Connolly's argument for the "multiplication of factions" follows James Madison's logic in engaging groups, constituencies, and voters at both the micro and macro level.
[3] An extensive engagement with Connolly can be found in The New Pluralism (Duke University Press, 2008), edited by David Campbell and Morton Schoolman.
[4] There Morton Schoolman, Thomas Dumm, George Kateb, Wendy Brown, Stephen White, Bonnie Honig, Roland Bleiker, Michael Shapiro, Kathy Ferguson, James Der Derian, and David Campbell engage with his accounts of pluralism, cosmopolitanism, agonistic respect, subjectivity, politics and global capitalism.
[6] "Echoing his early critique of value-neutrality, Connolly charges liberal secularists for failing to acknowledge... the ways their own parochial sensibilities and metaphysical investments infuse their supposedly neutral statements about a post-metaphysical public reason.
Connolly calls for a post-secularist politics that admits the ubiquity of faith in order to negotiate across these embodied registers of difference rather than claim, and fail, to transcend them.
"[7] Drawing on recent research in neuroscience on the role of affect in cognition, along with the theories of thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and William James, Connolly plumbs the depths of the “visceral register”, both in Why I am Not a Secularist (2000) and particularly in his 2002 book Neuropolitics.
"Rationalist and deliberative theories of democracy fail to grasp the ways visceral modes of appraisal affect political thinking below the conscious register of reasons and argument alone.
Echoing his early critique of value-neutrality, Connolly charges liberal secularists for failing to acknowledge the role of the visceral register in their own thinking and the ways their own parochial sensibilities and metaphysical investments infuse their supposedly neutral statements about a post-metaphysical public reason.
Above all, Connolly lauds an attitude that recognizes the tragic in life (serving to blunt dangerous faiths in a providential God or in the blessings of the market), while at the same time eagerly welcoming a determination to change the world for the better.
Finally, Connolly insists that his ardent desire for change does not negate an attitude of human "gratitude for this world" (p. 144) nor suck dry the ineffable "sweetness of life" (p. 146).
[10] It is not only that markets are also subject to elite manipulation, it is also the case that neoliberal states bump into a whole series of nonhuman processes with self-organizing powers of their own.
[11] After discussing how climate, glacier flows, species evolution and the ocean conveyor have gone through periods of stability punctuated by rather rapid changes, he pursues a philosophy of “entangled humanism” and a “politics of swarming” to respond to the contemporary conjunction between bumpy, self-organizing planetary forces and contemporary capitalism as a geologic force.
[14] In contrast, Robert Booth Fowler, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin, writes that to Connolly "American capitalism and Christianity work together...at all levels of society in ways which violate [Connolly's] main goals: a dramatically more egalitarian society, an environmentally responsible nation and world, and a deep respect for human diversity".
[15] Harvard University theorist Cornel West writes that "William E. Connolly is a towering figure in contemporary political theory whose profound reflections on democracy, religion, and the tragic unsettle and enrich us."