The Benjamin E. Lippincott Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to recognize a work of exceptional quality by a living political theorist that is still considered significant after a time span of at least 15 years since the original date of publication.
Citation from the Award Committee:
An exceptionally rich and generative work for many domains of political theory, James Tully’s Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity asks: “Can a modern constitution recognize and accommodate cultural diversity?” Tully’s controversial answer is a conditional “yes,” but only if we first radically rethink key features of “modern constitutionalism” so familiar that they are taken as given in political discourse. At stake in this work, in the name of what he calls an alternative “contemporary constitutionalism,” are two projects: a critical interpretive endeavor centered on the early formation of modern constitutionalism in the history of European thought (1650-1750) and a programmatic effort to articulate a new way of studying the politics of cultural recognition. In line with the first project, which continues to bear significance for scholarship in the now expansive fields of settler-colonialism, empire, indigeneity studies, and comparative political theory, Tully argues that we can find in the “founding fathers of constitutional theory” a normative language that was used “to exclude or assimilate cultural diversity and justify uniformity,” particularly, for his purposes, in the long and consequential history of British and French imperial wars against the Aboriginal peoples of North America. Indebted to cultural feminist critiques of masculinism in both canonical and contemporary political theory, Tully extends his provocative indictment of the language of modern constitutionalism to what he calls three “authoritative traditions” in political theory (liberalism, communitarianism, and nationalism), setting in train productive lines of controversy and response, including considerable criticism and resistance from liberal and deliberative democratic political theorists. The book’s second generative project pursues an emancipatory intent, contending that “the constitutions of contemporary societies,” once freed from the impress of modern constitutionalism, are best understood as “chains of continual intercultural negotiations and agreements in accord with and violation of the conventions of mutual recognition, continuity and consent.” This dynamic, action-oriented, account of culture(s) is both contentious and conciliatory in its investment of value in the historical realities of the “indomitable liberty of ancient peoples” and in living “intercultural” practices of speech, negotiation, and mediation of claims to recognition. Here Tully proposes a new and distinctively fluid perspective that releases “diversity” from the monologic categorization of groups and identities, opening possibilities of dialogue and interactive multiplicity among ordinary “intercultural citizens” within and across nation-states. In this spirit, under the abiding influence of Wittgenstein, Tully also calls readers toward a practical political and aesthetic “post-imperial” attitude where the “play of the imagination” resists the lure of sweeping generalizations and the urge to assert uniformity in the form of implicit rules. Strange Multiplicity remains politically and methodologically generative for contemporary theories of pluralism, constitutionalism, and cultural diversity, as well as for political theorists attuned to Tully’s distinctive approach to finding “public philosophy in a new key” in dialogic interaction with others, as interlocutors on ever-changing “‘common’ ground.”
James Tully, FRSC, is Emeritus Professor of Political Science & Law, at the University of Victoria. He received a BA degree from the University of British Columbia and a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1977. He previously taught at McGill University from 1977-1996, serving as the Chair of the Philosophy Department from 1994-96. After leaving McGill, he taught at the University of Victoria from 1996-2001, followed by the University of Toronto from 2001-2003. In 2003 he returned to the University of Victoria as a Distinguished Professor until 2014.
His academic honors include Emeritus Fellow of Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, recipient of the Killam Prize in Humanities for his contribution to scholarship and Canadian public life, and the David Turpin Gold Medal for Career Achievement in Research in 2014. In 2012 he received the C.B. Macpherson Award of Canadian Political Science Association for best political theory book in Canada 2008-2010 for Public Philosophy in a New Key. He is a consulting editor for Political Theory and Global Constitutionalism, with Antje Wiener, co-editor with Quentin Skinner of Ideas in Context Series (Cambridge University Press), co-editor of The Clarendon Works of John Locke. His primary focus is teaching and scholarship on political and legal theory in dialogues of reciprocal learning with diverse fellow citizens (public philosophy).
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Mary G. Dietz (Chair) of Northwestern University, Dr. Stephen Macedo of Princeton University, and Dr. Anne Phillips of the London School of Economics.