William E. Connolly

William Eugene Connolly (born January 6, 1938 ) is an American political scientist who has dealt in particular with the fundamentals of democracy and pluralism and their interplay with ecological issues. He is now a warrior-Eisenhower professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University .

biography

Connolly grew up in Flint , Michigan and studied at the University of Michigan . He has held teaching positions at the University of Exeter, European University Institute, Oxford University and Boston College, among others. His book The Terms of Political Discourse won the Benjamin Evans Lippincott Award in 1999. In 2004, Connolly was invited with a Fullbright Scholarship to speak at the Kyoto climate conference in Japan. He is involved, among other things, with the Huffington Post and is a founding member of the science journal Theory & Event.

plant

Connolly has identified some problematic aspects of modern secularism . Among other things, he points out the - for him foreseeable - failure of predictions in the 1970s, after which secularism would soon become the predominant view in public discussion. Instead, among other things, evangelicalism grew into a politically dominant current in the USA in the 1990s. Secularism implies an inadequate redefinition of religion. According to Connolly's interpretation of Talal Asad , the self-image of secularism as the division between private and public spheres, which relies on religious diversity in the private sphere, is by no means coherent and is itself a legacy of the European religious conflicts. The power to interpret religion is still not only reflected in private views that are kept in check by the state, but through religious values and rituals continues to have a wide range of influence on public discourse, which continues to present itself as a field of tension between competing values of religious origin. In this context he sees Baruch Spinoza's monism as a minority but important current of the European Enlightenment, which is by no means to be read as secular. Connolly emphasizes the need to conduct the public discussion with a radical pluralism, which in no way replaces a uniform (Christian Jewish) morality with an equally uniform one.

Individual evidence

^ William Connolly: Why I am Not a Secularist . University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2000, ISBN 0-8166-3332-0 .
↑ cf. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, Baltimore 1993, id., Formations of the Secular, Stanford 2003
^ William E. Connolly: Europe: A Minor Tradition . In: David Scott, Charles Hirschkind (eds.): Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocuters (Cultural Memory in the Present) . Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 2006, pp. 77-92 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Connolly, William E.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Connolly, William Eugene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American philosopher and political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH	January 6, 1938

[1] William Connolly: Why I am Not a Secularist . University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2000, ISBN 0-8166-3332-0 .

[2] . Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, Baltimore 1993, id., Formations of the Secular, Stanford 2003

[3] William E. Connolly: Europe: A Minor Tradition . In: David Scott, Charles Hirschkind (eds.): Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocuters (Cultural Memory in the Present) . Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 2006, pp. 77-92 .