A More Generous and Respectful Agonism: Making Pluralization Safe for Democracy

Abstract

The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition. Edited by David Campbell, Morton Schoolman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 364 pp., $34.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-4270-0). This is a most interesting and provocative collection of essays touching on seminal aspects of William Connolly's prolific contributions to the pluralism debate and its implications for both political theory and international relations theory. As Campbell and Schoolman indicate, Connolly's “new pluralism” stands in contrast to its more conventional antecedents rooted in “American and British political science and sociology, especially after the Second World War.” These preceding conversations are summarized by Ferguson (2007), who charts pluralism's rise as an anti-Hegelian antidote to the centralizing tendencies of the state (James, Laski, Figgis, and Cole), and its formalist turn (Dahl and Truman), which stressed the state's role as a mediator between various competing domestic groups, through Arendt's efforts to revalidate contention and Berlin's “value incommensurability.” But in Ferguson's (2007:15) estimate all of these approaches to pluralism fell short of Jamesian pluralism whose hallmarks were its acceptance of “the profound and meaningful differences in the world's of different people.” In many regards Connolly's “new pluralism” may share some of James' more aspirational commitments, and such points of affinity might be well worth exploring. However, this volume's intent is to locate Connolly's work within and against the Tocquevillian ideal, which provides Connolly with the opening to rework pluralist theory along the identity/difference fault lines that serve to illuminate how a biased set of institutional commitments, and the value structures which sustain them, privilege certain groups over others. As Runciman (1997) observes, “the history of political pluralism is the history of a series of unsatisfactory solutions to a set of intractable problems.” Whereas more conventional discussions of pluralism focused on the problem of authority, this collection of essays shifts our attention to the twin-sided problem of “how we can be with others” (Campbell, p. 290) and “how to eliminate violence toward difference” (Schoolman, p. …