Just What Is Ontological Political Theory Meant to do? The Method and Practice of William E. Connolly

Introduction

The contemporary ‘methodological turn’ in political theory offers a unique opportunity to re-assess previously-made methodological moves that escaped sufficient critical scrutiny. The ontological turn, associated with the entrance of Continental, post-structuralist political thought into mainstream debates in the 1990s and 2000s, is ripe for such an analysis, having both escaped recent reflection and generated a series of continuing approaches. Often justified through quasi-methodological claims of the necessity of ontological reflection and the presence of unexamined, problematic claims within the dominant traditions of political thought, the ontological turn has rarely been subjected to lengthy analysis as to just what an attention to an ontological approach is meant to do for political theory. That is, what practices of political theorizing is it meant to enable? This oversight is glaring as it has now spawned other approaches (e.g. new materialism) for whom the value of ontology for political thought is very much a given.

Ontological political theory (OPT) can refer to a wide body of theories. Stephen White (2000) in his account of ‘weak ontology’ identified it with William Connolly, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler and George Kateb. The present terrain is more structured around the two major ‘schools’ of OPT that emerged in the interaction between ontological analysis and democratic theory: that of Connolly and Chantal Mouffe. The latter two, in contrast to the former, both explicitly justified their ontological approaches and the use of ontology generally and generated clusters of work informed by their approaches. For example, while Connolly is arguably at the centre of a current American brand of post-structuralist agonistic liberalism, Mouffe (with Ernesto Laclau) produced (largely in the 1990s and 2000s) a school of radical democracy centred in the United Kingdom. ¹ The relation between these groups can be understood in different ways. One common frame is through the ontologies they employ; Connolly’s ontology of abundance is thus opposed to Mouffe’s ontology of lack (Tonder and Thomassen, 2005). However, this distinction ignores how Connolly and Mouffe share a basic Heideggerian understanding of what ontology does that structures their methods, their understanding of politics (and the political) and their enactment of the critical-normative aims of political theory.

These connections make the present analysis of wide relevance to contemporary debates in methodology in political theory and beyond. This discussion hopes to initiate a more substantive reflection on the methods of OPT by, in the first instance, focusing primarily on Connolly, as opposed to Mouffe. This is for the simple reason that the former is much more of a methodologue; he has actively investigated and argued for his ontological method to a level of detail not found in Mouffe’s work. She will however inflect and enrich the argument at several relevant points. ² Nonetheless, this does mean this analysis is and should not be understood as a general account of OPT, but an examination of a major voice there that hopefully will lead to similar analyses elsewhere.

This article proceeds through several sections. First, it examines the ontological turn in political theory and its motivating problems: justification and pluralism. This section argues that it seeks a reflexive brand of critique and normative construction that reverts to the level of ontology in order to dwell within these problems. It also suggests the possibility of a methodological tension within this structure. Second, this analysis turns to Connolly’s ontological method, focusing on its development from interpretivism, to Heideggerian ontology, to new materialism. It argues that the turn from interpretivism to ontology in Connolly’s work involves the introduction of two key arguments, the ontological contingency thesis (OCT) and contestability mechanism (CM). Finally, it connects these to the major criticisms of Connolly’s ontology, illustrating how it reconciles their contrasting accounts. In the third and final section, this analysis critically assesses this method and its two main parts. It argues that the OCT and CM are in tension with each other in a manner that obscures the status of the theory he offers, and undermines his claims as to the critical and normative significance of ontological political thought. Through an examination of Richard Rorty’s critique of ontology, it raises several concerns around the impact of ontological claims on pluralistic political theory. In the process, it also clarifies several recent criticisms of Connolly’s politics by locating those flaws in his ontological method. Together, these various arguments raise important concerns around whether there is a coherent project and set of purposes within Connolly’s method for contemporary political theory.

