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Agonized liberalism: The liberal theory of William E. Connolly

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Globalization and modern philosophy

Agonized liberalism: The liberal theory of William E. Connolly

Antonio Y. Vzquez-Arroyo

‘Democracy’ in the discourse of the ‘Free West’ does not carry the same meaning as it does when we speak of ‘popular-democratic’ struggle or of deepening the democratic content of political life. We cannot allow the term to be wholly expropriated.… Instead, we need to develop a strategy of contestation around the term itself.
Stuart Hall

In the last two decades, William E. Connolly has emerged as a significant figure in American academic political theory by framing his theoretical reflections on identity, difference and politics in terms of a ‘reworking of the democratic imagination’.1 The novelty of these reflections mostly resides in his combination of post-structuralist motifs with the traditional concerns of Anglo-American liberal theory. Meanwhile, the radical/critical import of his reflections has been taken for granted both tacitly and explicitly, to the extent that one of his essays even found a home in the pages of this journal.2 Connolly has simultaneously insisted that he is contributing to both the liberal and the democratic imaginations. Yet in his writings the compatibility of these two traditions is never addressed, let alone questioned. Rather, Connolly has constantly moved, almost interchangeably, from one to the other.

I shall argue that the tension between these two traditions emerges in his writings in a particularly revealing way. This tension raises several important questions about the status of democracy in liberal theory and in Connolly’s particular contribution. What is the role of democracy and liberalism in Connolly’s theoretical reflections? What, if any, are the possibilities of democratic renewal that his various formulations open up or foreclose? What limits does Connolly’s commitment to liberalism impose on his conception of democracy? By addressing these questions, this article presents a critical engagement with Connolly’s writings in relation to his professed adherence to democracy. Before I proceed, I shall state some of the assumptions of this article in order to clarify the stakes of the argument.

Liberal democracy is awash with promises of freedom and equality but it is incapable of realizing them. This impossibility is largely due to the contradictions between the terms the formula pairs together. Their coupling in the formula liberal democracy notwithstanding, democracy and liberalism constitute two distinct historical traditions. In the West, at least since 1945, liberal democracy has come to signify the combination of an electoral regime with a popular base and a constitutional framework of rights, operative within a capitalist political economy. It is no surprise, then, that the articulation of this ideal is ridden with tensions. Gopal Balakrishnan has starkly formulated the current stakes in this coupling: ‘To the extent that neoliberalism is a liberal doctrine, the relationship between [democracy and liberalism] today is probably about as complex and antagonistic as it was during the Weimar Republic.’3

Alongside the march of liberal democracy in the twentieth century there has been a gross increase in inequalities of power and status, both locally and globally. The global configurations of economic and political power impose new demands of local governance. At the global level, a new cast of characters has emerged to replace the old bourgeoisie: indeed, in the contemporary scene, technocrats CEOs and ‘financial buccaneers’ squash obstacles in ways the old bourgeoisie probably never dreamt of.4 The contemporary world is one full of asymmetries of power and status – political, cultural and economic. If the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie is no longer present as a visible oppressor, its counterpart, the oppressed groups and classes, has far from disappeared. This is a world where ‘the rulers have ceased to rule’, but where ‘the slaves remain slaves’.5

Politically, neoliberalism and the liberal-democratic consensus make few demands in terms of democratic participation. Rather, there is what Sheldon S. Wolin has fittingly called ‘the citizen–spectator’, whose role is to cheer fervently in an outburst of abstract patriotism, like the one that emerged after 11 September 2001.6 Or, as Perry Anderson has put it, in the age of liberal democracy what often reigns ‘is not democratic aspiration from below, but the asphyxiation of public and political difference by capital above.’7 Moreover, the early twenty-first century has witnessed a relocation of the structural interdependency of the liberal state and capitalism from the national level to an interdependency of the leading national economy (the USA) with the global economy, in a relation of mediation that is far from consonant with the egalitarian and participatory aspirations of democracy.8 Connolly’s refashioning of the liberal imagination hardly transcends this predicament. On the contrary, it has sought to make it less stingy.