In the last 30 years, Ian Shapiro, Jeffrey Isaac, and others have been calling for political theory to return to the domain of the real or the relevant. In Philosophy and Real Politics, Raymond Geuss takes up the charge, though he cites none of this relevant literature, suggesting either that for someone calling for greater attunement to the real he is oddly removed from it or that the literature on realism is part of the unreal theory he considers irrelevant to the actual practice of realism.

Realists tend to see political theory's interests in canonical texts, critical inquiry, and norm generation as fool's errands that tell us nothing about the real world and, indeed, take “flight from reality” (the title of a book by Shapiro). For Shapiro, the problem is mostly political science's greater fidelity to models than to the realities they are supposed to illuminate. For Isaac, the problem is mostly political theory's absorption by rarefied debates about arcane topics while the world stumbles around without the compass that political theory in more engaged ages sought to supply (though Shapiro, too, pillories the subdiscipline's affection for “gross concepts”). Here, political theory is Nero fiddling while Rome burns. In this, Geuss's most recent in a string of books on the topic, the problem is political theory's takeover by philosophy, which has drawn the subdiscipline into analytic and systematic approaches that operate at some remove from reality, deride the art of the possible, and promote abstract unrealities of reason or right while abjuring the study of power and violence.

In his two volumes of collected essays, Public Philosophy in a New Key, James Tully makes no mention of realism but he aligns himself with many aspects of the approach, as when he says: “The role of public philosophy is to address public affairs” (Vol. II, p. 3). He designates his position “agonism”—indeed, the first three chapters of Volume I are the best statements I know of agonistic democratic theory's commitments and should be taught in every graduate seminar on methods—but “realism” may prove a better fit while putting Tully's work in broader theoretical context.

Tully outlines an antisystematic, antiuniversalist approach he associates with Quentin Skinner's Cambridge School of contextual history, Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy, the agonism of Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt, the neo-Kantian critical Enlightenment work of Michel Foucault, the postsecular democratic theory of Bill Connolly, the neo-Hegelianism of Charles Taylor, and the civic ethos of Pierre Eliot Trudeau. Geuss, too, turns to Cambridge illuminati, such as Wittgenstein and Skinner, to take aim at analytic, systematic, and normative political theory and outline a more properly political, pragmatic, and practice-based approach to the study of politics. As Geuss puts it: “A realist … will … start from an account of our existing motivations and our political and social institutions (not from a set of abstract ‘rights’ or from our intuitions)” (p. 59). Tully echoes the sentiment when he criticizes political theory for its focus on “big abstract questions of normative legitimation” while “practices of freedom on the rough ground of daily colonization usually fall beneath the attention and interest of Western political theorists” (p. 287). But Tully's is a new realism that differs from the views of Geuss and other realists on several key points.

For Tully, the problem with conventional political theory is not only abstraction or even irrelevance, as it is for Geuss, or casual injustice, as it is for Isaac and Shapiro. On the politics of abstraction, Shapiro says: “The flight from reality … marginalizes the potential effects of political and social criticism, and sometimes it contributes to the maintenance of oppressive social relations—however unwittingly” (The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences, 2005, p. 2). But Tully says the problem is, more pointedly and often quite wittingly, elitism and colonialism. Political theory's turn to “an abstract starting point for theories of constitutional democracy that has nothing to do with the ways th(o)se societies were founded” (Vol. I, p. 267) was not just an expression of a philosopher's unworldly mind-set, as Geuss suggests, or of academicism, as Shapiro and Isaac argue. Instead, it was an all-too-real move that “served colonizing interests”. The move away from such abstractions to the “rough ground of politics” is therefore for Tully, if not for Geuss and other realists, a decolonizing, postcolonial, and specifically democratic move connected to class, race, and empowerment. Tully alone among realists takes his bearings from “the subaltern school” (Vol. I, p. 38).

Geuss's realism is antiutopian, measured, and pessimistic rather than ambitious (p. 59). The world of politics is contingent, fraught, contested, and so Geuss narrows politics to a narrower circle of effectivity deemed realistic. Tully, too, sees politics as contingent, but he does not narrow the ambit of politics nor does he resort to pessimism: Worldly contingency grounds the promise of freedom that is daily realized in practices around the globe, often overlooked or underestimated by political theorists. Here we see signs of Tully's humanism. Tully's work is motivated by a belief that somehow, even in the face of terrible odds, human freedom may triumph. But his humanism is not traditional: In his work, the human is not the sovereign center of action but, rather, the discursive effect of larger communicative networks (as in the posthumanism of Foucault), albeit still possessed of agency. And the human is situated in a natural world that may well, with its grandeur, diminish rather than ennoble the human species that all too often does violence to it. The human whose freedoms and capacities are celebrated at the core of Tully's vision is aware and respectful of his or her limitations and yet agonistically engaged with powers that may be beyond reach.

