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The Modern and the Political Pluralist Perspectives on Political Authorities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2018

Yann Allard-Tremblay
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Abstract

I contrast two perspectives adopted to theorize political authorities. The first is the modern perspective. It conceives of political society as a civic union of free and equal citizens and regards the state as the political organization of this society. This perspective is primarily concerned with the principles that should govern the use of state power. The second is the political pluralist perspective. It recognizes a multiplicity of normative orders as equally legitimate. The focus is put on the civic processes by which a diverse citizenry should negotiate its interactions. I illustrate these perspectives by considering how they approach diversity, and more specifically the political claims of indigenous peoples. The pluralist perspective is argued to be normatively motivated by a consideration for the actual freedom of citizens to sustain diverse normative orders, to negotiate the structure of political society, and to jointly search for justice.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 80 , Issue 4 , Fall 2018, pp. 675 - 700
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2018 

I. Introduction

In his illuminating account of indigenous peoples in North America, Thomas King illustrates an attitude that typically characterizes the relationship of settler states with indigenous peoples. Quoting a New York Times article from 1895 about the differential treatment of indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States, King writes:

“She [Canada] is too poor to seek glory by slaughtering the natives born of her soil, and too proud to defame her character or stain her escutcheon.” “Contrast this,” the writer continues, “with the policy of the United States that is nearly always fighting its redmen.” … “Born of her soil?” “Its redmen?” A rather possessive attitude. As though both countries had stopped off at the mall and bought us on clearance.Footnote 1

As political theorists, it is easy to believe that the manner in which we approach politics is for the most part devoid of this colonial attitude. After all, we aim to adopt a critical and general perspective so as to fairly apprehend our subject matter. I am afraid, however, that this possessive attitude nevertheless too easily seeps unnoticed into political theory, especially contemporary liberalism.

This happens when political theory adopts the self-representation of the modern state, that is, when it sees legitimate political authority to be the apanage of a unitary state, conceived as the primary political unit and as the ultimate and supreme lawgiver within its territory. In doing so, the subject matter of political theory is conceived to be the manners in which the authority of the state may or may not be used. More importantly, this also happens when political theory adopts the modern representation of political society. Even when alternatives to the institutions of the unitary modern state are accepted, such as when republican and federal institutions are accepted, political authority is nevertheless often thought to be constrained by what is required for it to be exercised in the name of a political society represented as a civic union of free and equal citizens.

Having the structure or representation of the modern state as a fundamental assumption about legitimate political authority deeply affects the style of political theory that is produced. For instance, it leads the political claims of indigenous peoples to be made sense of as issues regarding the agency of the state and the extent of its authority. What is under consideration is whether or not the state should extend cultural rights or differential treatment to its indigenous peoples and minorities. The state is held to possess a (pro tanto) valid claim to ultimately determine the nature and extent of minorities’ terms of governance.

This paper highlights the manner in which background assumptions about the structure of political society—both institutional and representational—deeply affect how legitimate political authority is conceived and in turn how political authorities are recognized and political theory is conducted. This is achieved by contrasting what are labeled the modern and the pluralist perspectives. The contrast is broadly between a representation of political society as governed by a set of collectively supreme institutions—the state—representing a civic union of free and equal citizens and that of a representation of political society as made up of individuals who by their interactions sustain various distinct, independent, overlapping, incommensurable, and potentially conflicting normative orders. In drawing this contrast, I connect various trends in political and legal philosophy and theory, and thus make clear that they share similar background assumptions. More precisely, I illustrate how the first perspective is most clearly seen in contemporary liberal democratic theory, while I am concerned with connecting aspects of Tully's agonistic approach,Footnote 2 Young's concern for self-determination,Footnote 3 the political pluralism discussed by Levy,Footnote 4 Eisenberg,Footnote 5 and Muñiz-Fraticelli,Footnote 6 and the legal pluralism and general jurisprudential perspective associated with CoverFootnote 7 to show the relevance of thinking of these approaches as broadly forming a distinct philosophical pluralist family.

The article also seeks to uncover the normative considerations that support the political pluralist perspective. I argue that it is grounded in a fundamental concern for the actual freedom of political actors. It gives due consideration to the freedom of citizens expressed in their normative commitments to normative orders and in their sustaining of these normative orders, to their freedom to negotiate and revise terms of governance and to jointly search for justice through politics. In consequence, a normative case, grounded in freedom, is made for the pluralist perspective and its style of political theory.Footnote 8 Additionally, this normative case helps to connect this perspective with existing (anti/post-colonial) critics of political theory raised by indigenous authors.

The contribution of this essay does not lie in the novelty of the ideas it discusses and defends; and I acknowledge the important intellectual debt owed to Tully's work. Notwithstanding, as Morgenthau writes: “novelty is not necessarily a virtue in political theory, nor is old age a defect.” What matters instead is “ascertaining facts and giving them meaning through reason.”Footnote 9 What this essay offers is an enriched general understanding of certain ways in which political authority is theorized and consequently political authorities are recognized. It makes manifest background assumptions that structure how facts are ascertained and given meaning. To achieve this, the point is not to provide a precise and comprehensive comparative study of the literature, but rather to provide a general account of intellectual trends that can be identified thereof.

II. Contrasting the Modern and the Pluralist Perspectives

The modern and pluralist perspectives differ in their presuppositions about what Levy calls political forms. A political form “refers to the category that includes the city-state, the modern sovereign nation-state, the medieval European patchwork polity, the early-modern composite monarchy or dynastic agglomeration, the self-governing clan or tribe, the ancient contiguous empire, the modern overseas empire.”Footnote 10 It can be associated with the settled structure(s) and institution(s) of governance that are (or assumed to be) found in a polity. These structures can be, among other things, more or less united, hierarchical, and supreme.

The modern and the pluralist perspectives differ precisely with regard to these features of structures of governance. The modern perspective assumes that authority is (or should be thought as) united, hierarchical, and supreme. This can be for various reasons: for instance, an unreflective acceptance of the self-representation of the state or an explicit endorsement of the view that political and moral agency is best realized in such a political form.Footnote 11 On the other hand, the pluralist perspective assumes that there are multiple overlapping and potentially conflicting political authorities and does not seek or deem it possible to resolve this pluralism; structures of governance should be assumed to be disunited, nonhierarchical, and irreconcilable. Again, this can be for various reasons, but mainly, as I argue below, because this is meant to adequately consider people's freedom.

In what follows, I provide descriptions of these perspectives and of the manner in which they structure the theorization of authority, the recognition of political authorities, and thus the conduct of political theory. Two things should be clear from the onset. First, the manner in which these perspectives are described is paradigmatic but not definitional, that is, typical abstract descriptions that cover assumptions generally applicable to the two approaches are offered rather than analytical definitions. In this sense, I am illustrating families rather than defining categories. Second, political theorists do not necessarily adopt one perspective to the exclusion of the other. There can be aspects of their work that draw more on the modern perspective, while other aspects of the same work are more sensitive to the pluralist perspective.

