Resounding Events - by William E Connolly (Paperback)

About the Book

In Resounding Events, one of the world's preeminent political theorists reflects on a career as an academic hailing from the working class. Connolly explores how diverse events jolt and animate thinking, and he enunciates the tasks of engaged intellectuals today.

Book Synopsis

Winner, David Easton Award for Political Theory, 2023

In Resounding Events, one of the world's preeminent political theorists reflects on a career as an academic hailing from the working class. From youthful experiences of McCarthyism, to the resurgence of white evangelicalism, to the advent of aspirational fascism and the acceleration of the Anthropocene, Connolly traces a career spent passionately engaged in making a more just, diverse, and equitable world. He surveys the shifting ground upon which politics can be pursued; and he discloses how to be an intellectual in universities that today do not encourage that practice.

Far more than a memoir, Resounding Events probes the concerns that have animated Connolly's work across more than a dozen books by tracing the bumpy imbrications of event, memory and thinking in intellectual life. Connolly experiments with ways to capture various voices that mark a self at any time. An event, as he elaborates it, is what disturbs or inspires thinking as it activates layered sheets of memory. A memory sheet itself assembles recollections, dispositions organized from the past, and vague remains that carry efficacies.

Resounding Events shows how resonances between event and memory can help forge new concepts better adjusted to an emergent situation. Addressing tensions between working class experience and norms of the academy, his father's coma, antiwar protests, the growing disaffection of the white working class, the neoliberalization of the university, climate denialism, and his sister's experience with workers shifting to Trump, Connolly shows how engaged intellectuals become worthy of the events they encounter.

From the Back Cover

Winner, Easton Prize for Political Theory, 2023

"A rich meditation on how events prompt memories that open up new ways of seeing, thinking, acting, and being. Resounding Events is the story--often poignant, sometimes funny--of a working-class kid from Flint, Michigan, who became one of the most restlessly creative political theorists in America."--Michael J. Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?

"Drawing on memory as 'a series of echo chambers within which thinking vibrates, ' William Connolly elegantly weaves working class legacies and family affections into his half-century exploration of critical political theory and radical politics. Connollyʻs characteristic voice--urgent, galloping sentences; long, staccato lists; and wry, understated humor--invites us in."--Kathy Ferguson, University of Hawaiʻi

In Resounding Events, one of the world's preeminent political theorists reflects on a career as an academic hailing from the working class. From youthful experiences of McCarthyism, to the resurgence of white evangelicalism, to the advent of aspirational fascism and the acceleration of the Anthropocene, Connolly traces a career spent passionately engaged in making a more just, diverse, and equitable world. He surveys the shifting ground upon which politics can be pursued; and he discloses how to be an intellectual in universities that today do not encourage that practice.

Far more than a memoir, Resounding Events probes the concerns that have animated Connolly's work across more than a dozen books by tracing the bumpy imbrications of event, memory and thinking in intellectual life. The book shows how resonances between event and memory can help forge new concepts better adjusted to an emergent situation. Addressing tensions between working class experience and norms of the academy, his father's coma, antiwar protests, the growing disaffection of the white working class, the neoliberalization of the university, climate denialism, and his sister's experience with workers shifting to Trump, Connolly shows how engaged intellectuals become worthy of the events they encounter.

William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor at Johns Hopkins, where he teaches political theory.

Review Quotes

A rich meditation on how events prompt memories that open up new ways of seeing, thinking, acting, and being. The book is also the story--often poignant, sometimes funny--of a working-class kid from Flint, Michigan, who became one of the most restlessly creative political theorists in America. Resounding Events takes us on a riveting journey from the cruelties of late-modern capitalism to a spiritually generous account of what pluralism really means and bids us to become.---Michael J. Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?

Drawing on memory as 'a series of echo chambers within which thinking vibrates, ' William Connolly elegantly weaves working class legacies and family affections into his half-century exploration of critical political theory and radical politics. Connollyʻs characteristic voice--urgent, galloping sentences; long, staccato lists; and wry, understated humor--invites us in.---Kathy Ferguson, University of Hawaiʻi

About the Author

William E. Connolly (1938-2026) was Krieger-Eisenhower Professor at Johns Hopkins, where he taught political theory. His books include Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth (Duke, 2020), Aspirational Fascism (Minnesota, 2017), Facing the Planetary (Duke, 2017), Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Duke, 2008); Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minnesota, 1999), The Ethos of Pluralization (Minnesota, 1995), and The Terms of Political Discourse (Princeton, 1983, 3rd ed., 1993). In a poll of American political theorists published in 2010, he was named the fourth most influential political theorist in America over the last twenty years, after Rawls, Habermas, and Foucault.