Geuss sees conflict as inevitable and so prizes political stability above all, seeing a thinly conceived legitimacy as its support. Tully also sees conflict as inevitable, but he seeks “just agreement” (Vol. I, p. 238), an ongoing, transformative dialogue of equal parties in contention, bound by a sense of shared fate, mutual respect, common future, and a shared past marred by domination and injustice but not exhausted by them. That this ideal is within a realist's reach is suggested by the intercultural dialogue Tully tracks and hopes further to advance between Euro-Canadians and Canadian Aboriginals. He links the possibility for success to the history and ongoing promise of practices of mutuality and sharing (what Wittgenstein calls a repertoire [Vol. I, p. 65]) that are no less “real” than the historical conflicts by which that history of mutuality is often obscured. Historical incidents of cooperation were often erased from Euro-Canadians' cultural memory as part of the colonial project (Vol. I, p. 245). Such erasures recur today: Alternative modernities hospitable to freedom are obscured by globalization's triumphalist metanarrative (Vol. II). But, Tully insists, recovery is as possible and as real as erasure, and such recovery is political theory's mission.

Both Tully and Geuss are committed to the study of politics on a historical register, but for Tully, history offers politics more promise than constraint. The postcolonial practices of freedom that he seeks to animate are resignifications of precolonial moments of encounter when the lines of power and dependence between Europeans and Aboriginals were murkier than in the later colonizing period. Without the hospitality of the Aboriginals, Tully points out, the Europeans might not have survived in the New World (Vol. I, pp. 244–45). His counternarration of Aboriginal and Canadian history offers a striking contrast to the domination and raw power politics that later intervened in the colonizing period. But the counternarration is not all he offers. Even relations of domination may be re-worked, Tully insists, drawing on Foucault in another departure from Geussian realism (Vol. I, p. 125).

Where Geuss claims the real by focusing on the need in politics to make decisions, Tully does not privilege the decision as the moment or essence of politics. Instead, he claims the real by recurring to complex registers of practice, where political reality involves decision making but also framing, arguing, maneuvering, horse trading, fighting, and more. Where realists like Geuss defer to the concrete realities of history, which they insist, as Ian Shapiro does, exist outside of human interpretation, new realists like Tully historicize in order to animate the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the nearly forgotten, sometimes by recontextualising the past (in the manner of Quentin Skinner) and sometimes by defamiliarization (in the manner of Nietzsche and Foucault). While realists focus on stability and legitimacy, new realists reframe legitimacy, tethering it to practices of freedom, citizenship, empowerment, and dissent that seem disorderly from Geuss's perspective. New realism, committed to politics as the art of the possible, is not degraded by that commitment because the possible is immense. That is why Tully is full of gratitude, optimism, and a sense of possibility and renewal even though he is responding to sedimented injustices that can only be alleviated or recognized, never fully repaired.

There is one problem, however: The very same traits that distinguish Tully from Geuss may bring Tully too close to the deliberativist position from which he wants to distance himself. (If this occurs more in the essays written for government or public purposes, the question of genre is raised: Is deliberative democratic theory, in Tully's view, apt for formal politics and agonism better suited for dissidence? Such splitting is performed but not argued for; it is even argued against [Vol. I, pp. 103–18]). Tully mounts a serious and sustained critique of Jürgen Habermas and discourse ethics in these pages. But when Tully insists, to great effect, on the fundamental equality and reciprocity of treaty making in the context of early precolonial encounters between Aboriginals and new settlers, he sounds uncannily like Habermas, who also casts certain historical events as exemplary of practices we need for our liberal democratic present and future. Tully's approach may be more immanent; after all, when Habermas refers us to the example of “the constitutional assemblies of Philadelphia and Paris,” he immediately corrects himself and says that we should attend “at least [to] the “reasonable trace of [that] great dual historical event” (“Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?” in Political Theory 29(6), p. 768). By contrast, Tully does not trade in actual events for universality's trace. Or does he perhaps only not announce that he does so?