The Modern Perspective

If the first perspective is labeled “modern,” it is because it assumes institutional and representational features of the political form of the modern state.Footnote 12 First, it represents political society as a civic union of free and equal citizens. This abstract representation is determinant of the legitimacy of political authorities. This is because political authority is conceived as the collective power of this civic union of free and equal citizens. Accordingly, the norms that apply to authority are thought in light of what is judged appropriate for or acceptable to a union of free and equal citizens. This point is central to so much of modern and contemporary liberal political theory that it does not require much explanation since we are all familiar with the theoretical tools that have been developed to think about what is required of political authority when society is conceived as a civic union of free and equal citizens: the social contract, the state of nature, and the original position. Whatever the actual institutional structure of political society, this perspective theoretically understands political society as such a civic union. This first assumption is the most resilient one. Even when theorists abandon the other assumptions, about the unity of the state for instance, they rarely deny the normative value of thinking about legitimate authority from the perspective of a civic union of free and equal citizens.

The second related assumption of the modern perspective is that political society, as a civic union, is unable to act by itself, such that it requires a unique agent to act on its behalf. This agent is held to be the state.Footnote 13 To the extent that the state is the agent of the civic union at the foundation of political society, it is institutionally assumed to be united and supreme. This means that the state, even if it is made up of various entities, is assumed to constitute a single corporate agent and is held to have the legitimacy to control all other political agents within its domain.Footnote 14

On this account, other internal political authorities or civil associations cannot ultimately oppose or resist the state with right. They are held to be either explicitly authorized or tacitly tolerated.Footnote 15 They are creatures of the state or subordinated to it. Such a state can thus be characterized as the most extensive and comprehensive—and sometimes only—political and legal authority in a polity. This explains (partly) why it is typically the main focus of political and legal theory and regarded as the main agency to be considered.Footnote 16 The point is not that other authorities are not or cannot be recognized; it is rather that all other political authorities and civil associations are ultimately held to be dependent on the state since it is the ultimate wielder of legitimate political authority. Since the power of the state is assumed to potentially extend to the whole of political society, it appears futile to theorize about subordinated entities since whatever is said at the substate level could be superseded at the state level.Footnote 17

In what follows, I expose five ways in which these assumptions structure the ways in which political authority is conceived with respect to issues of diversity.

(1) The well-functioning state. Since the state is taken to be the agent of political society conceived as a whole, and thus as the primary political agency within its domain, the overall well-functioning of the state is taken as desirable and as having high priority over other considerations. When considering issues of diversity, this means that whatever arrangement is considered, it ought not undermine the well-functioning of the state. There cannot, in the end, be genuine conflicts between the authority of the state and cultural rights.

This is most clearly seen with nationalist approaches. Miller, for instance, is well-known for defending the importance of a shared national community for the well-functioning of the state.Footnote 18 As he argues, a state where citizens share nationality—and thus a public culture—is facilitated in its capacity “to solve collective action problems, to support redistributive principles of justice, and to practise deliberative forms of democracy.”Footnote 19 In a similar vein, Scruton has affirmed that the liberal state is sustained by “the social loyalties and allegiances that define nationhood” understood “in terms of ethnic-cultural identity.”Footnote 20 For these approaches, issues of cultural rights are subsumed within the logic of the state: they are limited and assessed from the perspective of ensuring the agency of the state.

(2) The power of free and equal citizens. To the extent that the state is seen as the political organization of political society, it is seen as the wielder of legitimate coercive authority and this authority is deemed to be legitimate only if it can be seen to be exercised in the name of that political society. This requires that its authority be exercised in ways that are compatible with what is assumed of political society. The modern political society being represented as a union of free and equal citizens, legitimate political authority must be thought in light of this united and fundamentally uniform political society. This can be illustrated by considering how legitimate cultural rights can be understood to be those required to secure the equal and free status of citizens.

Consider the argumentative strategy adopted by KymlickaFootnote 21 and various other liberal culturalists.Footnote 22 Cultural rights are argued to be required by the very same principles and values at the foundation of the liberal state: autonomy, liberty, and equality.Footnote 23 Access to (a societal) culture is presented as a basic good, one that plays an essential role in people's autonomy. The equal and fair considerations of citizens’ interests in accessing their (societal) culture is argued to require cultural rights.Footnote 24 As Tully clearly explains: cultural rights “first, protect the individual members of minorities from interference or dominance by the majority (and by the powerful within the minority) and, second, empower members of minorities to exercise their civil and democratic liberties in more effective ways than through the institutions of the majority society.”Footnote 25

In this sense, cultural rights, from this perspective, serve an integrative purpose, that is, they contribute to the standing of minorities as full and equal members of political society. Even if, in practice, cultural rights give rise to differentiated citizenship and rights, they are justified by principles held to be coherent and consistent with an abstract modern representation of political society.

(3) The subordination of political authorities. Certain groups claim cultural rights that deny the legitimate authority of the state and that are not aimed at inclusion; this is the case, for instance, of self-government rights, veto rights, and similar cultural rights that increase political control over certain issue areas for (national) minorities and indigenous peoples.Footnote 26 Notwithstanding, these rights are still often justified from the perspective of the legitimate exercise of state authority. They can be justified (i) as pertaining to entities subordinated to the state, (ii) as merely historical anomalies that should nevertheless be respected based on a concern for the rule of law, or (iii) as pertaining to sui generis political entities to which a liberal state should extend recognition/accommodation.

The first type of justification still approaches political society as a civic union of free and equal citizens. It, however, recognizes that within the overarching liberal polity there are groups that require special self-government rights in order to ensure their freedom and their equality. The state has a pro tanto right to govern them but it justly extends self-government rights. On this account, indigenous peoples and politically organized national minorities are fully subordinated to the state. Their political authority is conceived as extended by and originating from the state. More importantly, they do not figure as such in political theorizing. Reflection on cultural rights is conducted entirely from the perspective of a union of free and equal citizens, not from the perspective of various overlapping political authorities encountering themselves and with the ability, for instance, to enter into treaties. All rights ultimately flow from the state, even self-government rights.

This means that even if self-government rights appear to divide political society, they remain within the logic of a unique civic union. This is because they are justified following the modern representation of political society and an overarching supreme liberal state is assumed. From this perspective, there is ultimately no genuine conflict possible between national minorities and the state to the extent that the authority of these subordinated authorities is determined by the same principles that govern the state.

Yet self-government rights remain suspect for this type of justification since they appear to conflict with the modern representation of the state. Beiner, for instance, exemplifies this type of suspicion when he affirms that Young's defense of minority group vetoes “would definitely undermine the integrity of the political community as a whole as a site for legitimate decision-making on behalf of the totality of its citizens.”Footnote 27 In a similar way, members of the Canadian Senate raised concerns about the use of the term “citizenship” to refer to membership of the Nisga'a First Nation since it could endanger the unity of the people.Footnote 28

The second type of justification recognizes that self-government rights may sometimes conflict with the principles that govern the state—that they may in some respect be contrary to what justice requires—and that they may conflict with the logic of a supreme and unique political authority. Yet it does not thereby automatically reject them. This is made clear, for instance, in one of the argumentative strategies mentioned by Patten. He explains that liberal states can have a weighty reason, grounded in their commitment to the rule of law, to respect their treaties (with indigenous peoples) and their constitutional arrangements (which grant self-government rights to certain provinces or regions). This is so “even if justice did not require that they adopt those measures in the first place and would not require them to adopt or respect those measures now if it were not for the importance of the rule of law.”Footnote 29 In certain cases, if we were to theorize from first principles and abstract away the historical context, the extension of self-government rights may not be recommended. It is only because the bindingness of past decisions—the respect of contracts—is held to be normatively significant and because of our specific history that these self-government rights may have to be respected. In more prosaic terms, this means that in our fallen world, there are historical anomalies that are rightly tolerated but that we would do away with, were we to build a well-ordered political society from the ground up.