The Ontological Turn in Political Theory

OPTs occupy the space between mainstream liberal-democratic theory, and post-structuralist critical social theory. Like post-war liberal political thought, they are rooted in a concern with political pluralism. This is the problem of organizing democratic engagement across substantive cultural-political differences where fundamental values, norms and modes of speaking are not shared. It is a problem of power in relation to the goals of equality and popular sovereignty in the Western liberal-democratic tradition (Moon, 2004). OPTs also are rooted in the problem of justification, which has concerned much of critical social theory. This problem stems from the critique of foundationalism that absorbed theoretical discussions in the humanities and social sciences in the latter half of the 20th century. Often articulated in different terms (e.g. as metaphysics/grounds/ presence), these critiques highlight a methodological problem of justification in the realm of socio-political criticism. How do we justify the explicit normative claims and implicit normative assumptions that guide socio-political criticism and reconstruction (Cooke, 2006: 1–8)? These two problems, political and methodological, structure OPT’s critical and normative endeavours, placing it in equal conversation with two projects: the post-foundationalism of ‘the social constructivist turn’; and, the imperative to inclusivism within liberal-democratic theory.

OPT is thus defined by a complex mixing of the critical and the normative from within the conditions of the problems of justification and pluralism. This has resulted in several broad imperatives. First, OPTs are anti-authoritarian, both epistemically and ethically. They cannot establish themselves as the top-rung of a ladder of either epistemic access or ethical value. Interestingly, this constraint crosses the major division in this literature between context-dependent and context-independent approaches. Second, OPTs are generally committed to reflexivity. They reject any assumptions of a neutral perspective outside history and particularity, and recognize the contestability of the theorist’s perspective. Consequently, they don’t seek more true or rational models of social criticism or inter-normative engagement, but more reflexive forms of political theorizing and practical interaction. These include reciprocal logics of interaction, exchange and learning which can increase the responsiveness of dialogical partners. They are thus part of what James Tully has termed the ‘dialogical turn’ (Tully, 2004).

While other critical social theories also pursue anti-authoritarianism and reflexivity, OPT is distinctive in its recourse to ontological forms of analysis. ³ The key difference is OPT’s attempt to use specifically ontological reflection to enable reflexive, non-authoritarian forms of critical analysis and normative prescription. For OPTs, ontology is both fundamental and contestable, both unavoidable and ungrounded. This paradox necessitates a twofold approach. OPTs attempt what Connolly calls a ‘double-entry orientation’ that both critically uncovers covert (and problematic) ontological assumptions within the practices and norms of contemporary liberal-democratic life (and their pernicious effects), that is, its critical task, and reconstructs those norms informed by alternative ontological figurations they argue have validity, that is, its normative task (Connolly, 2004, 2008: chap. 3). Thus, OPTs call for a deep engagement with contingency, that mixes assessments of current assumptions with alternative projections of ontologically-informed norms (Marchart, 2007: 31–32). This does not produce neutral norms, whether as a common ‘political’ conception or as a reflection of universal structures of validity within language-use. Rather:

[t]he fundamental conceptualizations such an ontology provides can, at most, prefigure practical insight or judgment, in the sense of providing broad cognitive and affective orientation. Practice draws sustenance from an ontology in the sense of both a reflective bearing upon possibilities for action and a mobilizing of motivational force (White, 2000: 11).

While ontological political thought rejects the project of making political forms flow from ontological analyses, it is concerned to make positive normative claims based on its ontologies.

This emphasis on normative construction links ontological approaches with a general desire in contemporary political theory to achieve ‘normativity without foundations’; to make political claims without reliance upon contentious philosophical foundations; to be critical and prescriptive without absolute grounds. This project spans Rawlsian ‘political’ liberalism, Habermasian discourse-ethics and Continental post-foundationalism. However, while this framing illuminates considerable crossover, specific differences remain in how OPTs (along with post-foundationalism) pursue normativity. To balance anti-authoritarianism and normative affirmation, they understand all claims as contestable. However, contestability is not merely stated but integrated into their ontologies themselves. Ontological (i.e. necessary) pluralism structures their analyses and norms. Contestability must ‘in some sense fold back upon itself, disrupting its own smooth constitution of a unity. In a way, its contestability will thus be enacted rather than just announced’ (White, 2000: 8). OPT resorts to the level of ontological analysis in order to integrate contestability into its presuppositions. Such a level subsists below conscious dialogue, conditioning our interactions, requiring a specialized form of theoretical access.

