Just What Is Ontological Political Theory Meant to do? The Method and Practice of William E. Connolly
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| Author | Clayton Chin |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321720925491 |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720925491
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(4) 771 –790
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720925491
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Just What Is Ontological
Political Theory Meant to do?
The Method and Practice of
William E. Connolly
Clayton Chin
Abstract
This article provides a critical appraisal of the ontological method of political theorizing through an
examination of the methodological development of the work of William E. Connolly. Connolly has
often been taken as a paradigmatic figure of the ‘ontological turn’. This is not only because of the
significance of his work in the field but because he is one of its major methodological articulators.
However, there has been no systematic evaluation of that method and its development. This
paper rectifies that lacuna by critically illustrating Connolly’s turn from a post-positivistic
interpretivism to his much noted ‘onto-political method’. It argues that the latter, while usually
thought to be modelled on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, is structured
by Heidegger’s understanding of ontological difference. The paper then argues that this leads to
several problematic tendencies within Connolly’s model that undermine the critical-explanatory
and normative power of his methodology by compromising the critical reflexivity ontology is
meant to provide. All of this raises some concerns and criticisms of the use of ontological method
of political theorizing, which has escaped sustained methodological analysis and scrutiny.
Keywords
methodology, normativity, critique, ontology, William Connolly
Accepted: 20 April 2020
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 justi-
fied through quasi-methodological claims of the necessity of ontological reflection and the
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
Corresponding author:
Clayton Chin, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia.
Email: clayton.chin@unimelb.edu.au
925491PSX0010.1177/0032321720925491Political StudiesChin
research-article2020
Article
772 Political Studies 69(4)
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 prac-
tices 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 politi-
cal 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 ontol-
ogy 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 politi-
cal) 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 ontologi-
cal 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 possibil-
ity 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 onto-
logical contingency thesis (OCT) and contestability mechanism (CM). Finally, it con-
nects 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 con-
cerns around the impact of ontological claims on pluralistic political theory. In the pro-
cess, it also clarifies several recent criticisms of Connolly’s politics by locating those
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