The final type of justification recognizes that politically organized national minorities and indigenous peoples are political entities in their own right. They do not derive their authority from the state nor are they mere creatures of the state. There are principled reasons, independent of treaties and constitutions, for these entities to be recognized as self-governing. For example, a First Nation, independently of a treaty it might have agreed to, which would provide a rule-of-law reason to respect its self-government rights, can be recognized as having features that are sufficient, for instance a societal culture, to be extended such rights. On this account, the extension and recognition of self-government rights are recommended as a matter of justice.

This third type of justification is the closest to the pluralist perspective. It avoids the other justifications’ complacent assumption of the state's self-image and associated possessive attitude. It also avoids failing to appreciate the fact that indigenous peoples often precisely deny that the state is in a position to determine with finality their rights.Footnote 30 Nevertheless, this justification does not adopt a general perspective with regard to political authorities; it remains structured by modern assumptions. It asks the question of which political authorities should be recognized and it answers it from the perspective of a liberal state and following liberal principles of justice: self-government rights are to be extended not to all political entities but to those that qualify as self-governing as a matter of liberal justice. In this sense, this type of justification still makes sense of political authority as the power of the state and of its underlying civic union. This fails to grasp the extent to which legitimate political authority, especially with regard to politically organized national minorities and indigenous peoples, has a significant dialogical aspect—that it can be seen as emerging from the struggle of distinct normative orders seeking to settle the scope of their respective authority—and thus that the state, together with the principles governing its agency, is not the sole or the main wielder of legitimate political authority to be considered.

Regardless of the type of justification adopted, issues of diversity are theorized following an insular and monological discourse that is internal to the perspective of the state. Young describes clearly this type of insular discourse:

The primary participants in the debate are members of the “we,” who argue among themselves for and against toleration. This “we” is the point of view of the dominant culture, which also assumes itself to have the power to influence the authorities who allow or forbid. While those holding the point of view debate among themselves whether toleration is the appropriate stance in this case, they all presume themselves to occupy a position as normal, which means not only in the statistical majority, but also holding values that lie within the range of acceptable and even good. Those whose practices the normalized “we” debates have little or no voice in the public deliberations. They are the object of the discussion, but in it, if at all, only weakly as political subjects. The debate positions them as deviant in relation to the norm; as with all questions of toleration, the question is only, are these practices so deviant as to be beyond a line of permissibility?Footnote 31

Young's point can be extended to cover the manner in which theorists ponder whether the state should extend recognition as a function of liberal principles of justice. The whole theoretical discourse is conducted from the perspective of a liberal state as the agent of our theorizing governed by liberal principles with the capacity to extend or not tolerance and recognition. It is the state that extends cultural rights and recognition to cultural minorities, politically organized national minorities, and indigenous peoples and it is the state that has the legitimate political authority to protect, limit, and monitor liberty of association, notably for religious groups. Political theory thus conducted is speaking for the “we” of the liberal state, the “we” who only secondarily belongs to various groups and associations. It does not adopt a general perspective concerning political authorities and it does not offer a fundamental role to distinct normative orders in the theorization of legitimate political authority: issues of diversity are interpreted largely as issues of cultural diversity and not as issues of political diversity. In contrast, a general perspective would regard indigenous peoples and other minorities, as well as other associations such as religious institutions,Footnote 32 as political units with a distinct standing to engage in negotiation or deliberation about terms of governance with the state and with other political units, making that negotiation and deliberation the focus of political theorizing rather than the agency of the state.

(4) The directedness of cultural claims. To the extent that the state is considered to be the supreme and unique political agent of political society, the claims of citizens and groups are typically considered to be directed towards it. Correlatively, the state is held to be the main bearer of the duty to meet these claims. It is both the addressee of citizens’ claims and the tool by which justice is implemented.

This directedness can be seen in certain affirmations of Kymlicka with regard to the rights of refugees. For instance, he writes: “the national rights of refugees are, in the first instance, rights against their own government. If that government is violating their national rights, there is no mechanism for deciding which other country should redress that injustice.”Footnote 33 This can also be seen in Patten's affirmation that cultural rights are conceptualized as “insisting that, as a matter of justice, the state ought to recognize and accommodate the cultures of minorities.”Footnote 34 More generally, this manner of theorizing diversity is apparent in the idea of liberty of association. Following this idea, people are free to form various associations, such as religious groups, and to live in accordance with their normative commitments. But this liberty remains directed towards the state: it primarily defines a duty of the state to both enable and respect that liberty.

In sum, it is once again the authority of the state that is the focus of political theory and diversity is apprehended through cultural rights, which are binding directives for the state and its officials. When cultural rights (or liberties such as liberty of association) are identified, they are seen as offering final normative conclusions. This reinforces the point made above that, from the modern perspective, diversity is not approached in a dialogical manner; issues of diversity are rather negotiated into a final and supposedly binding discourse of (citizens’) rights and (state's) duties.

(5) The affinity with the theoretical approach. Finally, when political society is conceived as governed by a unique and supreme political authority, it seems natural to hold that it can be governed in accordance with a consistent and coherent set of political principles. This is because the agent of political society—the state—does not have legitimate internal competitors that can resist it, which might be guided by different principles, and which might prevent the implementation of a single set of political principles. This is also because the set of principles that should be guiding the state is derived from the view of political society as a unique civic union of free and equal citizens. Ultimately, then, the modern perspective has a natural affinity with what LadenFootnote 35 and Owen and TullyFootnote 36 refer to as a theoretical approach to political theory.

This approach holds political theory as occupying a preeminent position for the just resolution of political problems. It conceptualizes the issues to which diversity gives rise as amenable to complete theoretical resolution (e.g., clear enforceable rights, duties, and freedoms). Differently put, political theory provides a sort of blueprint for a well-ordered political society. This blueprint provides guidance so as to adequately adjudicate claims associated with issues of diversity. Following this approach, “the task of the political philosopher is to work out a theory of justice in virtue of which judgments concerning the degree of justice or injustice exhibited by institutions, policies, and, perhaps, forms of personal conduct can be articulated.”Footnote 37

There are two facets to this theoretical approach. First, it sees the conclusions of political theory as potentially having overriding normative significance. Through the practice of political theory and thanks to the right method—whatever that is—one can arrive at valid recommendations for the just adjudication of claims and distribution of cultural rights. For instance, we can arrive at an account of liberty of association that defines how the state ought to act so as to enable, respect, and limit that liberty. Second, such a theoretical approach does not conceive politics as having any significant role, everything significant having already been resolved theoretically.Footnote 38 Political conflicts over diversity find their adequate and just resolution in a theory of justice such that the fact that political actors may have to resort to actual politics to resolve their conflicts is “an unfortunate concession to the limits of our theoretical abilities”Footnote 39 and ultimately something to be lamented and deplored.

