Between Consenting Peoples: Political Community and the Meaning of Consent (review)

This book comprises nine chapters by eminent scholars of political theory and addresses the meaning of consent to political or state authority and legitimacy. The authors offer a kind of conversation in which the subject is examined from different perspectives. Consent is a largely fictive device deployed to frame the discursive terrain on which we consider the state, the government, sovereignty, the citizen, authority, dissent, and revolution. Moreover, consent theories are overwhelmingly Western in conception and execution. Yet there is little evidence of any original moment of consent by populations to authorities, especially by indigenous peoples in settler states.

Consent theories are “profoundly ambiguous” (pp. 20–24). Yet in this book, Jeremy Webber suggests that the idea of consent is attractive because of its conflation with the notion of collective agreement, which implies engaged, democratic, and fairly homogeneous citizens. Margaret Moore usefully distinguishes between culturalist arguments about the incompatibility of Aboriginal and Western notions of consent and the historical records that demonstrate colonial oppression rather than intercultural misunderstandings (p. 146); in her view, “injustices delegitimate a state” (p. 155). David Dyzenhaus explores consent, legitimacy, and state authority, yet concludes that a human right of resistance may also exist, complicated by the sovereign’s power and ability to punish resistance. Andrée Boisselle considers consent in the form of a social contract as a myth that constructs “the binding character of law” (p. 207); she concludes that law and politics emerge relationally and that any lack of consensual relationship or mutual comprehension results in coercion.

Chapters by Val Napoleon and Janna Promislow introduce indigenous practices into the consent discussion. Napoleon considers how Gitksan customary legal processes enable the management of political consent and dissent through “a dialogic construct of consent” (p. 46). In contradistinction to the myth of Hobbes, “Gitksan customary law does not derive from a centralized authority but rather is generated by interactions and experiences over time” (p. 60). In other words, it is embodied in ceremonies, traditions, and enactments that are both arenas and processes of public engagement in conflict resolution, decision making, and consent. Promislow frames consent between French and English adventurers and mercantilists and Aboriginal (primarily Mushkegowek) communities in the York Factory area on Hudson Bay as contingent on power relations and on interpretation, both of which shift and neither of which is mutually agreed upon, either historically or now.

Duncan Ivison critiques the notion of consent in conditions of oppressive power relations and suggests that contestability, not consent, is the standard for political legitimacy (p. 189). Rights are part of the means of contestation; Aboriginal rights are precisely this kind of contestation in conditions of oppression. Yet rights talk can entrench or depoliticize oppressive power relations (p. 197) if it is not attentive to context. In his chapter, Tim Rowse queries the objects of consent and suggests distinct and contradictory assumptions about citizenship, rights, consent, and legitimacy emerge in the political claims of Torres Strait Islanders and the Australian government. Rowse suggests that offering limited welfare-state benefits while denying Aboriginal rights “has been a significant part of Australia’s solicitation of indigenous consent” (p. 130).

James Tully concludes the collection by examining the possibility of specific practices for managing contemporary consent and dissent between Western and indigenous peoples through developing “relationships of community” (p. 233). Tully suggests that while hegemony frames historic and contemporary treaty making, treaties created “a nation-to-nation federal-like relationship . . . of shared sovereignty . . . based on consent and open to renegotiation” (p. 237). This renegotiation is always contained by the elements predetermined by those theorists and their political offspring, producing a hegemonic “discursive and institutional matrix” (p. 241) in which the negotiations are captured and the indigenous subordinated.

Scholars of Hobbes, Burke, Hume, Locke, Mill, and others will appreciate the depth of knowledge animating this book. Scholars of liberal-democratic politics will benefit from its presentation of the intellectual foundations of liberal democracy. Critical and postcolonial scholars will be intrigued...