William E. Connolly

Introduction

William Connolly has made important interventions in political theory over a period of four decades, and the past few years have seen a surge in recognition of his contribution. ¹ In line with other prominent figures such as Wendy Brown and Judith Butler, Connolly’s work is widely acknowledged as a leading example of a certain post-structuralist mode of theorising, at work within the Anglo-American academy. Indeed, those who are familiar with Connolly’s ideas will know the role that continental theorists—especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze—have played in the development of his thought, and more recently the uses he has made of advances in the natural sciences, for example in complexity theory, in the work of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Ilya Prigogine. With reference to these innovations, a consensus has emerged in recent discussions, that there is a basic discontinuity between Connolly’s “postmodern” theory of pluralism and the “old” pluralism of the generation of post-war political scientists. ² However, my sense is these evaluations distort Connolly’s contribution in important respects, and they also seriously misrepresent the work of the leading post-war pluralist writers, especially Robert Dahl, Charles Lindblom, David Truman and David Easton. Clearly, much is at stake in the appraisal of this seemingly unconventional thinker, and not just his own contribution but also the status and standing of the whole tradition of American pluralism. By way of contrast, in this essay I outline the congruity between Connolly’s ideas and earlier iterations of pluralism. I trace the essential continuities between Connolly and the leading post-war writers, and also his proximity to a tradition of pluralism that flourished in the early part of the twentieth century and was exemplified in the work of Arthur Bentley. Without loosing sight of the crucial impact of post-structuralism in the development of Connolly’s oeuvre, I make the case that Connolly’s work is best understood as the resumption and enhancement of a distinct canon of pluralism in American political thought.

Commentators have been keen to develop the idea of a paradigm shift between Connolly’s work and the earlier pluralists, because of the widely held view that post-war pluralism was a conservative doctrine, concerned with ensuring the stability of the American system of government in the context of the Cold War. This rendition of post-war pluralism has been consolidated in a series of debates reaching back to the 1960s, ³ and today this represents the common sense understanding of “conventional” pluralist theory. In Nietzschean terms, we could say that this portrayal has become naturalised, and we have forgotten that this is a product of a polemical construction. Connolly has of course played a significant part in the consolidation of this narrative. In his earliest writings, from the late 1960s, he was a prominent critic of Dahl and others, and when he started to develop his own pluralist theory, from the mid 1990s, he did not fully appreciated the sophistication of the post-war writers. Connolly’s critical appraisal of post-war pluralism has subsequently been reiterated in the current interpretations of his own work. However, it is high time to contest this consensus, and here I undertake a genealogy of American pluralism, which challenges these established readings. In so doing, I revisit some of the most important exchanges of the mid to late twentieth century, in an effort to overturn the received view of Dahl and others, and to show how they anticipate the major themes of Connolly’s iteration of pluralism. Moreover, by tracing the lineage back even further—to some of the most significant early interventions in American political science—it becomes clear that Connolly’s work represents a resumption of the dynamic spirit of pluralism that was articulated at two previous junctures in twentieth-century American political thought, and which share a common root in the pragmatist tradition and in the work of William James. In turn, this revaluation of the tradition in light of Connolly’s contribution enables pluralist thought - past and present - to be brought into a more productive discussion with other contemporary approaches, both in normative theory (where pluralism needs to be juxtaposed especially to liberal theories of justice and to deliberative democracy) but also in a critical dialogue with some of the core assumptions that underpin explanatory work in political science today.

The essay is divided into three sections. Section one examines normative claims for the value of pluralism, and I challenge the commonsense view that post-war pluralism was preoccupied with the ideal of stability. Indeed, a rereading of Dahl’s A Preface to Democratic Theory 1956 and Lindblom’s The Intelligence of Democracy 1965 shows that both theorists shared with the founding fathers an emphasis on the primary importance of pluralism as a necessary condition of freedom from tyranny. The basic ideal of post-war pluralism was to secure as far as possible the immanent self-coordination of the social system, so that groups remain free from external domination, and these are also the central ideals of Connolly’s theory of “agonistic respect” and “critical responsiveness,” which he has presented as the civic virtues appropriate to pluralism. Indeed, Connolly has shown how these ideals remain pertinent in the contemporary age of globalisation and the insurgency of religious fundamentalism. The second section evaluates post-war pluralism as an empirical doctrine and as an explanatory framework. I focus on two well-known objections. First, the emphasis on observable decision making meant that the post-war writers underestimated the constitutive exclusions of pluralism—what Connolly called in 1969 “the bias of pluralism”—and so they ignored the unarticulated or poorly articulated interests of marginalised groups. ⁴ Second, the pluralists were committed to the idea that pluralist bargaining tends necessarily towards a condition of “equilibrium,” where conflicts are cancelled out and stability reproduced. ⁵ When Connolly began to formulate his own account of pluralism in The Ethos of Pluralisation (1995), he insisted that because of these deficiencies the post-war writers could not account adequately for change—for demands that were simmering on the margins of American politics and which burst onto the mainstream agenda from the mid-1960s in the form of the new social movements. However, I show that these evaluations do not stand up to close scrutiny, and, in fact, the major post-war writers prefigured Connolly’s notions of “pluralisation” and the “politics of becoming” in crucial respects.