The Political Pluralist Perspective

The political pluralist perspective holds that there is a multiplicity of incommensurable and potentially conflicting normative orders. It does not recognize an ultimate point of view from which all political obligations could be balanced. In this sense, it goes further than the simple recognition of cultural pluralism, it also recognizes political pluralism. This means that it abandons the views of the modern perspective according to which a definite, unique, and supreme political form can be attributed to political society. What should be assumed instead are multiple structures of governance, with their accompanying obligations, and agents negotiating their interactions with and within those structures of governance without there being an ultimate and final source of legitimate political authority that may ensure the coherence and consistency of their obligations.

According to this approach, political society is not represented as a civic union of free and equal citizens devoid of any political attributes, but neither is it conceived simply as the encounter of insular communities. Citizens are rather conceived as enmeshed in various overlapping relationships of governance and as being subjected to various normative orders. On this view, there is no distinct unique political society. Citizens are rather participants in a multiplicity of normative orders and subjected to various entities, sustained by their normative commitments, wielding authority. More importantly, no definite hierarchical order is assumed with regard to these entities. This means that the state does not have by default primacy over other entities and that authority is diffuse.

The state may exercise authority, but since there is no final hierarchical order between normative orders, it should not be assumed that it has a pro tanto right to determine the scope of other normative orders within its domain. Instead of assuming that the state has some theoretically justified authority to require obedience from all those subject to it and instead of assuming that all those subject to the state (will) willfully comply with its directives, this approach recognizes that there is a multiplicity of authorities that are habitually obeyed (for normatively relevant reasons). As Muñiz-Fraticelli explains:

Flipping John Austin's canonical formulation on its head … if habitual obedience is the measure of sovereignty, then the state cannot be the only sovereign around. The state is but one of many groups competing for the habitual obedience of men and women, and churches, trade unions, families even, hold the loyalty of individuals to at least the same degree as the state. They are, in a real and important way, self-governing, in that they pursue collective goals with unity of purpose, and do not habitually subordinate their values and their ends to those of another authority.Footnote 40

It is not habitual obedience as such that matters, but the fact that it points towards the normative commitments that people actually have to their groups. Such normative commitments become especially apparent when habitual obedience is put under pressure by contrary commitments.Footnote 41 It is those normative commitments that count as relevant reasons; I explain in the next section how these normative commitments may be considered normatively significant in light of freedom. Since these commitments are directed to various normative orders that structure and define people's obligations and what they recognize as legitimate authority, this perspective ends up recognizing various incommensurable and irreducible authorities.

Indeed, the recognition of these commitments as normatively significant renders the questions of which authority makes the most sense for those subject to them and of which authority may willfully be obeyed intractable from first principles.Footnote 42 The state cannot be assumed to occupy (though it might) any final role in the fulfillment of those commitments. As Cover argues, it cannot be assumed that obedience to the law is only realized by obedience to state law. In fact, there are multiple “jurisgenerative communit[ies] out of which legal meaning arises” and to which a law of their own can be attributed. From a general jurisprudential perspective, state law is no more law than the law of a First Nation. To see the state as the sole legitimate authority is to take the “sociological datum,” that is, the proposition that the state “do wield the heaviest stick,”Footnote 43 for the normative fact that it is the entity to which people are the most normatively committed.

These pluralist background assumptions entail that legitimate political authority cannot be conceived as the prerogative of the state. The modern perspective allows political authority to be conceived as the attribute of a single public institution of governance. On this view, religious groups can be free to pursue their normative commitments but they do not thereby form distinct political entities with political power: they are merely associations within the larger political association that is the state. The pluralist perspective allows political authority to be dispersed. This is because its background assumptions deny any substantive differences between the authority of the state and the authority of other associations.Footnote 44 On this view, the authoritative direction of human conduct, that is, what counts as political, is dependent on the normative orders that are sustained by people. In other words, legitimate political authority is dependent on people's normative commitments to the extent that legitimacy is a product of people's normative commitments and of the normative orders they jointly sustain.

I now turn to five ways in which this perspective structures the type of political theory that is produced, again with a focus on issues of diversity.

(1) Culture and narratives. One of the central features of the modern perspective with regard to issues of diversity is that culture is argued to be normatively significant.Footnote 45 The pluralist perspective is not, however, concerned with culture as such. As Muñiz-Fraticelli explains: “pluralism … is concerned with the authority of associations, with the corporate agency and self-direction of groups, and with the legal orders that they generate, sustain, and enforce.”Footnote 46 This means that pluralism interprets diversity primarily in political rather than distributive terms; issues of diversity are seen primarily as “struggles over recognition,” that is, as struggles over the norms that govern the interactions of citizens as citizens and as members of various normative orders.Footnote 47 The issues are then interpreted as jurisdictional conflicts: as issues of conflicting norms and laws and of authorities seeking to settle their mutual extent through their political encounter.

This means that culture is not indispensable for making the issue of diversity relevant. Imagine a historical First Nation band whose members now speak the same language as the settlers, whose religion is the same, and who broadly share the same societal culture. Nevertheless, they still regard their council as exercising significant if not final authority over them and they still hold their political status to be distinct. From the point of view of the modern perspective, it may only be treated as a historical anomaly since there does not seem to be a reason of justice for extending self-government rights. From the pluralist perspective, however, it may be regarded as forming a distinct self-governing political unit precisely because the members of the band maintain habitual obedience to a distinct normative order in light of their normative commitments.Footnote 48

Even if culture is not necessary, it often plays a significant role in determining and affecting the narratives that allow normative orders to make sense and thus to be the object of people's normative commitments. In this sense, the pluralist perspective is sympathetic to the normative conception of culture; it holds culture to be playing an important role in the construction of people's “normative world,”Footnote 49 but what matters ultimately are normative commitments and the narratives that give rise to them.

(2) Between individualism and communitarianism. The pluralist perspective neither adopts a purely individualist perspective nor does it only recognize groups as significant units. It rather recognizes that free and equal citizens are engaged in the process of making sense of the social world and that they thereby create narratives that ground normative commitments to various normative orders. This leads a pluralist theory to represent society as made up of individuals with various significant normative commitments to distinct groups that cannot be abstracted away.

There is no a priori theoretical account that can be applied to determine with precision which group should be recognized or not. Rather, this perspective is concerned with people's actual strength of commitment. Those entities that attract particularly strong collective commitments and that are held to have the authority to direct human conduct will count as significant distinct political units. This can be the case, for instance, with certain religious groups, ancestral institutions, and indigenous peoples and national groups. Such groups cannot be understood as deriving their authority from the state or from some primary civic union; they function as independent “nodes of governance.”Footnote 50 In this sense, political society is interpreted as the encounter of free and equal citizens but also of citizens with strong overlapping normative commitments to certain entities that sustain these entities as distinct and independent political entities in their own right.

