My friend is a visionary thinker. But he continually fails to follow through on his ideas.

I was talking to another friend about Philosophy for Change. This person is empowered individual, the CEO of a successful tech company. He brought into focus what the problem is: a question of self-belief. The gist of his insight was as follows:

‘What if someone doesn’t believe in themselves? What if they’ve been told from day one: ‘You’re no good’. They may be brimming over with ideas. But when it comes to applying these ideas and realizing them, they don’t have the courage for it. It is not that they don’t believe in their ideas. They don’t believe in themselves, and thus they don’t believe they can achieve these ideas’.

It is a genuine problem. Plenty of people have the capacity to think and dream. Without a robust sense of self-worth, however, these dreams tend to remain dreams. We know where we want to go. We just don’t believe that we have the resources to get us there.

How do you overcome a paralyzing lack of self-belief? The solution may seem straightforward: you need to change the way you think about yourself. If your beliefs about your worth or ability are holding you back, the obvious thing is to correct these beliefs, and to find positive, self-affirming, beliefs to replace them. But are bad beliefs really the cause of the problem? When one says: ‘I believe I am no good’, one is not just stating a fact about the world, one is expressing a mental state – a state that derives from a swathe of feelings linked to painful, and deeply embedded memories and experiences. Positive self-actualization can help you feel better about yourself in the short term. But it is a bit like polishing a surface without cleaning it first. We spread the grime around. Sooner or later, the dirt is back and we are at stage one again.

In the final analysis, a lack of self-belief is not caused by bad beliefs – it is caused by the negative reprocessing of past experience. The first step towards addressing this problem is to see the problem as a process. Lack of self-belief is the product of a continuing process of negative visioning. To correct the self-conception, we need to change the way that we envision life and being.

What is visioning? We associate visioning with thought leaders and innovators. In fact, we all develop visions of the future on a daily basis. The philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) conceived visioning as a matter of recollection and projection. We draw on memories of the past to create a mental map of the future, which we use to orient our activity as we travel through the present. We are visioning as we stumble from bed early in the morning, working on ‘auto pilot’, guided by memories of how to proceed. We are visioning as we fall into bed, exhausted by the day, subliminally preparing ourselves for the morning to come.

Visioning is not necessarily a conscious process. Mostly we recycle experiences without thinking about it – projecting them forth subconsciously to form an implicit horizon of anticipation and expectation.

The important point is that the kinds of experiences we recycle determine the way that we experience the future. If you’ve been lucky enough to have a life of positive experiences, you’ll feel strong and confident as a result. If you’ve suffered a life of disempowering experiences, you’ll most likely look into the future and see the same traps and barriers that you’ve encountered before waiting to trip you up.

This is how we participate in creating a negative conception of our person. Lack of self-belief is created by the habitual recycling of disempowering memories. To overcome a lack of self-belief, we need to target the cycle of negative reprocessing that creates this self-perception. We need to burrow down into the way that we draw on the past to create the future. We need to transform our process of visioning.

This is not easy, but it is possible. Ultimately, there is no necessary reason why you or I should reach into the past in such and such a way, seize on this or that memory in our storehouse of experiences and project it forward to create a vision of the future. The fact is, however, that we do do this in a certain way. To beat a lack of self-belief, we need to take charge of the process. We need to shift the way that we draw on the past to anticipate the future. Everyone’s life experience offers them some examples of personal achievement and empowerment. Why not recycle these memories instead of the disempowering ones? What could possibly prevent you from doing so?

The short answer is trauma. If one has suffered a traumatic experience, it can be extremely difficult to shift one’s recollection of the past and refocus on one’s achievements. In such cases, one is best seeking professional help to overcome the negative conditioning.

In less extreme cases, change can be achieved through positive visioning. Positive visioning involves rummaging about in the past, taking what you consider to be most empowering and projecting it into the future.

Here are three techniques you can use to help you cultivate a positive view of life and being. Practicing these techniques helps you refocus the way that you draw on the past to create a sense of the future. The aim is to cultivate a positive and optimistic perception of the future by drawing on the recollection of successes of the past.