Furthermore, the congruity between Connolly and the post post-war writers on the question of the “politics of becoming” is not coincidental. This becomes clear in the third section, which considers the relationship between pluralism and metaphysics. The common point of reference for the post-war writers, and especially for Truman and Easton, was Bentley’s The Process of Government 1908, and here we see that Bentley derived his conception of process partly from James, but also from the then latest developments in the natural sciences, and especially Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The earliest iterations of pluralism in American political science were exemplified in Bentley, but also found expression in the ideas of other leading political scientists such as Harold Laski and Mary Follet. There is no mention of these early contributions in the recent discussions of Connolly’s work, and this is all the more remarkable because these theorists sought to develop the political implications of James’s The Pluralistic Universe (1909) in a manner which exactly parallels Connolly’s discussion of James in his Pluralism (2005). In so doing they developed a conception of the political process characterised by nonlinear systems and relations of emergent causality, of political identity as composed of a multiplicity of forces, and a post-Newtonian conception of time as “duration,” where past, present, and future coexist in unpredictable configurations. Once Bentley’s writings are dusted down and brought back into view, we see that Connolly’s work is best understood not as a qualitatively “new” form of pluralism, but rather as a consolidation of a discrete canon of pluralist theory in American political thought. Moreover, by looking again at the earlier iterations of pluralism, we not only gain an improved understanding both of Connolly and more generally of the American pluralist tradition, we also better position pluralist thought in relation to contending viewpoints in contemporary normative and explanatory theory. ⁶

Pluralism as Normative Theory

Post-war pluralism was shaped to a considerable extent by the behavioural revolution, and the pluralists were principally concerned with explaining the substantive operations of power in modern formally democratic systems. We will explore the limitations and the supposed exclusions of the pluralists’ explanatory framework in the following section. However, the pluralists’ aspiration to establish a strict analytical demarcation between explanatory work and the prescriptive evaluation of political systems did not preclude an explicit formulation of the normative significance of pluralism, and, in fact, Dahl insisted from the outset that normative enquiry was a crucial component of political analysis. Without normative analysis, we would have no criteria to evaluate existing systems of government, and so it is important to first draw out the normative ideal of post-war pluralism and to dispel the misconception that stability was the central value of post-war pluralism, as it has subsequently been deemed to be. ⁷ The question of the conditions of stability in modern democratic systems was a concern for post-war political scientists. This was perhaps unsurprising given the recent experience of the collapse of democracy in Weimar Germany, the rise of authoritarian governments across much of Europe, and developments at home such as McCarthyism. ⁸ Nevertheless, we start by considering the range of goods of pluralist democracy as they were explicitly formulated by Dahl and Lindblom, which reveals a much richer set of arguments, focused principally on the idea of pluralism as a necessary condition of self-government. Moreover, despite his explicit disavowal of “conventional” pluralism in the late 1960s, we see that the normative spirit of post-war pluralism was carried over unchanged into Connolly’s later writings. Not only does he take his central idioms from Dahl and Lindblom, Connolly shares with them a fidelity to the ideal of pluralism as possible means to the prevention of tyranny or domination.

In A Preface to Democratic Theory, Dahl traced the origins of pluralist democracy to the debates surrounding the ratification of the constitution and, of course, most importantly to the Federalist No. 10. ⁹ In this famous text, Madison outlined the values of the new constitution in terms of its ability to manage the effects of faction and to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.” ¹⁰ Dahl described this as the “central ethical goal of the Madisonian system.” ¹¹ Unlike later iterations of pluralism, Madison’s focus was primarily on the role of political institutions—the principle of federalism and a constitutional separation of powers—understood as a series of “intergovernmental checks” on the influence of officials, and essentially designed to ensure that power was not concentrated in the legislature. However, Dahl also stressed that Madison understood the importance of the “social checks and balances existing in [a modern] pluralistic society.” ¹² Against conventional wisdom at the time, the Federalists argued that throughout society “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” and that “a greater variety of parties and interests” are to be welcomed, because when an electorate is extended in size and “diverse in interests”—as Dahl put it—“a majority faction is less likely to exist, and if it does exist, it is less likely to act as a unity.” ¹³

In his account of “polyarchal democracy,” Dahl further developed the idea of the positive value of societal pluralism, arguing that “no constitutional arrangements can produce a non-tyrannical republic” in the absence of a set of social checks and balances. ¹⁴ Nevertheless, Madison’s concern with the prevention of tyranny is also the major normative objective of A Preface to Democratic Theory. It is clear from this text that this was the primary goal of Dahl’s conception of pluralism and not the goal of stability. This objective was not presented in the original eighteenth-century idiom, that is, as a system designed to protect the natural rights of citizens; instead pluralism was reformulated as a potential way of offering “protection . . . against the deprivation by one group of the freedom desired by another.” ¹⁵ In a later text, Dahl put these objectives as follows: he said pluralism can help “minimise government coercion” of social life, “curb hierarchy,” “prevent domination,” and facilitate “mutual control.” ¹⁶ Dahl also claimed that the Madisonian argument has been a victim of its own success. Indeed, later-day pluralists need to be less concerned with majority tyranny because—as Madison rightly predicted—“majorities are likely to be unstable and transitory in a large and pluralistic society.” ¹⁷ On Dahl’s reading, the challenge of pluralist democracy is therefore to understand the ways in which different minorities seek to use the instruments of government to “frustrate the ambitions of one another,” against the backdrop of “the passive acquiescence or indifference of a majority of . . . voters.” ¹⁸ In other words, the real danger in twentieth-century democracy is the prospect of the tyranny of a well-organised and motivated minority, and a successful system of polyarchy is one that “greatly extend[s] the number, size, and diversity of the minorities whose preferences will influence the outcome of governmental decisions.” ¹⁹

