How to be Bicameral: Reading William Connolly's Pluralism with Whitehead and Deleuze

Abstract

This article argues that the concept of bicameralism is central to William Connolly's pluralism. The concept is analysed in terms of its roots in political bicameralism, in the bicameral mind and in organic bicameralism in order to show its richness and its capacity to provide positive answers to a series of standard criticisms of pluralism. Two more persistent critical problems are presented in the problem of evil (can we afford to be open to other political positions if they are evil?) and in the problem of the generation of paradoxes (does pluralism depend on adopting perniciously paradoxical positions?). These questions are answered by drawing connections from Connolly's work to Alfred North Whitehead's definition of evil and to Gilles Deleuze's work on paradox.