Technique 1: Recall empowering experiences. Identify five experiences you’ve had that have heightened your sense of capacity and potential. Jot them down in note form on a sheet of paper. Now imagine the kinds of contexts that would enable you to enjoy similar experiences today or tomorrow. How might you engage with your tasks and colleagues so as to reactivate these empowering experiences?

Technique 2: Apply unique skills. Think of some things that you do well, perhaps better than other people. Record these activities on a sheet of paper. Now imagine some contexts that would enable you to apply these talents and skills. Can you identify a common situation that you could use to practice your powers? Go make use of it! Apply your unique skills at every opportunity. The more you do this, the more you add to your storehouse of empowering memories, and the easier it becomes to project a positive vision of the future.

Technique 3: Cultivate Damascus road experiences. Think of the process of negative visioning as a matter of laying down a path through time. All of us are on a journey through time, and we all play a certain role in creating the route we take. We create this path through recollection and projection. By drawing on memories of the past, we cast a visionary timeline into the future and follow it to the horizon.

Imagine yourself on this singular path through time. Now think of some alternative paths that you could create by reprocessing empowering experiences instead of disempowering ones. Recall your most empowering experiences. Consider your unique talents and how you could creatively apply them. Put these paths together to make a crossroads of sorts. Imagine that you are standing at the nexus of these paths in time, trying to decide which way to go. Should you press on with the route that you were treading or should you take the road less travelled?

Whatever you decide, you should cherish this moment of decision and sustain it for as long as you can. You are enjoying a moment outside of time, just off the beaten path of life. It is here that the truly creative experiences in life take place.

Socrates, Seneca, Goethe, Heidegger, and Sartre never said it better: ‘Remembering that you are about to die is the best way of I know of avoiding the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart’. Powerful words and true from one of recent history’s most inspiring innovators and entrepreneurs.

The Symbionomics pattern cards are released under a Creative Commons license.

England in the 1640s was stricken by factionalism and war. Hobbes, a monarchist, fled to France, where he wrote his masterwork, Leviathan (1651), outlining his theory of the state. Hobbes offers a legislative solution to the problem of the multitude. He argues that the members of the multitude must forge a ‘social contract’ with the sovereign for the sake of security, prosperity, and civil order. The sovereign guarantees security for the members of the multitude, so that they may go about their business as they may. The members of the multitude, meanwhile, must give up certain ‘natural rights’ to the sovereign, firstly the right to take life – a right which we possessed in the so-called ‘state of nature’, but which we must give up in order to enter society.

This is how a multitude becomes a people. Unified under a sovereign with a monopoly on violence, the masses concede that security is better than war and hand in their weapons. The sovereign is thereafter a universal strongman with the task of looking after each individual’s rights and well being. Hobbes’ theory of the state and ‘civil society’ is embedded today in our legal institutions. Signing away our right to do as we please, we, the members of the multitude, have become organized if less-than-unified peoples. If you study liberal political theory, you have inherited a tradition that begins with Hobbes and centers on the unifying power of the social contract.

But the social contract never took place. It does not exist. Why do we think in this way, when we know that the idea is false?

The seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) rejected Hobbes’ theory of the state. In his final work, the Political Treatise, Spinoza outlines a theory of the state that doesn’t require us to posit a social contract. No such contract had been signed in the Mennonite and Anabaptist communities that Spinoza admired, yet the members of these communities were more than happy to make sacrifices and collaborate for the common good.

The problem with Hobbes’ theory, Spinoza decided, was that Hobbes had misrepresented the nature of the multitude.

What if the multitude were not a fractious, unruly force that needed to be domesticated by law, but a collective entity that emerged in the process of collaboration and struggle – an entity geared towards common empowerment and mutual reward? Working-up this intuition, Spinoza developed a new theory of the multitude as a collective agent. Spinoza’s multitude is a complex entity comprised of the actions of numerous agents who, through unity of aspiration, forge a ‘common mind’ and sense of advantage. Combining their powers, members of a multitude forge a unity-in-disunity, a provisional consensus sustained through fraternity and goodwill.