In The Intelligence of Democracy, Lindblom similarly reworked the classical discussion about the importance of the struggle between factions, and he developed a normative theory of pluralism in terms of what he called “partisan mutual adjustment.” ²⁰ Lindblom considered ways in which the pluralist system of bargaining might generate a range of possible goods, including opportunities for citizens’ participation and for policy initiative, and it is significant that he did not even raise the value of stability as a consideration in this discussion. ²¹ Furthermore, he identified the benefits of pluralism above all else with the systems’ capacity to ensure “large scale coordination . . . through mutual adjustment of persons not ordered by rule, central management, or dominant common purpose.” ²² In other words, pluralist democracy might enable people to “coordinate with each other without anyone’s coordinating them.” ²³ This is another way of saying the same thing as Dahl and Madison. Indeed, this is a positive way of formulating the idea of a non-tyrannical republic: an effective system of pluralism helps to facilitate democracy or self-government understood in terms of the immanent self-direction of the social and political process.

This depiction of modern democracy as a contest between minorities, and of pluralism as an ideal system of “minorities rule”—understood as a self-directing process of partisan mutual adjustment, free from the tyranny of any one constituency—is also the normative core of Connolly’s theory. In his recent writings, Connolly has argued that present day capitalist systems proliferate “minorities of many types.” ²⁴ Indeed, we now live in a “world of interlocked minorities”—a world of immigrants, alternative lifestyle movements, religious groups, feminist movements, and ethnic minorities—and the national majority has become “a symbolic centre consisting of fewer people than the sum of the minorities.” ²⁵ Under these conditions, Connolly says the key to pluralist politics is to prevent the tyranny of those “intransigent unitarians” who would seek to impose their interests and values on everybody else. ²⁶ For example, in the context of the Bush Presidency, Connolly saw such a threat in what he called the “evangelical capitalist resonance machine.” ²⁷ This depicts the alliances between Christian evangelists, advocates of neo-liberalism, large media corporations, and elements within the Republican Party, and, in Connolly’s iteration of the pluralist ideal, any attempt by this (or any other) minority—or assemblage of minorities—“to claim that it embodies in itself the essential virtues of the nation is stymied by multiple constituencies banding together to resist the outrageous presumptiveness of that claim.” ²⁸

Connolly’s account of the danger of intense minorities draws on his wider reflections—since the early 1990s—on the problem of existential ressentiment. Following Nietzsche, Connolly says that humans can best tolerate the fragility of their lives if “they can find some agent who is responsible for [their] suffering, an agent who can become the repository of ressentiment.” ²⁹ Indeed, one of the major contributions of Connolly’s writings has been to highlight the way in which ressentiment has become embedded in the fabric of American society, finding expression “in a variety of institutions, including those of work, investment, church assemblies, educational practices, modes of consumption, voting habits, electoral campaigns . . . economic theory” and the criminal justice system. ³⁰ For example, it was ressentiment that held together the evangelical capitalist resonance machine, and perhaps we can see the same sentiments today in the Tea Party tendency. Despite differences in creed, the elements of this minority assemblage were/are brought together around “affinities of spirituality”: they all seek “revenge against other people or [against] existence as such,” and according to Connolly, the best antidote is the cultivation of agonistic respect and critical responsiveness understood as the civic virtues appropriate to pluralism. ³¹

Agonistic respect is the normative keystone of Connolly’s theory and is presented as an ethos that can be cultivated by the carriers of any faith, identity, or doctrine, if they can only come to terms with the “comparative contestability” of their beliefs. ³² More specifically, Connolly urges political actors not seek revenge against others for the contingency of their own identity, but to strive instead for “reciprocal modesty” and greater “responsiveness to difference,” which become “presumptive virtues in pluralist politics.” ³³ Under these conditions, “partisans may test, challenge, and contest pertinent elements in the fundaments of others. But each [constituency] also appreciates the comparative testability of its own” most cherished values and beliefs. ³⁴ Critical responsiveness is an elaboration of agonistic respect, offered specifically by existing groups to emergent social movements. To the extent that pluralism is successful, democratic politics will therefore contain advocates of multiple faiths, values, interests and cultural identities “engaged in respectful competition and selective collaboration.” ³⁵

Dahl identified three possible sites for the system of mutual restraints that might prevent a monopolisation of power. These could be “(1) . . . internalised restraints in the individual behaviour system, . . . (2) . . . social checks and balances of several kinds, or (3) . . . prescribed constitutional checks.” ³⁶ As Dahl saw it, the original Madisonian formulation was aware of the importance of social checks and balances, but emphasised constitutional arrangements, whereas for Dahl societal pluralism was the really crucial mechanism for ensuring a non-tyrannical republic. ³⁷ Connolly agrees with this broad assessment, but adds that social checks and balances will only flourish if citizens acquire the necessary virtues to cultivate an attitude of mutual restraint, that is, to acknowledge the contestability of their own values; hence, his particular emphasis on the individual citizen and his/her relation to self. Connolly adds that this model of “pluralism . . . makes the checks and balances of Madisonian . . . pluralism . . . look like child’s play.” ³⁸ His grown-up version is more sophisticated. Nevertheless, Connolly’s presentation of pluralism as a system of partisan mutual adjustment retains the normative core of earlier iterations. The purpose of pluralist democracy is (with Dahl) to prevent domination or, conversely (with Lindblom), to facilitate self-government in the form of the immanent self-direction of the social process.

