Books by William E . Connolly
My aspirations in this chapter are, first, to consider the adverse effects on Aboriginal peoples ... more My aspirations in this chapter are, first, to consider the adverse effects on Aboriginal peoples of the pursuit of the nation in liberal states; second, to undercut the claim that the liberal nation provides a necessary condi tion of civilisation and democracy; and, third, to sketch elements in an ethos of engagement that enables democratic governance, scrambles the nation and opens up new possibilities of negotiation and improvisation between minorities of several types.
Original e-works to spark new scholarship FORERUNNERS: IDEAS FIRST is a thought-in-process series... more Original e-works to spark new scholarship FORERUNNERS: IDEAS FIRST is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Papers by William E . Connolly
Critical Policy Studies, 2014
focus on ideas, it also seems like a problematic delimitation that has a ring of essentialism to ... more focus on ideas, it also seems like a problematic delimitation that has a ring of essentialism to it. A pure focus on ideas is normally eschewed by discursive institutionalists, since this tradition is particularly interested in how ideas are used by political actors. Put differently, can political ideas be studied without probing how they play out in actual policies and how that feeds back into the development of new ideas? Interestingly, it also seems difficult for the editors and contributors to live up to this division between ideas and practice. Indeed, the fourth and fifth lines of analysis seem quite attuned to corresponding practices of neoliberal ideas, since they focus on what actors attain from supporting neoliberalism and how institutional frameworks may serve to support it. The three other lines of analysis could likewise have benefitted from a clearer conceptualization of how they relate to the practice of using neoliberal ideas in policy-making. Second, in putting a strong emphasis on the continued resilience of neoliberalism, the volume – at least on a conceptual level but less so in the empirical chapters – seems impervious to the resilience of Keynesianism or more socially oriented approaches to economic governance. This is interesting considering that the understanding of ideas as heterogeneous and malleable promoted in the volume leaves room for the possibility that in historically specific constellations, both Keynesianism and neoliberalism may remain resilient, perhaps because actors are so pragmatic (and, at times, it seems, careless) in how they put together ideas from multiple paradigms in practicing the craft of policy-making. More conceptual clarity on what the resilience of non-neoliberal ideas tells us about the resilience of neoliberalism would have been an important contribution to understanding ideational change and stability. These reservations do not undermine the basic premises and arguments of the book’s analytical framework but rather attest to the fruitful exchanges that may grow from it. In sum, this volume promises to be a central building block for future discussions of how ideas develop following crises and how they come to impact on Western political economies.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2020
Class Race Corporate Power, 2014
This article argues for a political transformation and reorganization of the university so that i... more This article argues for a political transformation and reorganization of the university so that it is capable of challenging the "hierarchy of power in a neoliberal society." Faculty democracy, administrative accountability to faculty, and the education of students to become critical, thinking citizens would be a major part of this reorganization.
Foucault Studies, 2014
After presenting a critique of both negative and positive freedom this essay pursues the relation... more After presenting a critique of both negative and positive freedom this essay pursues the relation between creativity and freedom, drawing upon Foucault, Deleuze and Nietzsche to do so. Once you have understood Nietzsche’s reading of a culturally infused nest of drives in a self, the task becomes easier. A drive is not merely a force pushing forward; it is also a simple mode of perception and intention that pushes forward and enters into creative relations with other drives when activated by an event. You can also understand more sharply how the Foucauldian tactics of the self work. We can now carry this insight into the Deleuzian territory of micropolitics and collective action by reviewing his work on flashbacks and “the powers of the false.” If a flashback in film pulls us back to a bifurcation point where two paths were possible and one was taken, the powers of the false refer to the subliminal role the path not taken can play in the formation of creative action. As you purs...
A World of Becoming, 2010
Political Theory, 2001
The gentlemen. .. have endeavored by various ways and promises to draw him back from his evil way... more The gentlemen. .. have endeavored by various ways and promises to draw him back from his evil ways; and not being able to remedy him, but on the contrary, receiving every day more news about the horrible heresies he practiced. .. and the awful deeds he performed. .. they resolved that the said. .. be put to the ban and banished. .. as indeed they proclaim the following herem on him: "By the decree of the Angels and the word of the Saints we ban, cut off, curse and anathemize. .. with all the curses written in the Torah; Cursed be he by day and cursed by night. Cursed in his lying down and cursed in his waking up, cursed in his going forth and cursed in his coming in; and may the Lord not want his pardon, and may the Lord's wrath and zeal burn upon him." We warn that none may contact him orally or in writing, nor do him any favor, nor stay under the same roof with him, nor read any paper he made or wrote. 1 No, this is not a curse hurled against Jacques Derrida in The New York Review of Books. It is an official excommunication from Judaism delivered by the elders of the Ruling Council in Amsterdam on 27 July 1656 to the 24-year-old Baruch d'Espinoza. Baruch's parents had been Marrano Christians, those in Portugal and Spain who were first compelled to convert to Christianity and then subjected to inquisition over the depth of the conversion. Many Marranos fled to Holland, as did Baruch's parents, joining a synagogue in Amsterdam. But the young Baruch-as he was called before changing his name to Benedict after the curse-found himself unable to endorse 583
Political Research Quarterly, 2014
When you transcend the reductionism of both genocentrism and cultural theories that bracket human... more When you transcend the reductionism of both genocentrism and cultural theories that bracket human being from its species origins and biological character, a reciprocal movement between the findings of refined experience and biological research becomes available. Drawing upon recent work in dynamic theories of evolution that respect the human achievements of meaning, freedom, consciousness, and creativity, this essay explores how those findings can inform our understandings and practices of freedom, and vice versa. Along the way, it criticizes the critique of genocentrism pursued by Thomas Nagel, contending that it ignores “teleodynamism” in favor of teleological finalism.