This raises a potential weakness that will manifest in Connolly in this account. OPTs, by making norms flow from ontological assumptions, risk establishing themselves in a relation of authority with their interlocutors through an implicit methodological claim of privileged access. By resorting to an external theoretical condition, they can assume a natural order to reasons with ontology/affect/sensibility/faith at the top and argument/dialogue/reasons at the bottom. As others have observed, when ontology/contingency are necessary, say in the priority of a distinct ontological realm of politics, political theorizing risks becoming a ‘form of political ontology as prima philosophia’ (Marchart, 2007: 166) and the original reflexivity for inter-normative engagement is lost. In this manner, ontological normativity can become rigid and deterministic.

Connolly’s Methodological Development

This section begins to illustrate at least one way this weakness manifests within a OPT. It does this by illuminating the development of Connolly’s ontological method. It treats him as an illustrative figure of OPT for several reasons. First and principally, the depth of his reflections on the use of ontology is unmatched in other thinkers. Connolly is a methodologue who has not only engaged in in-depth methodological discussion of ontology but has also compared his approach with others. Specifically, in the development of his work Connolly’s turn to ontology is situated in an ongoing discussion of the dominant methodological frameworks in the political sciences, with a particular concern to how emerging challenges (e.g. interpretivist, social constructionist, communitarian, liberal, etc.) require radically rethinking our descriptive and normative capacities. Second, the growing role of ontology in his work is particularly illustrative of both the reasons given to employ ontology, and the problematic tendencies of an ontology-centred approach. Third, Connolly is at the centre of debates that go beyond OPT and agonism. There was a surge of interest in his work following the mainstream debates on ontology confirming this (Campbell and Schoolman, 2008; Connolly Symposium, 2008; Finlayson, 2010). As a result, he is a privileged analytical object to consider the potential strengths and pitfalls of ontology. ⁴

Ontological Tensions: Connolly’s Two Problems

With this view of the development, motivation, method and criticism of Connolly’s ontological approach, this section assesses these moves. It examines the consequences for the analytic and normative capacities of his theory, arguing that the ‘double-entry’ structure, coupled with the OCT and CM, mean that Connolly’s framework is simultaneously too strong and too weak. This develops the existing criticism around Connolly’s ontological method: there is a continual tension between strong ontological and weak contestable claims in his work that obscures the model of political theory he is offering. The underlying conditions of this tension are found in the imbalance between the OCT, as an ontological thesis, and the resulting CM as an ethical norm. Connolly’s separation and pairing of these two creates a disjuncture between the two main aspects of his theory that undermines the coherence of the model he offers to political thought. This section examines this tension in Connolly’s work and its consequences in his political theory. To do so, it both turns to several compelling criticisms of that politics, connecting them to their roots in his ontological method, as well as to the pragmatic critique of ontology from the work of Richard Rorty. All of this illustrates how ontology is problematic for the reflexive justification Connolly attempts.

The OCT is the central claim motivating Connolly’s ontological method. Human knowledge, and the social and political systems that govern our interactions, all require us to determine and thus limit being, in order to speak and act in concert. For Connolly, it is the human condition that we must limit ourselves and our world, even as they resist that limitation in a more primary dynamic of becoming, complexity, fragility and pluralism that continually erupts. ‘Under these conditions, each worthy design [intellectual, social, political] we enact will subjugate some characteristics while releasing others, create new resistances while dissolving previous ones, and engender new contingencies while taming old ones’ (Connolly, 1993b: 132). The language here is important. Social, political and intellectual life for Connolly occurs ‘under these conditions’ of contingency (later: pluralism, becoming, fragility, complexity). It is in this sense that contingency creates resistances, disruptions and other disturbances within a unity or settled state of affairs. On a strong reading, this could lead some to charge Connolly with an anthropomorphism: of treating reality broadly understood as something with intention and agency. It not only lacks susceptibility to human intentions but actively resists them. However, even on a weaker reading (which I assume here) this is a problematic claim as it seems to create a hierarchy of conditions with ontological contingency at the top, affecting other entities, and human socio-political life at the bottom, being affected.