Furthermore, it is important to appreciate this continuity, and not least because Connolly’s and Dahl’s fidelity to these Madisonian ideals sets them apart from both liberal constitutionalists and from the assumptions of deliberative democracy, that jointly occupy the centre ground in normative political theory today. An earlier round of commentaries stressed Connolly’s proximity to liberalism. ³⁹ Although these observations are generally pertinent, part of the claim here is that we need a more exact evaluation of how Connolly’s later work relates to different conceptions of liberal democratic politics. My contention is that Connolly’s approach is closer to the normative foundations of the American republic than contemporary liberal theory, as it has been developed for example by John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, or Bruce Akerman. In contrast to liberal ideals of juridical impartiality, of the constitution as an overlapping consensus on basic principles of justice, or of higher lawmaking as somehow above the fray of democratic decision making: Bentley, Dahl, and Connolly have all emphasised the way in which the Supreme Court Justices, and the legal institutions more generally, are necessarily implicated in the bargaining processes of pluralist politics. ⁴⁰ Similarly, the ideal of American pluralism—past and present—is distinct from the Rousseauian standards of deliberative democracy, where something like the common good emerges from rational public debate, as interlocutors progressively come to see themselves as partners working out shared solutions to common problems, achieve a degree of detachment from their narrow self-interest, and move towards an “enlarged mentality” or an “extended ‘we’ perspective.” ⁴¹ As Connolly says, the pluralist conception of partisan mutual adjustment “is at odds with the Rousseauian ideal of identity between subject and sovereign . . . even while it is committed to the primacy of democratic politics.” ⁴² Indeed, the acknowledgement of Connolly’s theory as the present day embodiment of the Madisonian tradition, and of the crucial correspondence with Dahl and Lindblom, not only helps to properly explicate and differentiate his theory but also bolsters the American pluralist position vis-à-vis the currently predominant viewpoints in normative political theory.

Pluralism as Explanatory Framework

In addition to their reputed commitment to the ideal of stability, the conservatism of the post-war writers is also said to be evident in their empirical claims that the system of government in midcentury America roughly approximated the pluralist ideal, so that all groups in society more or less had an equal chance of shaping the outcome of decisions about public policy. In turn, this reflected untenable assumptions in their methodology and in pluralism as an explanatory framework. I focus on (1) the idea that the emphasis on observable decision making meant that the pluralists ignored the unarticulated or poorly articulated interests of disadvantaged groups and (2) the suggestion that the pluralists were committed to the idea that democratic politics tends necessarily towards a condition of equilibrium. These two lines of criticism are most significant here because Connolly has developed the central claims of his approach in explicit contradistinction to these supposed limitations of post-war theory. ⁴³ As he put it in the introduction to The Ethos of Pluralisation (1995), “there is an unconscious conservatism at the centre of the pluralist imagination” as it has developed “from the 1950s to the present.” ⁴⁴ A “conventional pluralist celebrates diversity within settled contexts of conflict and collective action” and “remains too . . . defensive of the world we now inhabit.” ⁴⁵ However, in this section we will see that these criticisms do not hold up to scrutiny. The pluralists were always mindful of the dangers of exclusion, inequality, apathy, and “immobilism” and they not only acknowledged the inevitability and value of change in political life, they also formulated this in terms that are exactly congruent with Connolly. Most significantly, his conceptions of “pluralisation” and the “politics of becoming” reiterate Truman’s account of “potential groups” in The Governmental Process (1951), and Connolly’s more recent formulation of pluralism—in terms of open systems in precarious balances of dis/equilibrium—correspond exactly with the central claims of Easton’s systems theory, elaborated in The Political System (1953). It seems that Connolly’s engagements in the heated exchanges of the late 1960s and 1970s prevented him from seeing these crucial points of connection between his own theory and the post-war writers.

In contrast to the various theories of a “power elite,” which identified a monolithic hierarchical power structure at the basis of both national and community politics, ⁴⁶ the pluralists concluded from their empirical research that “the democratic goal is . . . roughly and crudely approximated, in the sense that non leaders exercise a relatively high degree of control over leaders.” ⁴⁷ Indeed, the pluralist analysis of decision making—exemplified in Dahl’s hugely influential Who Governs? (1961)—revealed not a pyramidal concentration of power but a system of “polyarchy” in which a plurality of interest groups compete with one another over the outcome of political decisions, and there is “a high probability that an active and legitimate group in the population can make itself heard effectively at some crucial stage in the process of decision.” ⁴⁸ However, in the Bias of Pluralism Connolly captured the sentiments of a generation of critics when he described the American system of government instead as a “one-dimensional pluralist politics” in which “some concerns, aspirations, and interests are privileged while others are placed at a serious disadvantage.” ⁴⁹ Because the system of governmental decision making is often blind to the latent or poorly articulated interests of “the impoverished, the blacks, unorganised labourers, and many white collar workers,” the pluralists’ emphasis on observable decision making misses an entire “face” of contemporary power relations. ⁵⁰ This is what Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz described as the “second face of power,” the capacity exercised by dominant groups to set the decision-making agenda. ⁵¹ The bias of pluralist politics was therefore inherent in the methodology employed by Dahl and others.

On a preliminary view, Dahl and Lindblom appear to have been steadily won over by these critical interventions. From the late 1970s, they became more sceptical about the extent to which the American system resembles the ideals of pluralism. In his Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy 1982, Dahl outlined the dangers in pluralist systems. He said, left unchecked organisational pluralism can stabilise inequalities, deform civic consciousness, distort the public agenda, and eventually “weaken or destroy democracy.” ⁵² Indeed, in their later work, Dahl and Lindblom clearly share Connolly’s concern with the way in which pluralism can be twisted and distorted by overly powerful groups. Connolly has presented these dangers largely in cultural and existential terms, focusing on the perils of “normalisation” and the politics of ressentiment, whereas Dahl and Lindblom have been principally concerned with the predominance of business interests. ⁵³ Nevertheless, it is perhaps less controversial to draw attention to the substantial common ground between Dahl’s later writings and Connolly’s theory. Indeed, some commentators have also referred to Dahl and Lindblom’s later work as a “reformed” or “neo” pluralism. ⁵⁴ However, the key point here is that these commentaries also remain imperceptive to the continuity in Dahl and Lindblom’s early and later writings.