After all, some would argue, contra Tully, that the treaties he looks to for models of politics are themselves instruments of domination, European lures into the colonizers' net. Taiaiake Alfred even casts the Nisga'as' Final Agreement of 1998 as “a strategy of assimilation,” as Tully himself points out, (Vol. I, p. 275n., citing Peace, Power, Righteousness, 1999, pp. 119–28). At the very least, treaty politics are arguably an unholy mix of power and reciprocity. But Tully focuses on the treaty and not the violence, on the mutuality and not the instrumentalization. He understands the mutual implication of violence and reason in his theoretical chapters; indeed, he insists on it, siding with Foucault against the proclaimed wonders of a power-free Habermasian consensus (e.g., Vol. I, p. 143). But when Tully studies intercultural dialogue in Canadian politics, he seems to leave that insight behind.

When he suggests that the solution for alienation is fuller participation guided by principles of intercultural recognition, respect, and responsibility, Tully moves even closer to Habermas. “These principles are the norms implicit in the ways Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples have acted together in the past, when these ways have been just and fair” (Vol. I, p. 229). But are justice and fairness adequate guarantors for a realist politics? Tully seems to assume, rather ideally, that people's responses to political processes are rational or reasonable, that they will take some comfort in open procedures and fair hearings, even though sometimes the sense of injustice is greater, not lesser, when participation is high and costly. When he does note the possibility of “backlash” (Vol. I, p. 228), he responds by calling for a renewal of the treaty relationship, but he does not also pause to acknowledge its anxiety-generating power, especially for status quo power holders. Without a way to thematize or offset their losses (and maybe even with such a way), Euro-Canadians who feel resentment that the new association to which they've come to belong is “alien” and “imposed” (Vol. I, pp. 165–166, 169) may shout, with their tea-partying neighbors to the south and in a language that ironically mimes Aboriginal claims they seek to reject, that they want their “country back.”

Thus, as others have pointed out with reference to Habermas's ideal speech situation, Tully seems to assume as a condition of negotiation the very thing we cannot assume in real politics: the mutual respect whose absence, agonists and all realists know, is the reason we need negotiation. And when Tully says that with recognition and then dialogue “consent can replace coercion and confrontation” (Vol. I, p. 239; emphasis added), he seems quite close to the ideal speech situation he opposes (e.g., Vol. I, pp. 240–41). For while it might be possible and desirable to heighten consensual aspects of politics by way of participation, it seems odd to conclude, as Tully does, that we can replace coercion with consent: “[D]ialogue itself will gradually transform from within the distorted intercultural practices in accordance with the demands of justice” (Vol. I, p. 241; emphasis added). These issues arise out of his commitment to move beyond the thin reasonableness of Geuss's model of politics to issue a call to justice.

Here, some chastening of Tully's infectious optimism might be in order: When some Euro-Canadians today respond “unreasonably” to Aboriginal claims of sovereignty, that is not simply because Euro-Canadians have a “distorted” understanding but because they sense, not wrongly, that their maintenance of privilege in a new Canada-form is at stake. This is also the deep truth in the otherwise crazy claims made in the U.S. health-care debates about government death panels. The claim is false as fact but true as symptom, something realists both Old and New may have a hard time saying but critical political theory is well positioned to point out. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich has noted for several years, the American white majority will soon be a minority. Some of its members cling all the more desperately to their privilege as it is about to be eclipsed, not because Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election but because of the twenty-first century configurations of citizenship and power that allowed him to win. In these developments, there is indeed a death knell. Hence, the phobic discussion of “death panels,” which gives nonreferential expression to the fears of those caught in a moment of political mortality. If end-of-life counseling is demonized in this context, that is because death counseling postulates acceptance of mortality, and this acceptance (humane, for most individuals) is what death panel activists seek to deny (as a political fact).

In Strange Multiplicity (1995), Tully saw politics as often tragic, but he would now rather reorient us toward broader ways of conceiving public goods and shared fates than attend to (and risk contributing to the enhancement of) the zero-sum elements of politics. He is reluctant to take up issues of woundedness, resentment, mortality, and loss. Even with regard to Aboriginals who could make deep claims of wrong, he keeps the focus not on the trail of tears but on the history of treaty making (Vol. I, p. 239–240). These people have a claim to be free and sovereign now, not because they have suffered at European hands, though they have, but because they were free and sovereign at the moment of first encounter. Thus, Tully replaces Geuss's picture of politics—which, invoking Lenin, focuses on “who does what to whom?”—with a different focus on the complex (dis)empowerments of agency, historicity, and discourse. Emplotting Aboriginal claims in a narrative of sovereignty and equality, optimistically identifying and making real to us the often obscured (even by many realists) realities of daily postcolonial practices of freedom, Tully writes about politics as a new realist, in a way that dignifies all sides and vivifies an agonistic humanism all too often absent from even the best political theorizing today.