This tendency to the priority of ontology in Connolly’s method can be illuminated through a central distinction he shares with other ontological approaches. Connolly is linked by his Heideggarian assumptions to what Oliver Marchart has called a post-foundational ‘Heiddegarianism of the Left’ (Marchart, 2007: chap. 1). Like Connolly, post-foundationalists grapple with the necessity and contingency of foundations in political philosophy. Foundations cannot simply be negated; determination as limitation and the necessity of contingency entail that our thinking will always fall short of full presence and clarity, while not being able to pursue any other goal. This ‘quasi-transcendental’ move depends upon Heidegger’s notion of ontological difference, a distinction between the everyday ontic world of beings, and ontological Being which determines the former through the structure of determination as limitation.

Importantly, for both Connolly and post-foundationalists, ontological difference highlights the necessity of distinguishing between politics and the political in socio-political theorizing. This distinction has traditionally been ignored in political theory, as part of the minimalism which excluded ontology as irrelevant to socio-political discussion. However, it is central to many agonist perspectives, and is strongly associated with the work of Chantal Mouffe. Like Connolly’s use of ontology, the distinction between politics and the political is not solely a point about language or the social, but a claim about reality. Politics is the ontic realm of everyday political practice and institutions. That is, it is the current determination of the political in structures, institutions and discourse. The political concerns ‘the essence of politics’, its necessary character. Much like Heidegger’s characterization of Being, as both concealing and unconcealing, the political is the constitutive dimension of political life that structures it through a fundamental limitation. For Mouffe, it ‘concerns the very way in which society is instituted’ through ‘the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies’. Politics is always a limitation of this underlying dimension, a particular way to order and organize ‘conflictuality’ in order to domesticate it (Mouffe, 2005: 9).

The fundamental conflictuality of the political sits alongside Mouffe’s analysis, in her work with Ernesto Laclau, of the ontological category of ‘discourse’ and the conditions it places on linguistic claims about the world. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, Saussure’s understanding of linguistic structure and Derrida’s argument for différence as the condition of impossibility of full presence in language, Mouffe and Laclau offer an understanding of the pluralistic nature of language rooted in an account that meaning and use always exceed any attempt to lock particular uses of language into determinate meanings. This leads to one of the most revealing concepts in her use of ontology, the notion of a ‘constitutive outside’. This idea denotes an external (ontological) condition on both language use and political life which means any attempt to achieve full meaning, identity or legitimacy/consensus through language-use will always be disrupted by an external element that is excluded. The constitutive outside is a pluralistic claim that there is always much more and that this more is constitutive of the everyday determined reality. It stems both from the antagonistic reading of the political and the pluralistic reading of language (Mouffe and Laclau, 1990: 103–105).