Indeed, Dahl has consistently rejected the idea that American polyarchy facilitates equality in the bargaining process. As he put it, it is “doubtful that anyone who might be described as a theorist of pluralism has ever made” the assertion that polyarchy is equivalent to equality of control. ⁵⁵ Like Connolly, he has repeatedly insisted that social pluralism can help to curb domination, but this does not mean that it will bring about “equal or democratic control” or that pluralism can “guarantee justice, equality, or democracy.” ⁵⁶ In fact, Who Governs? opens with a discussion of the way in which (nominally) “democratic” systems are characterised by an inconsistency between formal equality—the universal franchise and the enjoyment of civil liberties etc.—and “extensive inequalities in the resources different citizens can use to influence one another.” ⁵⁷ From their earliest writing, Dahl and Lindblom emphasised the realities of the imbalances of power within modern democratic systems. Drawing on Robert Michels, they explained these tendencies with reference to the specialisation associated with a complex division of labour, and because of the structural tendencies towards oligarchy, the “struggle to maintain a polyarchal organisation is never won; it is always on the verge of being lost.” ⁵⁸ Moreover, despite widespread misrepresentation, the post-war writers always recognised the operations of something like the second face of power. Dahl recognised that “if a group is inactive, whether by free choice, violence, intimidation, or law, the normal American system does not necessarily provide it with a checkpoint anywhere in the process” of government, and he highlighted the circumstances of African Americans—at that time—as an obvious case in point. ⁵⁹ Similarly, Truman was concerned with the “atrophy or deficiency” of organised interest groups amongst the “less privileged classes,” and with the way in which “rigidity in the established points of access” to the political system reinforces this tendency. ⁶⁰

Furthermore, these commonly held (but erroneous) assumptions about the blindness of the post-war writers to the exclusions of pluralist politics are intrinsic to Connolly’s central claim that they did not adequately address the politics of change. In fact, Connolly probably derived his initial inspiration for his theory of pluralisation from Robert Paul Wolff, who in 1969 noted that “the application of the theory of pluralism always favours the groups in existence against those in process of formation.” ⁶¹ Taking this observation as his starting point, in the mid-1990s Connolly drew on Nietzsche to develop an (ostensibly more radical) pluralist theory that is attentive to the “politics of becoming.” With reference to the experience of social movement politics, Connolly presented the periodic emergence of novel political demands as inherent to pluralist democracies. ⁶² He described the “dissonant relation between pluralism and pluralisation [as] the constitutive tension of pluralist politics itself” and he has also emphasised how the politics of ressentiment is compounded by the “politics of becoming,” because new political demands often unsettle existing configurations of identity. ⁶³ Indeed, one of the major insights of Connolly’s theory has been to link these observations to the ever-quickening pace of politics under conditions of globalisation. On his reading, there is a necessary connection between the impact of globalisation and the rising tide of religious fundamentalism in many parts of the world, because the new mobility associated with globalisation brings an intensification of the experience of fragility and consequently of ressentiment. ⁶⁴ At the same time, Connolly has drawn attention to the ambiguous quality of these processes, as globalisation also presents increasing opportunities for transnational actors to hold national governments to account. These are important insights into the contemporary situation, and this emphasis on transnational politics is one area where Connolly takes pluralist theory in decisively new directions. Indeed, in his influential discussions about democracy and increasing scale, Dahl did not consider the possibility that pluralist politics might be opened up by the emergence of new forms of transnational social movement. Instead he focused on how we might introduce institutional reforms designed to reinvigorate democracy on a national and subnational scale, and as an antidote to the inherently technocratic structures of transnational institutions. ⁶⁵ However, the main objective here is not to evaluate Connolly’s theory of globalisation. Instead, the task is to situate his account of “pluralisation” in the history of American pluralist thought, and the bone of contention is that Connolly and others have overlooked essential continuities between his stress on the significance of the politics of “becoming,” and the very same point of emphasis in post-war pluralist theory.

Dahl emphasised that the idea of a distinct “system” presupposes a degree of continuity; a political system—such as the American republic—must be “relatively durable or persistent through time.” ⁶⁶ This is partly ensured by the specific traditions of legitimacy and widespread consensus on the “rules of the game,” associated, for example, with support for the rule of law, for formal political equality, for non-arbitrary expressions of power, for the guarantees in the Bill of Rights, etc. ⁶⁷ As Truman says, these are “not continually at issue” in regular political conflicts. ⁶⁸ Multiple group memberships and cross-cutting cleavages also serve to reproduce an element of stability through time. ⁶⁹ These are the principal motifs of post-war pluralism that have come down to us via posterity. However, we appear to have forgotten that each of the major pluralist theorists also stressed that pressures for continuity are always in tension with demands for change in society, and that democratic politics is defined precisely by this tension between continuity and change (between what Connolly calls pluralism and pluralisation). As Dahl put it in Who Governs?:

Neither the prevailing consensus, the creed, nor even the political system itself are immutable products of democratic ideas, beliefs, and institutions inherited from the past. For better or worse, they are always open, in some measure, to alteration through those complex processes of symbiosis and change that constitute the relations between leaders and citizens in a pluralistic democracy. ⁷⁰