The consensus that is created by a multitude does not require sanctioning by a sovereign. It is a living material consensus, which can withdrawn by the multitude at any time, thus holding open the possibility of insurrection against the unjust state. Spinoza argues that in democratic states, the sovereign will be bound by the will of the multitude, ‘which is led, as it were, by one mind’. He cautions that ‘[t]his unity of mind can only be achieved if the commonwealth pursues the interest of all’. No doubt part of the reason why we have such divided societies today is because states no longer pursue the interests of all. Our societies are full of struggling individuals. It is only at protest rallies that we see multitudes.

Spinoza’s multitude is different from a society or people. A multitude is a living event. A multitude can be as intimate as a group of friends or as sprawling as a transnational movement. It takes shape when a group of people grasp that together they could be more than just a team or network, but a collective power. Individuals gravitate towards the collaborative activity as a source of empowerment, and they participate for the hit or experience.

This, Spinoza argues, is how societies are born. It is an intrinsic law of social networks in the offline and online worlds.

Before them is the Lincoln Memorial, where Abraham Lincoln studies them from his giant chair. A man stands at the microphone, dwarfed by the statue behind him. The civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King is ready to deliver his speech.

The people have come to the US capitol by buses, trains, cars, and planes. Their hearts are full of hope, their minds full of memories of recent struggles. They have known discrimination, inequality, and injustice. Canvas the crowd and you’d hear thousands of stories of persecution, forced eviction, police brutality, murder and lynching. You’d hear the name Rosa Parks, who eight years before had refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. You’d hear stories of boycotts, sit-ins, angry demonstrations and non-violent protests.

The crowd simmers with anger and frustration. Will this day mark a grand step forward in the struggle for civil rights? Or is it the case, as Malcolm X says, that the organizers have compromised too much by allowing white folks to participate?

The crowd has come to Washington DC fired by the momentum of the Civil Rights movement, which is not yet a decade old. They reflect on this struggle and what it has achieved as Martin Luther King steps up to the microphone.

Dr King takes a deep breath, as if drawing back the string of a bow. He has never addressed a crowd of this size, in a moment of such importance. He looks down the Mall towards the Capitol Building. Yes, he thinks – this is my time.

He tenses the string and releases it. The arrow of vision flies into the future.

‘Four score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation’.

It is an epic start. Instead of invoking the present struggle, reinforcing in the minds of those gathered the memory of the movement that they are presently engaged in, King has them remember a different struggle: the struggle by Lincoln’s Republican Party to free the American slaves. In this gesture, King invites those gathered – black and white – to reflect on a common source of empowerment: the fact that one hundred years before, the United States granted freedom and equality to all its citizens. Yet as people’s breasts swell with patriotic pride, King brings them back to earth. His next line speaks of present day reality.

‘But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. … And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition’.

In the space of two paragraphs, King has projected for his audience a visionary sense of what it means to exist in the present. The people in the crowd have inherited the empowering promise of freedom, but today, this promise is denied them. How can they forge ahead? How can they overcome this ‘shameful condition’ – a condition that affects all of them as Americans?

Dr King speaks. The arrow of vision flies into the future, and the hearts and minds of those gathered in the Mall fly after it.

‘I have a dream’, King says – a dream that is ‘rooted in the American dream’.

‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!’

King’s speech is a brilliant example of what I call, ‘situated vision’. Situated vision involves reframing people’s perspective on, and expectations of, the present moment by taking a common source of empowerment and projecting it differently. King’s dream concerned the future of the Civil Rights movement, yet it was not inspired simply by the energy of that movement, it’s anger, resilience, its practical and symbolic achievements. King reached back one hundred years to find an important source of empowerment that everyone contributing to the movement could take pride in. The Emancipation Proclamation was a historical precedent that legitimated the struggle and that warranted an optimistic vision of its success. Seizing on this historical touchstone, King projected a bold vision of the future, offering an inspiring map for thought and action.

Martin Luther King transfigured the historical moment. It is not that he predicted the future. By drawing on a common memory, he projected a roadmap linking the past to the future, which would serve as a guide for those who continued the struggle, even after his death.