The language of constitution reveals the particularly problematic nature of ontological accounts of politics. Specifically, it reveals that ontology has a tendency to assume its own priority, creating a hierarchy of entities with ontological ones at the top, and everyday institutions, actors and events at the bottom. Once its sense is distinguished from the usual physical meaning (e.g. where buildings are constituted by various materials), there is no clear sense in which language or politics are constituted by pluralism/antagonism. Does this entail that these dynamics are more determinative of their respective objects than other attributes we might ascribe them? What kind of priority is being argued for pluralism/antagonism over say the agreement-seeking aspects of language or the cooperative aspects of politics and how is it known? The tangible sense this claim has is that, as language-users and political actors, we couldn’t get very far if we didn’t admit that meanings change in language and politics always contains the possibility of descent into conflict and/or violence. However, this is simply the pragmatic claim of fallibility, that our ideals of transmitting meaning and overcoming antagonism are never predetermined to be successful, which is why language use and politics will continue without end. For this reason, Richard Rorty argued that the claim that something constitutes something else (i.e. that it is more essential to it than any other aspect) is as empty, as ‘drawing a line around a vacant place in the middle of the web of words, and then claiming that there is something there rather than nothing’ (Rorty, 1982: xxxvi). It is a rhetorical sleight-of-hand to argue that our favourite things have metaphysical priority over all other aspects and all the ways they could be articulated. This is because the idea of constitution, or of essence, assumes an inaccessible (and unconfirmable) and hierarchical condition that is posited as outside of and determinative of this everyday world. Such hierarchies always precipitate the claim that these structural features require a distinct method of study, entail a distinct object of enquiry and require a distinct discipline of enquirers.

Rorty’s work on ontology is especially useful for developing this line of criticism. For him, ontological explanations of social life always fall into a claim of privileged access: that there is some method with a unique ability to understand and articulate the world. Whether it is Kantian categories, Platonic forms or contingent resistance, whenever you posit governing entities removed from everyday experience that condition other, available entities, you create two theoretical problems. First, you create a hierarchy of conditions with those on the top, seemingly immutable, and those on the bottom, subject to change and development. Second, you create a self-referential problem of explaining your theoretical access to those immutable conditions:

all unexplained explainers, are in the same situation as a transcendent Deity. If we are entitled to believe in them without relating them to something which conditions their existence or knowability or describability, then we have falsified our initial claim that availability requires being related by something other than the relata themselves. We have opened up the question of why we ever thought that there was a problem about availability in the first place. We have thereby questioned the need for philosophy, insofar as philosophy is thought of as the study of conditions of availability (Rorty, 1991: 54).

For Rorty, theoretical forms of reflection that necessitate, rather than just argue for the usefulness of, ontology assume that ‘ontology precedes cultural politics’, that reality trumps cultural practice in determining what language a community uses and what objects they discuss through this vocabulary (Rorty, 2007: 3–5). In opposition, he follows Robert Brandom in arguing that the only non-hierarchical way to understand the presence of authority in language is as the practice of certain groups treating certain types of claims as authoritative. As a result, he argues for the ‘ontological priority of the social’. He is concerned not with disproving the existence of ontological conditions but with arguing for the priority of social and cultural categories over ontological ones in social practices. By referring to the presence of an authority (God, empirical reality, contingency, etc.), ontology attempts to take a privileged stance it has no real basis for. ‘The reason why quarrels among metaphysicians about the nature of Reality seem so ludicrous is that each of them feels free to pick a few of her favorite things and to claim ontological privilege for them’ (Rorty, 2007: 106). In social and political theory, for Rorty, we need to remove all external forms of normative and explanatory authority by dropping the assumption that vocabularies like ontology, epistemology and metaphysics precede the social practices of claiming and giving authority to sets of linguistic claims. ¹⁶

The Rortian critique of ontology is especially powerful because Connolly takes this ontology to have normative force. Despite any caveat Connolly can make to contestability, the impetus within his theory to open social and political systems to articulations (whether natural or social) of resistance stems from the claim that these emerge out of something beneath and more primary than the existing socio-political system. Rather than rejecting the whole transcendental mechanism of external criteria, as Rorty does, Connolly ‘naturalizes the transcendental’ (Howarth, 2010: 27). External normative and explanatory authority remains in this model; it is just radically immanent to the world in a series of dynamics (e.g. self-organizing processes, systems in disequilibrium, etc.) that Connolly identifies and then applies back onto sociopolitical questions. The OCT injects a basic normative commitment into Connolly’s work that motivates his critical account of contemporary politics, and serves as the basis of his model of negotiating pluralism. The necessity of contingency as a structure of the limitation of Being through articulation leads to a basic normative commitment to the pluralism that always exceeds any current determination, linguistic or material. This means that Connolly places political theory under a general ‘responsibility to otherness’ that normatively values the alternative potentialities of current forms over their present manifestation (White, 1991: 20–27). This, as a result, leads to a consequent devaluation of the situated present and whatever social forms we currently employ, solely on the basis of the ontological possibility of them being-otherwise.