Moreover, like Connolly, the pluralists acknowledged that the forces of inertia often have the upper hand, and effectively block hoped for changes. As Truman put it, “any system . . . tends to discriminate in favour of established groups and interests, and it may deny to new groups access points to decision.” ⁷¹ Whoever deviates from the norms “incurs a high risk of defeat, for the resources that will be mounted against the political deviant are almost certain to be vastly greater than the resources the . . . deviant can himself muster.” ⁷² Indeed, the conventional pluralists were not only concerned about the dangers of instability, they also drew attention to the perils of “immobilism” or of the “incapacity in the system to accommodate new kinds of demands.” ⁷³ However, like Connolly, they also stressed the (ultimately) inevitable and the disruptive nature of change. As Dahl put it:

At least two predictions can be made with considerable confidence: (1) in every political system, no matter how permanent it may be or appear to be, significant changes are bound to take place; and (2) because change is so difficult to predict, a very large measure of uncertainty is an inescapable feature of political life. ⁷⁴

It would of course be possible to arrive at these conclusions from criteria that are compatible with the then dominant behaviouralist thesis, that valid scientific knowledge should be based upon “concrete evidence drawn from the observed behaviour of different political systems.” ⁷⁵ Importantly, however, the pluralists not only mobilised empirical evidence in support of this view; Truman and Easton—in particular—also developed sophisticated theoretical accounts of political temporality and change. Moreover, in so doing, they effectively endorsed metaphysical assumptions about the “politics of becoming” that correspond with Connolly’s theory. In The Governmental Process, Truman wrote, in “the scientific study of society only frustration and defeat are likely to follow an attempt to deal with data that are not directly observable” (the behaviouralist thesis), nevertheless, he continued: experience suggests that “although [observable] activity is the basic datum of social science, a “becoming” stage of activity must [also] be recognised as a phase of activity if any segment of a moving social situation is to be [properly] understood.” ⁷⁶ There are, in other words, “potential” activities, or “tendencies of activity,” always latent in the present which, although not directly observable, must be accounted for in any credible account of pluralist politics. On Truman’s account, the “potential group” is immanent to the manifestation of political interests, and a lack of political organisation may at any time give way to an “increased rate of interaction among . . . affected individuals” resulting in a more “formal organisation” of the group. ⁷⁷ In other words, his rendition of political temporality is predicated on a metaphysical thesis about the nature of “becoming,” which is congruent with Connolly’s theory. This suggests that traces of metaphysics can be found in post-war pluralism, despite the ostensible commitment to empiricism.

In his most recent writings, Connolly has reformulated the idea of “becoming” in terms of open systems that are susceptible to periods of acute disequilibrium. Unlike “systems in equilibrium,” unstable systems (e.g., in biochemistry) are “marked by an element of internal unpredictability, by capacities of self-development, by periods of significant openness to outside forces, and by a trajectory of irreversible change.” ⁷⁸ In Connolly’s view, political scientists need to be informed by these developments in natural science, in order to adequately explain the morphology of social and political systems. On a superficial reading, these insights would seem to take Connolly in a different direction from the post-war writers. Indeed, there is a widespread view that—taking Easton’s theory as their main point of reference—the “conventional” pluralists claimed that the American system of government had an inbuilt tendency towards equilibrium. According to Avigail Eisenberg, for example, Easton’s theory was functionalist and teleological so that “all aspects of the system were ultimately explained and assessed according to a view that made stability the central value of democracy” and “the purpose for which all institutions of the system where designed.” ⁷⁹ However, this is once again a misconception.

In The Political System, Easton said that “chaos is not the rule” and the various “elements of the political process have a real tendency to hang together.” ⁸⁰ But this should not be misunderstood as an inherent tendency towards equilibrium. The classic idea of equilibrium—taken from either physics or economics—depicts “a point . . . when the vector sum of all forces acting on that point is zero.” ⁸¹ Nevertheless, Easton insisted that these abstractions only apply in a hypothetical “frictionless universe” and are never actualised in the real world, which is characterised instead by open systems and multiple lines of causality. ⁸² Like Connolly, he described the political system in a constant and irreconcilable tension between equilibrium and disequilibrium. In the real world of politics, as in economics and physics, forces are “in a constant state of disequilibrium, moving to or away from equilibrium.” ⁸³ “Tendencies towards equilibrium do exist” but “changes take place [periodically] in the basic circumstances (such as technology or population for example) that abort these tendencies.” ⁸⁴ What we have then is “a world in flux constantly striving towards equilibrium but never achieving it.” ⁸⁵ Similarly, Dahl and Truman both explicitly rejected the idea that the system has an inbuilt tendency towards equilibrium. ⁸⁶

Pluralism and Metaphysics

It is clear from this assessment, that the post-war writers had a more nuanced understanding of the politics of becoming than is generally understood, and in this respect their work is congruent with the major themes of Connolly’s pluralism. Moreover, the common point of reference for Truman’s account of “potential groups” and Easton’s theory of open systems is Bentley’s The Process of Government, ⁸⁷ and so to fully comprehend the extent to which Connolly’s work takes up and consolidates the pluralist tradition we also need to consider Bentley’s contribution. At this point the discussion moves more directly to an evaluation of the relationship between pluralism and metaphysics. Connolly’s first book Political Science and Ideology (1967) was an adamant critique of the pretence to value neutrality characteristic of behaviouralism. ⁸⁸ Connolly challenged the tendency to supress normative and ideological concerns in empirical research, and these ideas were further developed in The Terms of Political Discourse (1974), which is probably his best known work and now in its third edition. ⁸⁹ In his subsequent writings, Connolly has been increasingly concerned with the interface between political science and metaphysics. This clearly represents a basic difference between Connolly and the post-war writers who tried consistently to maintain the notion of value neutrality, by upholding a clear analytical distinction between normative theory, concept formation, and empirical data collection, and in an effort to enhance the study of politics as an empirical science. We have seen that they were not entirely successful in this endeavour, and various metaphysical assumptions crept into their analyses despite their best intentions, and primarily in their theoretical formulations of time and change. Nevertheless, Connolly’s explicit concern with metaphysical questions does differentiate him from the post-war writers, but not, as we will see, from the earliest iterations of pluralism in American political science.

