ABSTRACT
Instead of directly addressing Tully’s unstinting critique of and his alternative to informal imperialism, my aim in this chapter is to scrutinise the fundamental opposition that governs his Edinburgh lecture, namely the opposition between monism and pluralism. It is perhaps not exaggerated to say that, for Tully, empire is monism. In general, monism is not merely a specific way of organising polities, but also, and perhaps most fundamentally, a specific way of thinking about political community. Tully leaves no room for doubt, both in his Edinburgh lecture and in an earlier piece,2 that Kantian and neo-Kantian theories of democracy have played an important role in consolidating monism in modern philosophical thinking. The task of the politics of cultural recognition defended by Tully is, therefore, to recover a pluralistic understanding of law and politics, a pluralism, he holds, which is constitutive for the notion of democracy itself. While I share Tully’s concerns about neo-Kantian theories of democracy, I will largely bracket his critique thereof, focusing, instead, on what I take to be the conceptual core of the opposition he sets up between monism and pluralism: the problem of identity. Indeed, to the extent that democracy is defined as self-rule or self-legislation, the debate between monism and pluralism centres on the conception of identity appropriate to political self-rule. Accordingly, the question to be addressed in this chapter is the following: is the concept of identity germane to political self-rule at all compatible, as Tully argues, with the notion of legal pluralism? If not, and I will argue that it is not, then in what way is plurality the indispensable condition of politics? The chapter concludes by very tentatively drawing out the implications of my argument for the problem of the
spatial boundaries of political community, an issue that goes to the heart of empire and imperial thinking.
