The Nature of Political Theory

260 The Nature of Political Theory

liberalism and democracy, sensitive to difference. He admits that Nietzsche does not
quite present what people would normally expect as a ‘normal political theory’.^33
However, given that Nietzsche treats modernity as something alien, he can make us
reflect on our present beliefs and our frequent ‘self-deceits’. This is envisaged as an
opening up of new political possibilities. Nietzsche’s work also enables us to come
to terms with difference in a new way. It allows us, in Connolly’s terms, to adopt an
ethic of ‘letting be’. It also enables the self to begin to ‘craft’ or ‘form itself’ without
any transcendental or ontological supports.
In summary, for Connolly ‘a democratic politics provides the best way to incorpor-
ate the experience of contingency into public life. This would still leave much to be
thought about the relations between the contingent subject and the forms of other-
ness it engenders’ (Connolly 1988: 159–60). Similarly, there are viable notions of both
justice and equality that can be integrated within a postmodern Nietzschean society.
Connolly thus notes, ‘Perhaps a reconstituted, radicalized liberalism is needed today;
one which reaches into the subject itself rather than taking it as a starting point for
reflection; one which challenges the hegemony of economic expansion rather than
making it a precondition of liberty; one which treats nature as a locus of difference
and resistances essential to life as well as a shelter and set of resources for human
use’ (see Connolly 1988: 171–2). Essentially Connolly wants to rewrite the nihilistic
aristocratic radical Nietzsche as a democratic postmodern liberal sensitive to a multi-
cultural or difference-based society. The operative faith is that ‘an ethical orientation
to life does not depend upon the demand to lock all reverence for life into some uni-
versal theistic faith, rational consensus, secular contract, transcendental argument,
or interior attunement to a deep attunement’ (Connolly 1995: 27). Most of our prob-
lems come not from fragmentation and heterogeneityper sebut the attempt to give
that particularity some kind of moral foundation. Connolly thus has the same basic
view as Foucault.^34
A Nietzschean and Foucaultian dedivinized radical liberalism also forms the main
text to Connolly’s own work. Connolly’s vision of society is an ‘agonistic democracy’,
containing decentralization and local democracy. Where neutralist or procedural
liberals try to shield society from strong identities, Connolly wants a future liberal
society to encompass them. The crisis of society is not fragmentation but rather
the attempt to fix and close identities. Connolly, following Nietzsche and Foucault,
favours a ‘cultivation ethics’ over a ‘command ethics’; the former celebrates difference,
exposes paradox rather than suppressing it, and accepts self-creation. There are no
‘either/or’s in agonistic democracy. Connolly makes ethical hay here while the decon-
struction sun shines. Derrida’sdifférance, Heidegger’s ‘destruction’, and Nietzsche’s
perspectivism become supports for a cultivation ‘ethic of care’ (Connolly 1991: 50;
see also White 1991: 96ff.). Connolly takes the refusal of closure as a prime mark of
postmodernism.^35
Rorty’s political vision is less overtly Nietzschean than Connolly’s, although the
intellectual influences are still quite obvious. However, the final upshot is not that
different from Connolly. Rorty values a liberalism without foundation and without
any Enlightenment moral baggage. It is non-universalist, non-rationalist, and accepts