Connolly has developed his own distinct metaphysical doctrine—which he calls “immanent naturalism”—from the late 1990s. He defends a materialist ontology that “mixes nature and culture” in a conception of the world as “a layered, immanent field” of “infrasensible forces,” whose “subtle powers of multiple causality may exceed our best approximations of it.” ⁹⁰ Three components of this theory are particularly significant here: the idea of emergent causality, of what Connolly calls “connectionism,” and his conception of time as “duration,” where past, present, and future are always combined in complex unpredictable configurations. Drawing on complexity theory, Connolly has shown how the latest developments in the natural sciences have undermined the idea of efficient causality within closed systems. ⁹¹ In contemporary cosmology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, for example, we find models of evolution where open systems possess powers of self-organization, and seemingly minor variations can initiate distinct new trajectories so that change cannot be fully predicted. ⁹² In each of these fields, the “emergence of new formations, is irreducible to patterns of efficient causality, purposive time, simple probability, or long cycles of recurrence.” ⁹³ To the extent that Connolly is right about the importance of these developments for understanding political systems, then these ideas “puts the squeeze” on both organic and mechanistic models of institutional development, as well as theories that model political behaviour from axiomatic assumptions about the preferences of individual actors. ⁹⁴ More generally, complexity theory challenges the received view that empirical work in political science can be presented in the form of “reliable inferences” drawn from observed data, coupled with a “reasonable estimate” of the degree of certainty attached to any given set of inferences. ⁹⁵ Instead, we need to come to terms with the idea that chaotic and unpredictable behaviors represent essential features of the evolution of political systems, and develop models of multi-linear, complex, and emergent causality, and correspondingly intricate modes of inference. ⁹⁶

In Pluralism (2005), Connolly emphasised the proximity between his approach and the metaphysical pluralism of William James. James’s A Pluralistic Universe (1909) reproduced a series of public lectures delivered at Oxford University in the previous year. In these lectures, James was concerned with themes that resonate strongly with post-structuralist theory as it has developed from the 1960s, and, in particular, he shared with more recent thinkers a rejection of dialectical conceptions of unity and diversity. ⁹⁷ Indeed, the principal target of James’s book was the Hegelian philosophy of the Absolute, as it was developed in English Idealist philosophy from the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, James rejected the teleological assumption that the diversity characteristic of modern civil societies, historical development, and the flux of life are all somehow lifted up and preserved—aufhebung—in higher forms of unity. In contrast to the Hegelian conception of “Totality” with—as James put it—“no loose ends hanging out,” he postulated instead a genuinely “pluralistic and incompletely integrated universe” and he called this alternative ontology “radical pluralism” or “radical empiricism.” ⁹⁸ For James, radical pluralism is a “coherent world, and not an incarnate incoherence.” ⁹⁹ However, its coherence is constitutively unstable, and from every claim to identity “something like a pluralism breaks out.” ¹⁰⁰ As Connolly puts it, on James’s view “the overlapping forces propelling the world are themselves messy. Pluralism is the philosophy of a messy universe.” ¹⁰¹ Applied to the realm of politics, we find a world where the connections between different elements—individuals, groups, and institutions—are “typically loose [and] incomplete.” ¹⁰²

James’s metaphysical pluralism was partly inspired by Henri Bergson, ¹⁰³ and in Pluralism Connolly draws on Bergson and James to disrupt “the chronological idea of time, the idea that time consists of one punctual moment after another.” ¹⁰⁴ Indeed, these thinkers have enabled Connolly to develop a conception of time as “duration” in which temporal trajectories resemble a “flux in which elements from the past fold into the present and both of those into future anticipation.” ¹⁰⁵ The experience of time as duration is “marked by feedbacks and alterations that deform continuity without eliminating it.” ¹⁰⁶ Again, Connolly’s emphasis is on the pluralistic and unpredictable nature of time and change: the temporal is characterised by an open trajectory that is occasionally disrupted by unexpected “forks” or “swerves” in time. ¹⁰⁷

Connolly engaged with James relatively late in the development of his own work. However, the proximity between these two thinkers is reaffirmed when we consider that a number of distinguished political scientists enthusiastically embraced James’s metaphysical pluralism in the early twentieth century, to develop a conception of political process, identity, and time that reveal a remarkable coincidence with Connolly. Prominent amongst these early pluralists were Laski and Follet, who both sought explicitly to apply James’s metaphysical pluralism to the realm of politics. ¹⁰⁸ Indeed, Laski is credited with introducing the term pluralism into American political science for the first time in 1915 in a series of public lectures at Harvard University, and taking the idea and the terminology directly from James. ¹⁰⁹ Follet was inspired by Laski’s intervention, and in her book The New State (1918) she developed a metaphysics of social “forces” that is strikingly similar to Connolly’s. ¹¹⁰ She said, “society is not a collection of units but a complex of radiating and converging, crossing and recrossing energies” which “we must view . . . as a rushing of life . . . as a mobile, elastic incalculable, protean energy.” ¹¹¹ However, the figure who comes closest to Connolly in these early debates—although he didn’t use the term pluralism—is Bentley.