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 1996
organize suffering into categories to help cope with it, but often these categories themselves co... more organize suffering into categories to help cope with it, but often these categories themselves conceal some forms of suffering, even contribute to them. This latter experience leads some to suspect that suffering is never entirely reducible to any determinate set of categories. To suffer is to bear, endure or undergo, to submit to something injurious, to become disoraanized. Suffering subsists on the underside of agency, mastery, wholeness, joy, and comfort. It is, therefore, ubiquitous. But there I go.., moving from the agony of suffering to a comforting reflection on it. Appropriating suffering to a reading of the human condition. For severe suffering exceeds every interpretation of it while persistently demanding interpretation. Without suffering, it is unlikely we would have much depth in our philosophies and religions. But with it, life is tough.., and miserable for many. Does the poly-cultural character of suffering reveal something about the human condition? And.how contestable and 3 culturally specific are the medical, psychological, religious, ethical, therapeutic, sociostructural, economic and political categories through which suffering is acknowledged and administered today? Is "sufferingn a porous universal, whose persistence as a cultural term reveals how conceptually discrete injuries, wounds, and agonies are experientially fungible, crossing and confounding the fragile boundaries we construct between them? Or is it a barren generality, seducing theorists into metaphysical explorations far removed from specific injuries in need of medical or moral or religious or political or therapeutic or military attention? Any response to this question draws upon one or more of the theoretical paradigms already noted. A political theorist might focus on power struggles between disparate professionals over the legitimate definition and treatment of suffering. An evangelist might minister instances that fit the Christian model. And a physician might medicate theorists and spiritualists burned out by the projects these faiths commend. Is the bottom line, then, that today people go to the doctor when they really need help? Perhaps. But they might pray after getting the treatment. Or file a malpractice suit. Or join a political movement to redesign the health care system. Sufferers are full of surprises. Among fieid contenders for primacy in the domain of suffering, ethical theory has pretty much dropped out of the running. The reason is clear, even if astonishing. Contemporary professional paradigms of ethics, represented fairly well by John
Contemporary Political Theory, 2010
How may one explain the vehemence, organization and effectiveness of the American right? How may ... more How may one explain the vehemence, organization and effectiveness of the American right? How may one explain the dominance of its ideas in public consciousness and the media, its success in appointing individuals to key institutional offices and its campaigns to vilify any opponents or activists on the left? Economic self-interest is insufficient to explain the sense of mission that is more of a vocation than a defence of vested interests. The conjunction of capitalism and Christianity may offer a possible explanation. William Connolly proposes an alternative political analysis of capitalism to the mechanism of the self-regulating market, the dominance of human agency or the effects of a mode of production: political forces resonate in the interstices between the natural world, institutions and individuals, and these resonances crystallize in an ethos or shared spirituality. Every institutional practice has an ethos of some sort embedded in its institutions, and a shared ethos can cut across divisions of identity based on race, class, gender, creed, education or income level. Then brands of capitalism, whether laissez-faire, fascist, social democratic or neo-liberal, may be distinguished by their ethos. Although they all share the axiomatic of the priority of private profit, a significant role for pricing mechanisms, the contract form of labour and the primacy of the commodity form, the ethos or spirituality impregnated into these practices is drawn from the intersections between market practices and religious institutions, from the habit-forming mechanisms of family, school and TV, and orientations to past and future expressed in underlying images of God, nature, culture and time. It finds expression in state policies, media life, movies, sermons, modes of advertising, consumption habits, and work and family life. Connolly characterizes the dominant contemporary American spirituality as the 'evangelical-capitalist' resonance machine. This is a spiritual disposition, an 'abstract will to dismiss other constituencies and disdain collective responsibility to the future', and it might be installed in any of the micro-dimensions of political life such as affect, emotion, habit or posture. It is not that the religious or the economic acts as a cause or determinant of the other, or that they are identified. Instead, there is a resonance between their respective sensibilities
Contemporary Political Theory, 2018