Even if this perspective conceives of political society as made up of various political entities, it is not subject to objections to the “archipelago view,”Footnote 51 which might at first sight be associated with it. According to Weinstock, the archipelago view can be criticized because it holds two problematic assumptions: “The first is … the independence assumption. It claims that people's cultural identities are formed independently of the broader social and political structures of which they are a part. The second will be referred to as the completeness assumption. It claims that membership in a group accounts completely for members’ identities.”Footnote 52 Neither of these assumptions can meaningfully be attributed to the pluralist perspective. This is because distinct political and legal orders are recognized to the extent that they are the object of significant normative commitments: this is compatible with people being committed to various normative orders, one of them being wider political society. The pluralist perspective denies the essential primacy of any political unit; political society is rather represented as complex and fluid. It extends to the whole of political society the view described by Blackburn when she notes that “many indigenous people think of themselves as dual citizens in ways that combine belonging to their aboriginal nations and the larger states in which they live.”Footnote 53

(3) The general jurisprudential perspective. Following this representation of political society, political institutions are interpreted as lacking primacy, supremacy, and hierarchical order. What we have instead are distinct institutions of governance directing human conduct, none of which can be assumed to take ultimate precedence over the others. This perspective, accordingly, gives up the assumptions of coherence and consistency associated with the modern perspective. In terms of political theorizing, this means that the point of view of the state can no longer be assumed to be the ultimate appropriate point of view. There is a sense in which the well-functioning of the state matters, but it is not a categorical requirement to which all other political obligations can be reduced. This perspective acknowledges the possibility of genuine conflicts between the logic of the state and the logic of other political units.

For example, consider the case of mandatory education for insular groups. From the modern perspective, when the state is conceived as the agent of a civic union of free and equal citizens, it can be argued that “when the state imposes a curriculum upon members of minority associations, it is also in so doing educating its citizens.”Footnote 54 There is no incommensurable conflict here: this is necessary for the well-functioning of the state and accordingly we face an overriding political obligation. The pluralist perspective, for its part, recasts this as the particular point of view of the state. To the extent that no normative order is held to be supreme or to have primacy over the others, the interpretation of the insular group—that this is an unacceptable interference of the state in its internal affairs—has to be recognized as equally valid from its own point of view.

There is then no ultimately legitimate political authority. Whatever solution is enacted, it should be clear that there is a loss. The fact that the interpretation of the insular group did not win the day cannot be compensated by the fact that the interpretation of the state did.Footnote 55 This is because the authoritative direction of human conduct cannot be completely apprehended by interpreting it solely from the perspective of the state or of the rights entailed by the modern representation of the state. When political theorists adopt the perspective of the state, they ought to be conscious that they are doing so and thereby offering a partial account of the political issues under considerations. They ought to guard themselves against confusing the particular perspective of the state for a general one. In this sense, political theory may be conducted from within any of these particular perspectives; but the affirmation of a partial point of view as the sole acceptable point of view should be avoided. A pluralist political theory should ultimately adopt a general perspective on political authority. This means that it should recognize that groups often hold norms and requirements to be supreme from their own perspective, that these perspectives are not fully commensurable, and that there can thus be genuine conflicts and genuine losses.

(4) Extending the case of indigenous peoples. The adoption of a general perspective on political authority should be interpreted as meaning that we should extend the federal approach adopted notably with regard to indigenous peoples to most issues of diversity.Footnote 56 We should not approach issues of diversity as issues giving rise only to questions regarding the duties that apply to the state and whether it should accommodate diversity and extend cultural rights and liberty of association. We should rather approach these issues as the negotiation of terms of governance by citizens engaged in diverse overlapping structures of governance. Through their interactions and negotiations, citizens should be seen as seeking to achieve settlements regarding the respective authority of these structures of governance, as resisting one another, and as sometimes seeking to rely on or to create higher-scale political units in order to pursue some shared aims.

On this view, political theory should, then, to a large extent, focus on the interactions between citizens as enmeshed in these structures of governance such that these structures emerge as distinct and independent, partially self-governing political units. This does not mean that a political-society-wide perspective is never possible, nor that we have to consider political units as sovereign. Rather, the best way of understanding this perspective is formulated by Young in three essays on self-determination as nondominationFootnote 57 and by Tully in Strange Multiplicity.Footnote 58 The somewhat paradoxical nature of political society—easily apprehended when we consider the case of indigenous peoples—should be recognized: citizens are part of groups that claim limited supremacy but they are also involved in society-wide political relations. They interact both as citizens and as members of self-governing groups. This means that (i) we should recognize by default the ability of groups to be self-directing, (ii) that certain issues will give rise to a need for subsidiary political arrangements, and (iii) that democratic politics may be organized in a complex manner where citizens act both as equal individuals and as members of self-directing groups.Footnote 59

(5) The affinity with the political approach. In recognizing the default position of self-governing groups and the relevance of complex democratic participation, this approach interprets the structure of political society and political issues as open to dialogue, negotiation, and deliberation.Footnote 60 Diversity is accordingly not properly assessed following a theoretical blueprint; it is rather only properly addressed following civic processes by which a diverse citizenry negotiates its interactions. In this sense, political theory should primarily be concerned with the conditions that are required for these civic processes to constitute genuine dialogue and negotiation.Footnote 61

The pluralist perspective has a natural affinity for the political approach, which holds that politics has a central and necessary role to play in the just and adequate resolution of political conflicts. On the one hand, political principles by which political conflicts should be resolved are not validated only from a theoretical point of view. Rather, the correctness of political principles requires “the actual endorsement (in a suitably defined sense) of actual people acting politically in actual societies” such that politics plays a fundamental and normatively desirable role in the resolution of political conflicts.Footnote 62 This is because politics is not conceptualized as a field where we only give in to force and domination and where mere modus vivendi are achieved but rather as a field where actors may reason together about the just terms of their interactions.Footnote 63 Following this approach, the validity of political principles is not the prerogative of theory. It is fundamentally dependent on politics.

On the other hand, and accordingly, it can also be affirmed that political theory does not occupy a privileged position from which the just adjudication of claims can be determined. Politics is not just essential to validate political principles, it is also part and parcel of political theorizing. On this view, the philosopher is a participant in the wider political process by which political issues are adequately resolved. Political theorizing is held to be a public activity such that the substantive question is ultimately addressed by an engagement in public philosophy.Footnote 64

As Tully has made clear, if political encounters between citizens normatively committed to various normative orders are held to be fundamental for theorizing diversity—despite the limited normative conclusions this issues—it is because this is held to be the right way for achieving justice. The modern perspective would see a “just peace [as] a constitutional settlement in accordance with the comprehensive theory of justice,” but this is, as Tully affirms, “the most destructive illusion of our age. … It is always a limited and partial description of justice which, when imposed, galls the necks of others and leads to discord. On the contrary, a mediated peace is a just peace.”Footnote 65

III. Freedom and the Pluralist Perspective

Having contrasted these two approaches and the manners in which their respective assumptions about political forms influence the conduct of political theory, I will now argue that a fundamental concern for people's actual freedom unites the approaches I have associated with the pluralist family. I expose three senses in which the pluralist perspective gives due concern to people's freedom: it respects their freedom expressed (1) in their capacity to develop narratives and sustain diverse normative orders, (2) in their capacity to negotiate the terms of their governance, and (3) in their capacity to jointly search for justice through politics.

The first way in which this perspective gives due concern to people's freedom is that it takes seriously the importance of living and acting in accordance with norms that actually make sense to those subject to them and that are complied with mainly owing to good-faith judgment as opposed to coercion. These ways of expressing freedom are lost when political society is represented as a civic union of free and equal citizens to which primary political loyalties are attached. This is because this representation abstracts away the fact that people have distinct and diverse normative commitments that are independent from state-wide political society. These commitments are abstracted away because they are regarded either as trivial or as due to partial preferences that should not be respected. On this view, then, citizens are represented as devoid of prior political attachments such that freedom is conceived to be expressed in the rational and reasonable interactions of citizens so conceived. In a sense, people's true freedom is held to originate in the civic union at the foundation of the state.