By refiguring elements of the past, visionary leaders make the present a place of opportunity. This is what King did in his speech at the National Mall. This is why he is remembered as one of the great leaders of history.

Philosophy is a broader field of study than metaphysics and epistemology. It includes moral and political philosophy, two very practical forms of inquiry. Anyone can do practical philosophy. You don’t need a degree. Most of us know a little practical philosophy that we’ve picked up here and there, often without realizing it.

Practical philosophy is philosophy in its ancient guise. It is concerned with ‘ethics’ and the good life. Socrates was a practical philosopher. The great philosophers of Greece and Rome were all deeply concerned with practical philosophy and the question of the good life, a life of happiness and flourishing.

Philosophy for Change is practical philosophy for times of change.

The challenges of the decades ahead present us with a different risk environment to the one we’ve become use to through the twentieth century. We are entering what James Martin calls the twenty first century canyon.

Philosophy for Change uses philosophical examples to examine the virtues, qualities, and skills required to flourish in times of change. The core virtues are resilience, agility, and vision. Resilience, agility, and vision are essential qualities for a robust and creative engagement with change. In Philosophy for Change seminars, I draw on philosophical insights to explore these qualities and how to achieve them. I also develop games and exercises to help participants get inside the ideas. As I explain in the course description on the CCE website:

‘Each philosopher contributes a different insight into the art of reflective change. The lessons are distilled into practical exercises that consolidate the ideas and show participants how to apply them in everyday contexts. Through practical exercises, participants learn how to cultivate the resilience to deal with change, the agility to explore different aspects of their person, and the vision to use change to forge empowering new perspectives on the future’.

Here is a group exercise that I use in my classes on leadership and innovation. The aim of the exercise is to show participants how collaboration has an intrinsic value when people are able to draw on personal powers and combine them to achieve common goals. I am developing new gaming activities to add to my classes.

If you’d like me to drop in and speak to your peeps, I’d love to hear from you. My email is tim [at] timrayner [dot] net.

————————————————————————-

- What do you see as the problem with the current politics of global warming?

Global warming not only presents us with a major ecological crisis but a global political crisis as well. It is clear from the failure of the Copenhagen talks that the international system of states is inadequate to enable a response to the challenge of global warming. Many people blame political leaders for the failure of the talks. But the problem is not the leaders (many of whom seem to be genuinely concerned to respond to global warming). The problem is the system of competing states, the inter-national system, which was born with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and which has come the define “the political” generally. The global capitalist system that we know today has grown up through competition and negotiation between states, facilitated by international law. But because the international system in premised on competition, it makes it difficult for coalitions of states to band together to address common problems. And that’s how things stand today.

Global warming calls for a new political ecology. This problem is like nothing the human race has faced before: it is global in scope and potentially cataclysmic in its effects. And the political system of competing states that we have at the moment prevents us from even responding to the problem. Our only hope is to transform the political. Fortunately, this is not as difficult as it sounds: the infrastructure that will enable this transformation is already in place and the process is underway. “Coalition of the Willing” is not so much a new idea for tackling global warming as it is an attempt to focus attention on how new internet technologies are already transforming the way that people all over the world understand themselves as empowered political agents. I think that in the next few years we will see global climate action networks start to play an increasingly powerful role in world affairs, as people come to appreciate the impotence of the international state system for tackling global warming. The way ahead lies in global grassroots action, coordinated through online platforms for participation. If we continue with politics as usual, there is no hope for the future.

- Why do you think that the web 2.0 could be a part of an ecologic war?

The internet is rapidly evolving from a space for sharing information to a space for collaboration. The open source movement is leading this development. Ten years ago, “open source” was a collaborative approach to designing software online. Today open source is becoming a generalized “culture” – an attitude and approach to designing innovative solutions to all sorts of problems, used in business, government, and the not-for-profit sector. Our idea in “Coalition of the Willing” is that an open source approach to the war on global warming could transform the nature of this struggle. Currently people all over the planet are waiting for their governments to take action on this problem. For people who care about the future of the planet, it is deeply frustrating to see how slowly the process is going. But we don’t need to wait for governments to fight this war themselves. By setting-up a series of online platforms for collaboration that enabled people to freely contribute to the grassroots struggle against global warming, we’d not only enable all sorts of new ideas, interventions, and initiatives, we’d facilitate the kind of global transformation in political consciousness that I was speaking of before. By working and creating together across borders, acting towards a common goal, people would come to realize a new form of political identity beyond the nation state. That, I think, is the ultimate contribution that web 2.0 could make to the ecological struggle.