At least since Aristotle defined humans as uniquely 'political animals,' politics in the Western ... more At least since Aristotle defined humans as uniquely 'political animals,' politics in the Western tradition has largely been conceived as a distinctly human endeavor: a circumscribed realm insulated from non-human nature. The borders between the political and the natural were, like borders between states, always more porous than those who sought to police those borders imagined. But the impacts of homo sapiens' rapidly growing technological power are increasingly visible. So much so, in fact, that earth scientists now speak of the Anthropocene: the geological epoch in which humans have become a (if not the) dominant geological force. Conceiving of politics as separate from nature is an increasingly difficult (if not misguided or dangerous) enterprise. Hence the title-at first perhaps somewhat bewildering-of William Connolly's book. Facing the planetary means taking responsibility for the implications of the world that we are creating. The book resists easy summary. It does not advance an analytical argument step by step to a logical conclusion; it describes, or rather unveils a particular theoretical perspective. In the first four chapters, Connolly provides us with an impressive intellectual synthesis. Even if we restrict ourselves to political theory and philosophy, the breadth of thinkers that Connolly engages with here is dazzling: Nietzsche, Rousseau, Marx, and Deleuze, but also Hayek, Berlin, and Marcuse, among many others. And these diverse political theorists are put into conversations with numerous contemporary earth and biological scientists. In these engagements, Connolly positions himself against both natural scientific and socio-centric reductionism. Too much of a focus on biological determinism underestimates the plasticity of human nature and the impacts of society and culture on human thought and behavior. Social constructionism, conversely, underestimates the force that non-human nature exerts on us, even in the Anthropocene. In rejecting these determinisms, Connolly emphasizes freedom and agency, albeit a freedom that is 'both real and risky' (p. 67). Connolly's engagement with the biological sciences emphasizes 'teleo-searching processes
Contemporary Political Theory, 2018
Entangled humanism. Bumpy temporalities. Sociocentrism. Role experimentation. Politics of swarmin... more Entangled humanism. Bumpy temporalities. Sociocentrism. Role experimentation. Politics of swarming. A most timely book, Bill Connolly's Facing the Planetary buzzes with a swarm of innovative concepts, testing both the limits and the creative powers of contemporary political theory to address the fragility of the human condition in the Anthropocene. These concepts, Connolly shows, are carriers of power to shape and reshape collective identities, consolidate and trouble drives toward mastery over nature, and form and reform bodies and assemblages. Today, the decisive challenge of human viability not only reveals familiar human/nonhuman and mind/body dualisms as very difficult, even impossible, to sustain; it also requires a radical rethinking of the practice of political theorizing itself. This new practice should not be reduced merely to the goal of exposing the confines and silences built into the dominant Euro-American conceptual repertoires of political thought. The idea is to explore these limits-made more visible by stretching
Political Theory, 2005
The alliance in the United States today between cowboy capitalism and evangelical Christianity ca... more The alliance in the United States today between cowboy capitalism and evangelical Christianity cannot be understood sufficiently through the categories of efficient causality or ideological analysis. The constituencies fold similar spiritual dispositions into somewhat different ideologies and creeds. Each party then amplifies these dispositions in the other through the media politics of resonance. The ethos infusing the resonance machine is expressed without being articulated. The inability to grasp this political economy separate from the spiritualities infusing it may carry implications for the form a successful countermovement could assume.
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2008
During a very wet week in May 2007, the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)... more During a very wet week in May 2007, the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at the University of Nottingham hosted a week-long visit by Professors Jane Bennett and William E. Connolly of the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Professors Bennett and Connolly are among North America’s most distinguished contemporary political theorists and they were involved in an intensive programme of lectures, seminars and workshops throughout their brief stay in Nottingham. The final day of their visit was given over to a one-day conference on ‘Pluralism and Democracy: the “Radical Pluralism” of William E. Connolly’, sponsored by Blackwell and The British Journal of Politics & International Relations. Three pairs of papers were delivered around the themes of ‘Pluralism and Metaphysics’ (James Williams and Mark Wenman), ‘Pluralism and Hegemony’ (David Howarth and Gulshan Khan) and ‘Pluralism and Practice’ (David Owen and Saul Newman). As well as contributions from the floor, there was a substantial response from Connolly himself with which the meeting closed. All six papers plus Connolly’s commentary are published here. Taken together, they constitute a lively, instructive and diverse introduction to one of the most important and influential treatments of one of the key issues of contemporary political theory. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856x.2007.00312.x BJPIR: 2008 VOL 10, 139
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Books by William E . Connolly
Papers by William E . Connolly