William E. Connolly, American political scientist, theorist, and academic
William Eugene Connolly is an American political theorist known for his work on democracy, pluralism, capitalism and climate change. He is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His 1974 work The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award.Cornell University political theorist Alexander Livingston summarizes Connolly's work in the following way: "For fifty years, Connolly has pushed the boundaries of democratic theory to ever more complex, layered, and entangled visions of politics. From his early writings on ideology and social science, to his work on agonism and identity in the 1990s, to his most recent writings on capitalism and climate change, Connolly has warned against the dangers of rooting democratic theory in final foundations or fixed identities in favor of a pluralizing vision of democracy as the agnostic care for difference. The rhizome, not the root, is the better symbol for Connolly’s democratic imaginary ... While there can be no core idea uniting his corpus, pluralism is certainly crucially important within an assemblage of political concepts, including agonistic respective, critical generosity, tactics of the self, micropolitics, the visceral register, resonance machines, the capitalist axiomatic, and entangled humanism."