The pluralist perspective, in contrast, does not abstract away the fact that citizens derive political obligations from a multiplicity of normative orders. This is because those normative orders are seen as resulting from the capacity of citizens to freely interpret and make sense of the world, that is, to develop narratives. They are thus seen as being grounded in what makes sense to citizens and accordingly as the expression of people's normative judgments. To abstract them away would be to abstract away the fact that people actually, by their free actions and interactions, jointly construct the social, political, and legal world in accordance with what makes sense to them. Positively put, the pluralist approaches give due consideration to people's actual freedom expressed (1) in their joint development of narratives that genuinely make sense to them and (2) in the actual structures of governance sustained by their normative commitment to various normative orders.Footnote 66

The second sense in which respecting those actual commitments gives due concern to people's freedom relies on the idea that this takes seriously the importance of achieving compliance with norms in a voluntary manner. There are indeed two, nonexclusive, modes in which laws and norms achieve social organization.Footnote 67 First, norms and laws can guide behavior as directives backed by sanctions and coercive force. People act in accordance with those norms mainly as a way of avoiding undesirable consequences. Second, norms and laws can guide behavior as directives that are voluntarily followed. People act in accordance with those norms because they believe and accept compliance as right or required. The latter of these modes of social organization, from the point of view of freedom, is preferable for obvious reasons. By recognizing the importance of people's actual normative commitments—and the structure of governance they sustain—and the fact that they cannot simply be abstracted away, the pluralist perspective adequately takes into account the various non-state-centered ways in which law functions as a voluntary medium of social organization.

In terms of diversity, this is significant because it recognizes the legitimacy of multiple normative orders. It does not see political diversity as a departure from the ideal or as an anomaly that would never emerge from reasoning from first principles. Political diversity is rather the normal and appropriate social condition in which freedom expresses itself. What is in need of justification is the discarding of people's normative commitments and associated normative orders; it is uniformity and forced compliance. In this sense, indigenous peoples, national minorities, religious groups, and other units that function as normative orders backed by normative commitments are by default significant units for the free authoritative direction of human conduct.

This connects the pluralist perspective with some critics of colonialism. Coulthard has argued, following Fanon, that indigenous peoples should not seek recognition and “constitutionally protected ‘rights’ to land and self-government” from the state, for in doing so, they are determining themselves following the colonial terms set by the state.Footnote 68 People must be “the creators of the terms and values of their own recognition,” otherwise “the best the colonized can hope for is ‘white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by [their] masters.’”Footnote 69 This is precisely what the pluralist perspective acknowledges as significant freedom: the freedom that people express when they jointly self-determine on their own terms and not following the terms dictated in accordance with set presuppositions about political society.

In the same line of thought, it is possible to explain why liberty of association is insufficient to account for the freedom under question here. A liberal opponent might affirm that self-government is fine for indigenous peoples, but that liberty of association is better at respecting people's freedom when we are concerned with religious groups. This opponent might ask to illustrate the relevance of the pluralist perspective by showing why, in terms of liberty, it is essential for religious groups to exercise coercive political power. The thought behind this challenge is that the liberal approach would be better at protecting freedom since the state, in protecting liberty of association and thus the liberty to form religious associations, would also protect the liberty of those who want to dissociate. The pluralist perspective would need to explain why allowing some groups to coerce their members is good for freedom.

This challenge remains rooted in the modern perspective. It assumes that we should seek a scheme of social organization that will maximize a certain conception of freedom. But that is precisely the manner of approaching political issues that the pluralist perspective seeks to displace. The point is not to define a scheme of social organization but to acknowledge the ways in which people actually sustain and structure their normative world and to set this freedom at the core of our apprehension of political issues. This means accepting that the ways in which people express their freedom may lead to intractable conflicts. That is abstracted away by a state-enforced conception of liberty of association.

More problematically, such a conception also remains rooted in the colonial possessive attitude of the modern perspective. When I affirm that it is colonial, it is indeed because of its assessment of the political standing of indigenous peoples but also because it reproduces that same attitude towards all associations. It requires these groups to tell and determine themselves in the terms dictated by a monological political theory that relies on set (modern) presuppositions about political society, in the present case, following the terms of a liberal conception of liberty of association. Yet indigenous peoples and religious and other groups could respond, as Antjie Krog wrote about the ways in which the West fails to properly understand African interconnectedness: “you don't hear us through our own voice. You keep on hearing us only through your voice.”Footnote 70 It is simply not the case that all religious groups can be thought—in the voice of their faithful—as voluntary associations of citizens, primarily members of the state or even as subjected to the power of the state. People construct and sustain groups, associations, and religious groups that do not respect the requirements of a liberal liberty of association.

Hence, the pluralist perspective does not seek to maximize freedom; what it seeks is to adequately acknowledge the ways in which people express their freedom so as to define their own normative orders. In relegating all religious associations to the status of associations subjected to the state, a liberal modern perspective may protect a certain conception of liberal freedom, but in doing so it speaks over the members of those associations and understands their normative commitments in terms that are not their own.

In the end, this whole account may seem overtly relativist since it appears to countenance any and all sorts of political orders supported by actual normative commitments. It has to be recognized that the pluralist approach is for the most part mute with regard to what consists in a political order with the appropriate standing. This is because it holds that all normative orders held to have the ability to authoritatively direct human conduct and voluntarily backed by normative commitments stand as recognizable political units. The adequate theoretical attitude is to adopt a general perspective and to be concerned with the political interactions between these units. In this sense, the presumption is to include. Otherwise, we unwarrantedly abstract away from the object of political theory interactions between genuine political units and we adopt a limited and partial perspective.

This does not mean, however, that this approach cannot discriminate at all between political units. For one thing, it can focus on the practice of political interactions such that dominating groups that refuse political interactions would disqualify themselves by their own actions: they would not be engaged in the practice of voluntarily and politically negotiating terms of mutual governance. Similarly, groups whose internal governance cannot be judged to be the expression of normative judgment owing to, for instance, extremely authoritarian practices would not qualify. Yet, as Williams points out, we should not be too quick in discarding all authoritarian or illiberal political orders as little insular tyrannies. Some of these political orders might in fact be voluntarily upheld by their members who are “jointly caught up in a set of beliefs which regulate their lives and which are unsound, but which are shared in ways that move the society further away from the paradigm of unjust coercion.”Footnote 71 Such orders are genuine political orders backed by normative commitments. In sum, discriminating between political orders is possible but it requires an assessment that is not always easily carried out.