Bentley is also misrepresented as a theorist of a closed system that tends necessarily towards equilibrium. ¹¹² However, more careful readers have shown how his conception of process “was not in harmony with the idea of a bounded system.” ¹¹³ In fact, Bentley’s conception of process was explicitly indebted to James, ¹¹⁴ and, like Connolly, he developed a long-standing interest in the metaphysical foundations of political science research, ¹¹⁵ in continental theory, ¹¹⁶ and in the latest developments in the natural sciences. ¹¹⁷ Indeed, the whole of Part One of The Process of Government is a polemic against monocausal explanations of political behaviour, represented at that time, for example, in the methodological individualism of classical utilitarianism or conversely in functionalist accounts of social structure. Bentley rejected all those theories that reify the individual into a “definite, firm, positive, foundation” for social theory. ¹¹⁸ Individuals are not “‘things’ in or behind society, working upon it as causes.” ¹¹⁹ Instead the political scientist needs to focus on the “streams and currents of activity that gather among the people.” ¹²⁰ Moreover, the actions of men in the present can never be dissociated from “potential” activities, and although these are not directly observable or fully predictable, they too “are stages of activity just as much as any other activity” and so they need to be accounted for as part of the social and political process. ¹²¹ Moreover, like Connolly, Bentley insisted on the non-teleological and open nature of the political process: he said no “such group as the social whole enters into the interpretation in any form whatever.” ¹²² Indeed, one commentator has described the always only temporary unities accomplished in Bentley’s conception of the political process as rather like the achievements of “a sculpture who attempts to mould statues in a medium that is always on the point of melting”. ¹²³ This metaphor also perfectly describes Connolly’s understanding of the emergence of “assemblages” (of individuals, groups, and institutions), which, he says, are “underdetermined by any logical, narrative, or explanatory line of progression.” ¹²⁴

This conception of the political process as an open-ended flux is the central thesis of the Process of Government, and this had a lasting impact on subsequent iterations of pluralism, including, as we have seen on Truman’s account of potential groups and Easton’s notion of open systems. ¹²⁵ Furthermore, the proximity between Bentley and Connolly is even more apparent in a remarkable—and long forgotten—text titled Relativity in Man and Society (1926). In the same way that Connolly has sought to fold developments in natural science into the basic schema of American pluralism, in this text Bentley drew upon Einstein to develop a political theory that tried to break with Newtonian mechanics. After Einstein, Bentley understood, there is nothing left of Newtonian conceptions of absolute space and time as the conditioning mould in which all happens. ¹²⁶ Instead, “space and time” have themselves “proved to be variable factors.” ¹²⁷ Like Connolly, he rejected the chronological conception of time—understood as a series of discrete moments—and insisted that we must appreciate time in “durations,” where “no arbitrary sharply defined present can be found” and instead present, past, and future are always in some way coextensive in unpredictable configurations. ¹²⁸ As an “unreal instantaneous present yields to a reality of durations” we start to glimpse a more adequate account of the social process. ¹²⁹ Most significantly, Bentley understood that the established dualisms of modern social theory—the individual/collective, agent/structure etc.—are dissolved into a conception of the “man-society process” that is analogous to “space-time” on Einstein’s continuum. ¹³⁰ Following James, and anticipating Connolly, for Bentley, the basic datum in political research is “any definable” cross section in the “man-society continuum.” ¹³¹

Conclusion

This genealogy of American pluralism has been in two parts. The first excavation burrowed down to the mid-twentieth century, and the purpose was to interrupt the predominant misconceptions of “conventional” pluralist theory. We have seen that the post-war writers were committed to an ideal of pluralism as a “non tyrannical republic,” as “government by minorities,” and as “partisan mutual adjustment”; that they were mindful of the dangers of exclusion and inequality (without endorsing the notion of a fixed power elite), aware of the inevitability and the value of qualitative change in political life, and—despite their broad commitment to behaviouralism—that they formulated change in terms of a politics of “becoming.” Their emphasis was not on the necessity of stability or the inevitability of equilibrium but rather on the need to perpetually re-strike precarious points of agreement, and in a context of open systems in dynamic tensions of dis/equilibrium. In all these respects, their iteration of pluralist democracy is consistent with the major themes of Connolly’s theory, and this rereading restores a certain dignity to the post-war writers, and further reinforces the significance of pluralist theory especially in relation to deliberative democracy and constitutional liberalism.

The second excursion traced these ideas back further, to some of the earliest statements of pluralism in American political science. Here we discovered an extraordinary resonance between Connolly’s work and Bentley’s conception of the political process, as well as the contributions of others who sought to apply James’s metaphysical pluralism to the world of politics in the early part of the last century. Taking each of these historical passages into consideration, it becomes clear that Connolly’s contribution is best understood not as a qualitatively new theory but as the resumption and enhancement of a distinct canon of pluralist thought in American political science. Moreover, this clarification of the core components of pluralist theory provides an important restatement of the enduring significance of the pluralist conception of democratic politics. Indeed, in the current circumstances of, for example, widespread climate change and ongoing economic instability, contemporary political scientists could learn something from Connolly’s approach, as well as relearn something from early pioneers like Bentley and Easton, that is, if we want to fashion explanatory tools that are appropriate to the analyses of emergent causality in increasingly complex social and political systems.