- In Beyond Copenhagen, you wrote that Web 2.0 could provide people all over the world with the opportunity to creatively engage the problem. Do you really think that people will act?

Three things would be required in order for it to work. First, the web 2.0 sites would need to be state-of-the-art platforms that mixed cutting-edge collaborative and crowd-sourcing technologies with seriously cool design. If the sites are easy to use and fun to explore, people will want to contribute to them. Second, we’d need to organize some high-profile collaborative projects to kick-start the sites. If people saw that business, activist, and research and design teams were already using the sites to collaborate on new initiatives, they’d be more likely to pitch in or start projects of their own. Third, the sites would need to be properly promoted. “Coalition of the Willing” could be part of this. At this stage, the film is a think-piece and optimistic manifesto. But once the sites it describes come online, the film could be used as an advertisement.

- Do you think that it will change anything at the current apathy as you describe it? How could they make a difference?

The reason people feel apathetic is because they believe there is nothing that they can do to make a difference beyond consuming less, which isn’t much fun. The truth is that there are all kinds of things that people could do to make a difference – there is simply no forum that would enable people to pool their ideas, form groups, and get started. As for how people could make a difference: I think it is unnecessary to tell people what needs to be done, and probably counter-productive too. The world is full of talented, smart, and creative people who are perfectly able to dream-up actions and initiatives of their own. That’s the beauty of an open source approach to collaboration: you don’t need to organize people from “above”; you simply prepare the sites and spaces in which they can self-organize and let them do their thing.

Why do I think this would work? Because talented, smart, and creative people all over the world would see this as an exciting opportunity to actively engage the greatest problem of our time. In a word, it would be immensely empowering. People love the idea of saving the world. Here is a chance for people to actually participate in doing it. That is an empowering prospect

- What do you mean by “creatively engage”? Is this about imagination?

Imagination is important, but what we need right now is collaborative action. The three internet sites that we describe in “Coalition of the Willing” are aimed to enable people to participate in designing and actioning real solutions to the many problems thrown up by climate change. This approach is already being applied to humanitarian crises about the world (see this article on open source humanitarian design ). We could take the same approach to the climate crisis – indeed, we need to do this.

- What do you think people can do with the web 2.0?

At least three things. First, wikis enable people to compile databases of information. Wikipedia is an example of this. We argue in “Coalition of the Willing” that the next step is to create a Green Knowledge Trust, based on the Wikipedia model, that would enable people form all over the world to share practical know-how for low-carbon living, and also practical strategies for adaptation to climate change. Second, online collaboration software enables us to build platforms for participation, which innovators and experts from about the world could use to create new solutions to the problems of the future. We call this an Open Innovation Center. A team at MIT has already built a prototype of this sort, which has produced some exciting innovations. Third, social networking technology enables people to organize movements and initiatives on a global level. People are familiar with MySpace and Facebook, but these systems are only the beginning. Imagine a Facebook-styled social networking system connected by links and feeds to an Open Innovation Center and a Green Knowledge Trust. That would be an extremely exciting development that could really change the way that people about the world understood what was possible for them to do and achieve.

- Are individualism and consumerism reasons to the global warming?

Consumerism is a major part of the problem. Capitalist economies are premised on the idea of constant growth, and to achieve this they need to be constantly introducing new products for people to buy. These products are manufactured cheap in the developing world and shipped all over the planet, all at a considerable ecological cost. Why do people feel the need for all these new products? It is because people have become used to defining themselves in terms of the social status they derive from new products. Consumerism has become part of how people form their sense of individual identity. All of this needs to change, but it won’t be easy, and it won’t happen fast.