Now it is true that living in common requires a difference between freedom and license and that, accordingly, we cannot assume that all normative commitments can and should be respected. Here again, however, the pluralist perspective offers significant recognition of people's freedom. This is because it recognizes the freedom of citizens to actively engage with and negotiate the terms of their governance. Which norms should be enforced is seen as something open and fluid, it is not determined theoretically and prepolitically. It is determined by the actual commitments of citizens to normative orders and by their interactions. In this sense, the actual political actions of citizens—their resistance to laws, their less than perfect compliance, and their wholehearted adherence to the law—are regarded as normatively significant. They are held to be the expression of people's capacity to freely engage with the terms of their governance and to jointly determine the political world.Footnote 72 On this account, citizens are not merely subjects of the state and of political orders; they are also and mainly agents engaged in the mutual determination and negotiation of the terms of their governance. To give due consideration to the fact that people are committed to diverse normative orders in light of which they interact with others and negotiate the structure of political society is to give due consideration to the standing of citizens as agents within, and not merely as subject to, relations of governance.Footnote 73

Furthermore, the recognized agency of citizens within relations of governance also offers due concern for their freedom as participants in the discovery of justice. Citizens are duly recognized as active moral agents and not merely as addressees of high political theorizing. This is because, following the political approach to political theory, the negotiation of the terms of governance by citizens is held to be an exercise in public philosophy. As noted above, politics on this view is not just interpreted as the realm of force. It is also where citizens reason together and thus freely exercise their capacity to participate in the joint discovery of justice.

IV. Conclusion

The primary aims of this article have been to highlight how assumptions about political forms structure the ways in which political authority is theorized, political authorities recognized, and political theory conducted, and to argue in favor of the political pluralist perspective. I have exposed how a normative concern for people's actual freedom underlies the thought of various authors I have brought together within the same broad pluralist philosophical family. This entails that the five features discussed above that are associated with the modern perspective, most of them associated with contemporary liberal democratic theory, rely on abstractions about the coherence and consistency of political society that are bought at the cost of people's actual freedom.

In sum, this means that depending on which assumptions about political forms are favored, political authorities will be interpreted in radically different ways. In turn, the type of political theory produced will also be different. I have explained how issues of diversity will be interpreted either as issues of cultural diversity concerning the adequate use and limits of the state's political authority, or as issues of political diversity concerning conflicting jurisdictions and normative orders. I have argued that the latter option better accounts for people's actual freedom. Thus, the central cases of concern for multiculturalism, namely, indigenous peoples, religious groups, and national minorities, are best apprehended as distinct normative orders that conflict over norms of mutual interaction. To understand these issues as concerned with the legitimate authority of the state is to retro-integrate these political units into the overarching form of the liberal modern state. It requires adopting the perspective of the state and its concomitant possessive and monological attitude.

This is the sense in which the case of indigenous people should not be seen as the exception but as the paradigmatic case from which we should understand the structure of political society and the nature of the negotiations that take place on terms of governance. Indigenous peoples stand as examples of self-governing differentiated entities—whose members are citizens both of the group and of wider society—that are engaged in forms of decentered federalism. This fits well for “cultural” groups that are institutionally organized, such as most churches, First Nation bands, and politically organized national minorities. But it has to be recognized that some groups that are too sparsely dispersed to politically organize—such as new immigrants groups—or that simply do not constitute a normative order may need to be apprehended from a different perspective.

In conclusion, then, political theory can escape from the colonial possessive attitude of thinking about diversity as the extension by the state of accommodation and cultural rights appropriate for a civic union of free and equal citizens. The state might have thought the indigenous peoples of America to be “its redmen,” but what they teach us, with their unrelenting affirmation of their distinct political standing and ongoing engagement and intermingling with wider political society, is to disregard the state as the primary and supreme political unit with the ability to wield legitimate authority. As political theorists, we should recognize the extent to which the object of our work is fluid and constantly transformed by the free agency of citizens enmeshed in various normative orders negotiating the terms of their governance and thus the structure of political society. We should embrace the fact that political society lacks coherence and consistency and that our political theory cannot help itself to these abstractions; that it is a mess of overlapping and potentially conflicting political authorities and that issues of diversity often lead to incommensurable alternatives. The case of the indigenous people of America teaches us that the state simply lacks the authority to unilaterally dictate terms of accommodation, that no one is “its redmen.”

Footnotes

This work was supported by the financial support of the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et Culture. I would like to thank Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli and Daniel Weinstock, and especially Jacob T. Levy for his support.

1 King, Thomas, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2013), 27–28. Emphasis in the original. Quoting “No Indian Wars in Canada,” The New York Times, December 1, 1895, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9E03EEDB1139E033A25752C0A9649D94649ED7CF

2 Tully, James, “The Agonic Freedom of Citizens,” Economy and Society 28, no. 2 (1999): 161–82.

3 Young, Iris Marion, “Self-Determination as Non-domination,” Ethinicities 5, no. 2 (2005): 139–59; Young, Iris Marion, “Hybrid Democracy: Iroquois Federalism and the Postcolonial Project,” in Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination, and Responsibility for Justice (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 15–38; Iris Marion Young, “Two Concepts of Self-Determination,” in Global Challenges, 39–57.

4 Levy, Jacob T., Rationalism, Pluralism and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014).

5 Eisenberg, Avigail, Reconstructing Political Pluralism (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995).

6 Muñiz-Fraticelli, Victor, The Structure of Pluralism (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014).

7 Cover, Robert M., “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97 (1983): 4–68.

8 Pluralism has a long history and comes in various forms. See Schlosberg, David, “Resurrecting the Pluralist Universe,” Political Research Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1998): 583–615. I am concerned with a specific version of pluralism, which I refer to as political pluralism, whose underlying normative motivation is, I argue, the actual freedom of citizens.

9 Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1985), 4.

10 Jacob T. Levy, “Contra Politanism,” European Journal of Political Theory, published online July 2, 2017, p. 2, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885117718371.

11 What Levy (ibid.) refers to as the teleology of political forms.

12 For problematizations of this perspective, see Tully, James, “On Global Citizenship,” in On Global Citizenship: James Tully in Dialogue (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 3–100; Young, Iris Marion, “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship,” Ethics 99, no. 2 (1989): 250–74.

13 Skinner, Quentin, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2008): 351–54.

14 The power of the state, even if supreme, may not be absolute. The limits on its power will typically be thought following the first assumption.

15 Muñiz-Fraticelli, Structure of Pluralism, 109n35.

16 Joseph Raz, “Why the State,” Legal Studies Research Paper Series paper no. 2014–38, The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, London, 2014. SSRN http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2339522.

17 I follow Tully in using the term “modern” to describe this perspective, but this usage is independently supported when we consider the extent to which modern thinkers have vilified what they called “irregular republics” in which unsubordinated political authorities are “like wormes in the entrayles of a naturall man” (Hobbes, Thomas, Hobbes's Leviathan [Oxford: Clarendon, 1929], 257). See also Pufendorf, Samuel, On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 142, 144.

18 Miller, David, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2003 [1995]), 27.

19 Footnote Ibid., 98.

20 Beiner, Ronald, editor's introduction to Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 6. This refers to Scruton, Roger, “In Defense of the Nation,” in Philosopher on Dover Beach (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's, 1989).

21 Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2003 [1995]).

22 Patten, Alan, Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 6.

23 As noted by Scott: “for thinkers such as Walzer, Kymlicka, Kukathas, Carens, and Taylor, what is at stake is … rethinking from the standpoint of liberal democracy… . The privileged status of liberal democracy is not itself in question” (Scott, David, “Culture in Political Theory,” Political Theory 31, no. 1 [2003]: 96).

