concepts of citizenship – of the themes of previous chapters (vol. II, pp.243–309)). Nevertheless, it must be said that, despite some inevitable repetition and overlapping of material, Tully has done a remarkable job in revising and organising a rich body of work into a generally pleasing whole. The one modest editorial suggestion that might be made – in the name of broader accessibility – might be to publish (something like) the first three chapters of volume one as a separate, punchy, intervention in the otherwise rather lethargic (certainly when compared to Tully's) methods of contemporary political and constitutional theory (in the format, say, of Raymond Geuss' Philosophy and Real Politics, 2008).

Of particular interest to public lawyers (including internationalists) will be chapter 5 of volume two, which offers a searching, and much needed, critique of anti-imperialist literature – though itself in the name of anti-imperialism (for some excellent responses to this argument see part two of Christodoulidis and Tierney, eds., Public Law and Politics, 2008). For example, and as illustrated by Obama's increased military activity in Afghanistan, surely Tully is right to insist that it would be naïve, to the extreme, to think that the election of a democratic administration in the US can mark “the end of empire” (see vol. II, p.134)?

Constitutional theorists might do well to give special attention to chapter 7 of volume two. Here, Tully uses the explanatory framework of the “constitutional paradox” (first proposed by Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker), i.e., the antagonistic relationship between constituent power and constitutional form, and applies it to global governance (indeed, he argues forcefully that this relationship “cannot be adequately understood by focusing on its histories within Western states” (vol. II, p.210)). Tully reminds us that “approximately 80 percent of the Indigenous population”, in colonies in America, Australia and New Zealand, “was exterminated by 1900” (vol. II, p.211), but his point is not to confine our sensitivity to imperialism to the past. On the contrary, Tully's way of seeing is a history of the present: a method that allows us to see (perhaps not unlike Geuss' History and Illusion in Politics, 2001) how the currently most tenacious features of global governance – such as “openness to free trade, acceptance of corresponding domestic and international legal orders, and a Western territorial state form” (vol. II, p.213) – are contingent structures that have and continue to serve Western interests. Significantly, however, Tully's tone is not all doom and gloom; in the final section of the chapter he offers a model of de-imperialisation, called “democratic constitutionalism”, the aim of which is to establish global networks of alternative “living democracies”, such as “cooperatives rather than corporations, fair trade rather than free trade, local democracy, non-violent dispute resolution rather than recourse to arms, deep ecology, mutual aid rather than aid tied to privatisation and military biases, and continuing dialogues amongst the civilisations involved” (vol. II, p.220). The crucial point about these ‘non-imperial customary normative orders’ is that they resist “the horrors of present-day imperialism” (vol. II, p.220) not from the outside, but from the inside.

The key message of this work is Tully's endorsement of the use of “pedagogical relationships of reciprocal elucidation between academic research and the civic activities of fellow citizens” (vol. I, p.3) in order to fight off complacency (especially via reliance on abstract forms of representation) in the practice of public philosophy. Of course, we must not think that any one form of renewing public philosophy will do the trick. In other words, it is crucial to keep recalling the particularities of the history and culture of scholarship (including that of the seemingly most abstract and timeless ideas and methods) – though not without becoming so imprisoned by one's reflexivity as to forego attention to “the rough ground”. This very difficult balance is neatly struck in Tully's work.

Overall, this is a rich and also timely work; it is historically erudite, analytically subtle and passionately engaged. It is more than a worthy sequel to Strange Multiplicity (1995). At over 700 pages all up, it offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the sensibility of one of our best contemporary political and constitutional theorists. Fans will not be disappointed; new readers will want more. But that is the rub. The one worry I have about this work is that it is likely to be read only by those who already find it persuasive, and be dismissed by others who will be frightened off by its critical sympathies. The crucial question, then, becomes the following: how can we – in the spirit of Tully's dialogical orientation – reconcile cultures of theory?