- You say (in Essay #3) that “The story of sorryeverybody.com illustrates how an online initiative can focus and coordinate the action and desire of a multitude of people in geographical space. It shows how, under the right conditions, a site, or series of sites, can trigger a human swarm that centers about an issue of common concern and functions as a locus of empowerment”. Don’t you think that these kinds of mobilizations are quite different from each other in their stakes?

People participate in swarm movements for all sorts of reasons, it’s true. But these movements don’t take shape without some common problem or concern that binds the swarm together. It’s only when people recognize that they share a problem or concern with others that they are inspired to action. Take the example of sorryeverybody.com. The people who contributed to that site were no doubt upset about the re-election of Bush for all sorts of reasons. The site took off, however, because it provided an opportunity for them to give expression to a common desire – to apologize, on behalf of the US, to the rest of the world. The opportunity to act together towards a common goal was inspiring and empowering for them. Swarm movements take shape when a mass of people see the opportunity of acting together towards a common goal.

- Could you explain swarm politics in a few words?

Swarm movements take shape when a mass of people see the opportunity of acting together towards a common goal. Individuals gravitate towards the collaborative activity as a source of empowerment, and they participate for the hit or experience.

- Do you live according to your desire to end the global warming?

I do my best, using green energy at home, public transport to get about, and off-setting my air miles with carbon credits when I fly. I still have a carbon footprint, but I hope to find new ways of reducing it as the years go by.

I think it is important for people concerned about the environment to avoid becoming ashamed and self-hating on account of the negative contribution they make to global warming. The unfortunate fact is that most of us don’t have the tools and means to live fully sustainable lifestyles – not yet at least. But people all over the world are coming up with new ideas and innovations that will make this possible in the future, that that gives us reason to be optimistic. Instead of beating ourselves up for what we can’t achieve at the moment, we should be focusing our energies on forward-thinking initiatives that will change the world. This is the kind of attitude that Simon Robson and I have taken to making “Coalition of the Willing.” Fortunately, we’re not alone in taking this attitude. I think that sites like WorldChanging represent the cutting edge of contemporary social change, which is being driven by an optimistic, creative attitude towards the future.

Change and innovation both call for unlearning. To think anything new, and to see what could be new in things, one needs to find a way of unlearning what one already knows. Without unlearning, there is no chance of achieving a break and new beginning in your way of doing things. Think of experiences you’ve had of working towards change in whatever respect, and reaching a moment in which you saw that change was actually possible – more than possible, inevitable. In the sense of inevitablity – the realization that nothing you can say or do will make a difference, things will change – there is a new beginning.

There is a world of learning to be done to prepare oneself for a new beginning. But to become a new beginning, and to enter wholeheartedly into the process of change, you need unlearning.

Martin Heidegger develops a theory of learning and unlearning in Being and Time (1927). Heidegger argues that human understanding is first and foremost a circumspective understanding of the environment of our practical concerns. Our ‘intentional’ understanding of objects, items, and things is grounded in a more basic mode of apprehension. We have a ‘pre-reflective’ understanding of the background or ‘horizon’ of our concerns. This shifting background informs our every cognition and act of judgement.

Heidegger’s account resonates. It gets at the way we feel immersed and absorbed in the world, embedded in a network of practices. To understand the meaning and significance of any problem or thing in the world, Heidegger claims, we must attune ourselves to a background of practices. We must enter into the world of the problem or thing, and treat it in ways that such-and-such a community would expect it to be treated. We must accustom ourselves to the common discourses and practices pertaining to this problem or thing to understand it as the problem or thing it is.

Extrapolating from Heidegger’s account, we see that to change our understanding of life or any part of it, we must transform the cognitive-existential background on the basis of which we understand things. We must unlearn how to come at life on the basis, and in light of, a certain background of understanding. We must be open to the possibility of grasping life on the basis of a radically different background. This is how new beginnings are possible.

The only real future is the impossible future. The future is always impossible until we unlearn what we know of the past. This is a task that must be repeated with each generation.

Do not underestimate the wonder in discovering a new sentiment or passion. Don’t you remember the first time you fell in love?

Do not underestimate the value of learning a new activity, or acquiring the ability to tackle a new task. These things can transform lives.