24 Kymlicka, Liberalism, 109; Patten, Equal Recognition, 28.

25 Tully, Global Citizenship, 17.

26 Kymlicka, Will and Norman, Wayne, “Return of the Citizens: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory,” Ethics 104, no. 2 (1994): 375.

27 Beiner, Ronald, “Multiculturalism and Citizenship: A Critical Response to Iris Marion Young,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 38, no. 1 (2006): 28.

28 Blackburn, Carole, “Differentiating Indigenous Citizenship: Seeking Multiplicity in Rights, Identity, and Sovereignty in Canada,” American Ethnologist 36, no. 1 (2009): 69, 71. For a list of related objections, see Kymlicka and Norman, “Return,” 372n25.

29 Patten, Equal Recognition, 9. See also Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 116–17, 120.

30 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 118; Owen, David and Tully, James, “Redistribution and Recognition: Two Approaches,” in Multiculturalism and Political Theory, ed. Laden, Anthony Simon and Owen, David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 283; Tully, James, “The Struggles of Indigenous Peoples for and of Freedom,” in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Ivison, Duncan, Patton, Paul, and Sanders, Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 36–60.

31 Iris Marion Young, “Structural Injustice and the Politics of Difference,” in Laden and Owen, Multiculturalism and Political Theory, 86–87.

32 Muñiz-Fraticelli, Victor, “The Distinctiveness of Religious Liberty,” in Mapping the Legal Boundaries of Belonging: Religion and Multiculturalism from Israel to Canada, ed. Provost, René (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014), 99–118.

33 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 98.

34 Patten, Equal Recognition, 2 (emphasis added).

35 Anthony Simon Laden, “Negotiation, Deliberation, and the Claims of Politics,” in Laden and Owen, Multiculturalism and Political Theory, 198–217.

36 Owen and Tully, “Redistribution and Recognition.”

37 Footnote Ibid., 266.

38 Honig, Bonnie, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

39 Laden, “Negotiation,” 200.

40 Muñiz-Fraticelli, Structure of Pluralism, 23. See also Laski, Harold J., Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), 19, 23.

41 Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 53.

42 On the idea of political power making sense, see Williams, Bernard, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

43 Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 47.

44 Cf. Muñiz-Fraticelli, Structure of Pluralism, chap. 8.

45 For a critical survey, see Festenstein, Matthew, Negotiating Diversity: Culture, Deliberation, Trust (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).

46 Muñiz-Fraticelli, Structure of Pluralism, 38–39.

47 Owen and Tully, “Redistribution and Recognition,” 267; Tully, James, “Struggles over Recognition and Distribution,” Constellations 7, no. 4 (2000): 469–82.

48 On jurisdictional disputes without culture, see Muñiz-Fraticelli, Structure of Pluralism, 40.

49 Festenstein, Negotiating Diversity, 15.

50 Tully, James, “The Unfreedom of the Moderns in comparison to Their Ideals of Constitutional Democracy,” Modern Law Review 65, no. 2 (2002): 220.

51 This refers to Kukathas, Chandran, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

52 Daniel Weinstock, “Liberalism, Multiculturalism, and the Problem of Internal Minorities,” in Laden and Owen, Multiculturalism and Political Theory, 258.

53 Blackburn, “Indigenous Citizenship,” 70.

54 Weinstock, “Liberalism,” 261. Note in passing the use of the possessive “its.”

55 I wrote those two last sentences before encountering this one: “in the pluralistic view of the State, there are … ‘real losses and real losers,’ in the clashing of its parts; nor do these add mysteriously to the splendour of the whole” (Laski, Studies, 11).

56 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 181–82; Young, “Self-Determination,” 140.

57 Young, “Self-Determination,” “Hybrid Democracy,” and “Two Concepts.”

58 Tully, James, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

59 This manner of extending the case of indigenous peoples to make sense of issues of diversity may seem problematic: indigenous peoples typically appeal to decolonization as a ground for their distinct political status. It is because they were forcefully and unjustly incorporated that they demand and would be entitled to self-government. In affirming that what matters is the strength of their present-day attachment, I would be at odds with the strategies they themselves adopt.

Yet decolonization without present-day attachments is meaningless: self-government to a colonized people that does not form a distinct normative order and that does not attract normative commitment is like extending self-government to a people that does not exist. It is because indigenous peoples have present-day attachments that sustain their distinct normative orders, and because colonialization was and is still an attack on the ability of indigenous peoples to live in accordance with their own normative orders, that we can make sense of their political claims to decolonization and that it may give rise to a right to self-government.

But once decolonization is no longer seen as sufficient or necessary to support the claims of indigenous peoples, religious groups and other associations having strong present-day attachments are on par with indigenous peoples for political standing. This might seem odd, but it is a consequence of the pluralist assumptions. Political authority is no more than the authority exercised by an entity, or settlements achieved following the interactions of such entities, that attracts normative commitments extending to the authoritative direction of human conduct.

60 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 184.

61 It can also be concerned with offering suggestions that will themselves be the object of a political assessment. See Owen and Tully, “Redistribution and Recognition,” 266.

62 Laden, “Negotiation,” 201.

63 Owen and Tully, “Redistribution and Recognition,” 266.

64 Tully, James, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

65 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 211.

66 See the notion of jurisgenerative communities in Cover, “Nomos and Narrative.” See also Tully's discussion of freedom based on Arendt in Tully, “Agonic Freedom,” 162.

67 Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 18.

68 Coulthard, Glen, “Beyond Recognition: Indigenous Self-Determination as Prefigurative Practice,” in Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations, ed. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2008), 194.

69 Footnote Ibid., 195. See also Alfred, Taiaiake, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Peterborough: Broadview, 2005); Corntassel, Jeff, “Toward Sustainable Self-Determination: Rethinking the Contemporary Indigenous-Rights Discourse,” Alternatives 33 (2008): 105–32; Corntassel, Jeff, “Re-envisioning Resurgence: Indigenous Pathways to Decolonization and Sustainable Self-Determination,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 86–101.

70 Krog, Antjie, Begging to Be Black (Cape Town: Penguin Random House South Africa, 2009), 156.

71 Williams, In the Beginning, 71.

72 Young, “Self-Determination”; Tully, “Agonic Freedom”; Tully, “On Global Citizenship.”

73 A referee raises this relevant worry: following people's actual freedom, we might have to consider the self-government rights of indigenous peoples as on par with those of the Ku Klux Klan. Putting aside that the KKK seeks domination, this worry nevertheless misinterprets the point advanced here. The point is not that we should, as the modern perspective would have it, exercise authority so as to extend self-government rights. It is that we better account for people's freedom and thus make better sense of the political world by interpreting these groups as already self-governing. What this entails is that if Klan members are coercively prevented from living in accordance with their normative commitments, we should recognize that this is a loss for them in terms of freedom. It also means that were negotiations on terms of governance to take place, again ignoring the dominating nature of the group, the resulting arrangements may be an expression of people's freedom while most imposed arrangements, following, say, a theoretical conception of liberty of association, would be coercive. An appeal to liberty of association to legitimately coerce the KKK divides freedom from the ways in which people actually exercise their freedom; it seems to entail that people can be forced to be free. We make better sense of the situation by recognizing forced compliance for what it is.

Ibid
Ibid
Ibid