This tendency to devalue the present is most dramatically revealed in his ontological reading of Foucault on freedom, where he attempted to provide a consequent ethical sensibility for contemporary democratic politics. For Connolly, Foucault’s genealogies ‘support an ontological thesis with political implications’ (Connolly, 1985: 365). Specifically, Foucault claims that discourse, linguistic practice with its inevitable norms and exclusions, is ‘a violence we do to things’ (Connolly, 1985: 368). Foucault’s accounts of various social practices intend to incite the experience of discord and pull us out of established frames of meaning and practice. The motivation behind this is ontological; ‘every such settlement [social order] involves imposition even while it may enable life to be in particular ways’. The problem is in where this logic leads. If the norms of social life are always a sedimentation of a more primary, constitutive flux, then every set of norms is imposed and one can legitimately assume that every set of norms must be resisted. ‘Freedom, in this perspective, is not reducible to the freedom of subjects; it is at least partly the release of that which does not fit into the moulds of subjectivity and normalization’ (Connolly, 1985: 371). As above, otherness, as an undifferentiated bloc, is normatively prioritized over the present in an unreflective and highly non-specific way as bearing some sort of authority on the present. Thus, the type of hierarchy established within an ontological account of politics violates the very pluralism and anti-authoritarianism it seeks by determining the pluralistic conditions of political life and then drawing norms out from that very process which have a claim to be situated in ‘how the world really is’, and thus have an authenticity based in their constitutive nature from which to make normative claims. ¹⁷

This develops one of the most challenging criticisms of Connolly’s politics of ethos made in recent years. Inder Marwah and Alex Livingston have both expressed concerns about Connolly’s affective politics of ethos (Livingston, 2012; Marwah, 2015). By levelling rational reasoning and visceral affect, Connolly politicizes ethos in a way that pushes the boundaries of democratic legitimacy. In effect, in responding to what Connolly sees as a manipulative politics of affect on the Right, which encourages politics of resentment, he supports an equally manipulative politics of generosity. For both Marwah and Livingston, the issue is that he responds to a covert politics with another covert politics, just because he reduces political behaviour to affective conditions that exist below the conscious level of citizenship. For Livingston, this produces just the sort of tension I identify in Connolly’s ontology, at the political level:

Torn between the adversarial and manipulative politics of war machines on one side and an ethically sensitive negotiation that seeks understandings and mutual respect on the other, Connolly’s recipe for a democratic reinvigoration of the left oscillates back and forth between a worrisome politics that would subvert popular reflection and a dialogical art that would provoke it (Livingston, 2012: 289).

Connolly is implicitly aware of ontology’s tendency to colonize his critical and normative accounts. Thus, his second methodological move imposes the CM. The role of this mechanism is especially clear in his later methodological discussions that extend the double-entry orientation. For him, every ontology, what he calls an ‘existential faith’, is not only assumed by our beliefs and enquiries, but layered into our affective dispositions, habits and institutional priorities. They are embodied, lived and structured in the materiality of our socio-political lives. Consequently, these existential faiths have deep connections to the methods of enquiry and political problems identified in any approach (Connolly, 2004, 2008: chap. 3). The continued hierarchical structure is important. The CM relativizes, attempting to save ontology from authoritarianism, while still claiming that each framework’s ontological assumptions are determinative of its methods, problems and politics. That is, it assumes a hierarchy of reasons with ontology at the top and the others flowing from it.