Do not underestimate the human need to be and belong. To say ‘I am…’ and have that mean something… It gives meaning to life.

What do these experiences have in common? They are all forms of empowerment.

No one knows what they are capable of thinking, feeling, doing, or being. No one knows the true extent of their powers. The adventure of life is to find out.

Tully locates the origins of extensive democracy in early modern struggles against power. Following Michel Foucault, he argues that, from the time of the European Reformation, increasing emphasis was placed – first in the military, then later in hospitals, schools, workhouses, and prisons – on the drilling and performance evaluation of individuals. Extensive democracy initially emerged as a response to these new ‘disciplinary’ modes of administration. People assembled in the streets, facing-off against pikes, swords, and crossbows, demanding a say in the manner in which they were governed. The Age of Revolutions was born. It rode in on the back of extensive movements, the expression of a popular desire to change the world.

This historical background helps resolve an apparent problem in Tully’s use of the term ‘democracy’. On the face of it, Tully’s use of this term is a misuse, insofar as it seems to equate democracy with popular protest. This is not how we ordinarily understand democracy today. However Tully, I would suggest, is not using the term ‘democracy’ in the sense in which we’d ordinarily understand it today. Tully understands ‘democracy’ in an early modern sense. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the term ‘democracy’ was commonly linked to popular protest. Before the rise of elected governments, the term ‘democracy’ was associated with rowdy peasant gatherings in streets and town squares, often prefiguring riot or revolt. For authorities of the day, ‘democracy’ was a ‘term of abuse’ (Tully, 2001, 44). Contemporary authorities take a similarly dismissive view of street level protest movements, often deploying riot police and water cannons to keep them in check, and to a large extent barring them from involvement in high-level discussions and policy development.

Tully outlines three main features of extensive democratic struggles:

1. Extensive struggles contest dominant social and political norms. Extensive struggles identify and articulate problematic social and political norms, casting practices that express these norms in a critical light, and encouraging agents to transform or abandon these modes of activity. As Tully puts it, the ‘disputational strategies’ of extensive struggles centrally involve questioning, contesting, and seeking to renegotiate hegemonic practices of governance and forms of life (Tully, 2001, 55). Importantly, extensive democrats situate themselves within the world of relations of power that they seek to transform. Instead of locating themselves outside established power-relations (as insurgents), they struggle to transform society and politics from within (Tully, 2001, 55).

2. Extensive struggles have a networked mode of organization. Extensive struggles are not orchestrated by a party or a political avant-garde. Such struggles emerge, instead, about common problems experienced by diverse agents. Here we see the network structure of extensive democracy: groups and individuals cohere with other groups and individuals on the basis of issues and concerns that they share in common. Relations between parties remain informal and, for the most part, provisional – this is what gives extensive struggles their flexibility and scope.

3. Extensive struggles create new forms of identity. While extensive struggles tend to be explictly directed at ‘the rules, norms, . . . or means of gaining consent in a practice of government’, they also contest ‘the pre-reflective yet non-mechanical modes of comportment – thought and action – that constitute the forms of subjectivity (identities and roles) of the participants . . .’ (Tully, 2001, 54). Extensive struggles create new forms of identity. Through the contestation of norms and the establishment of new social networks, extensive struggles facilitate the creation of new ways of being and new perspectives on the world. Extensive struggles are not only struggles to change the world – they are, for participants, vehicles for the transformation of the self. The task of progressive movements is not simply that of ‘reframing’ or reinterpreting questions of justice, but of opening up and legitimating a complex corporeal-affective space capable of supporting, not only new questions and concerns, but a new forms of personal identity that can greatly impacts on political and juridical debates.

Our familiarity with the rules and norms of electoral democracy makes it hard for us today to understand what is ‘democratic’ about extensive struggles. Yet there is nothing more equally distributed, nor reflective of political autonomy, than the power to resist power, or to determine, together with others, the powers that ought to be resisted. To the extent that extensive democratic struggles drive the reformation of values and norms in society, they are an original expression of democracy itself. In the collective contestation of norms, and in the agonistic resistance to power, we glimpse a primordial expression of the demos as such.