As a result, Connolly takes the CM one step further. For him, the connections between method, problem and faith cannot be schematized, as there is no ‘general formula’ for how they are connected. He rejects the idea of a method of adjudicating between such competing frameworks as this assumes a super-problematic capable of resolving inter-methodological disputes (Connolly, 2004: 338–339). However, this raises a problem around inter-methodological relations. In the absence of such neutral arbitration, how are we to speak to one another across ontological, methodological and political difference? This goes to the question of how political theory in general can productively engage with OPT and its claims. Similarly, it has important consequences for engagement across cultural-political difference in contemporary democracy. Connolly’s answer resembles his noted model of agonistic democracy: inter-methodological engagement should be governed by an ethos of engagement:

The first thing is to articulate comparatively the problematic you support with as much energy and skill as you can, pressing others to take it seriously as a possibility to respect . . . The second thing is to come to terms publicly with the persistent element of contestability in the eyes of others of the faith infusing your problematic (Connolly, 2008: 90).

Beyond the incredible broadness of such a framework for engagement, which Connolly gives few further details about, this ethos places all the work of normative engagement on self-examination and declarations of our methods, problems and faiths (i.e. ontologies) that motivate us. Thus, it requires us to examine our often hidden ontological assumptions, connect them to our approach to politics and understand how this raises and excludes certain political problems. As such, all the weight of this model is placed on ontological examination and articulation as the main resource for, and condition of, making normative claims across significant differences.

As a growing list of scholars have argued, this presents a significantly reduced task for political theory that potentially compromises any disciplinary claim to distinct approaches or tasks different from any socio-cultural production. After White’s first account of weak ontology, Elizabeth Wingrove wondered whether there wasn’t a dangerous move towards theology in ontological frameworks. The injection of acknowledged faith-based judgements into political theory, in her view, stands under an ambiguity in who exactly is doing this affirming. While it may be quite right and positive for political theorists to justify political actors making various sorts of ontological claims in the ebb and flow of politics, especially in terms of how those have been delegitimized classically in liberal theory, it is quite different for the task of political theory to be ontological articulation (Wingrove, 2005: 88–90). Similarly, Colin Koopman has wondered if Connolly’s use of James’ pragmatism to justify ontological analysis misses the point of a key distinction James makes between acts of judgement and the work of critique. The former is key to the everyday life of political actors who must make controversial judgements, declare them and act. However, the latter, where theorists attempt to offer new concepts, descriptions and possibilities for political life is the second-order task before the discipline of political theory (Koopman, submitted). The point is not that there is any hierarchy of legitimacy between these two activities but that they are focused on different ends with different resources (at least partially). Ontology as a vocabulary for articulating controversial claims about the broad nature of reality may not, on this view, be an appropriate forum for political theorists to do the work of critical and normative innovation.

Conclusion

These tendencies to overly strong ontology and too weak contestability within Connolly’s ontological method raise serious questions about the role of ontology in political theory. On this account, there is a persistent tension in Connolly’s method between the OCT and the CM. The former frames contingency as an ordering condition on socio-political life, re-creating a hierarchy to reasons with ontology at the top. The latter, in contrast, insists this is simply a contestable judgement, a faith like any other and all political theories, potentially undermining the idea of any task before that literature. This tension leads to, at the very least, a real unclarity around the status and use of Connolly’s method and the role he lays out for political theory. While there is great nuance behind his project and method, and many of his analyses of other theories and problems are highly insightful, this article has argued that this tension raises important questions for the contemporary methodological turn in political theory. There are of course other ontological approaches that require similar concern and assessment, as they construct and enact their methods within different terms.

My sense here is that the problem with Connolly’s method is one of indeterminacy. That the median space he carves out for political thinking is normatively suggestive without being normatively productive. In the context of deep disagreement (both in political theory and democratic politics), which will extend to the presence and use of speaking ‘ontology’ itself, it frames differences in highly abstract and impenetrable terms as metaphysical differences. This does not provide resources for reflective engagement or the construction of possible dialogue that could lead either to productive disagreement or new areas of agreement. In these ways, Connolly’s theory ends up being deeply in tension with itself, either too strong in its claims about contingency or too weak in its self-understanding of the status of its claims. Importantly, this leaves us without a good reason to speak ontologese.