The Deep Biology of Politics: A Reminder

William Connolly, you may be surprised to discover, is a political scientist. "Impossible!" you argue: "He's a biologist! He's a philosopher! He's a climatologist! He's a self-help guru!" Yet a careful examination of the institutional and historical record shows that his official status is as a political scientist: he teaches politics, he is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, the catalogical terminology on the back covers of his books often (though not always) say "political science" or "political theory."A question insinuates itself: How does this identity comport with his essay in this journal, which seems more to be about evolutionary biology than about politics (Connolly IN PRESS)? One might first expect it to be an expansion of the field of politics into a seemingly unrelated field, a new and creative use of the biological sciences to illuminate the inherent materialism and nuances of humans who engage with the powers of one another and the world at large. But the connection is far deeper, far more historically nuanced, than it would first appear. For what Connolly has done, here, has not been the introduction of new scientific concepts into our understanding of politics, but rather a returning to the roots of the discipline, working and reworking the foundations of politics as a disciplinary locus. He is, in other words, reexamining and reinscribing the central relationship in the history of political science.This response, then, is an excavation of this relationship. Although my essay here is not precisely a critique of Connolly's essay, it also is not exactly an explanation or a further development. The reader looking for resources to further analyze Connolly's work, either from a friendly or unfriendly location, will be disappointed. Instead, it is better understood as a set of reminders: reminders to Connolly, to other political theorists, and to the discipline as a whole.Reminders tend to be slightly unpleasant (if you were entirely looking forward to a task, you would not need one), but they also promise the return of a self who had threatened to disappear (the person who feared you would be so absorbed in your present task that you would forget the responsibility you have now reminded yourself about). Those who practice political science, whether with positivist, hermeneutic, quantitative, poststructural, game-theoretic, or phonetic approaches, occasionally need such reminders, especially to note how our practices and procedures contain old and sometimes antiquated presumptions. Unlike the modes of creativity that interests Connolly, a creativity that is future-oriented and emergent, reminders are historically caught up in the times of the past. But these pasts are also pluripotential, sites of manifold uncertainties and possibilities, rather than realms of settled causality.Taking the Brute Out of MaterialismFor more than a decade, now, Connolly has been turning to the non-social, or "hard," sciences to make sense of certain formulations of logic, ideas, and the strange matrices of individuation and collective identity that make up political attitudes and identities. From Neuropolitics to The Fragility of Things to the current essay, Connolly has used neuroscience, climate predictions, and even Darwinian biology to expand the ways in which politics must take into account the material world. In each, the complexities of bodies, systems, and the world as a whole are brought to bear upon the social presumptions that make up the contemporary condition (Connolly 2002, 2013). A complex and nuanced view of recent scientific insights, Connolly argued, could illuminate the usual suspects of politics, such as interest groups, ideologies, or institutions.For many theorists, this turn was shocking: we had been trained to distrust material and scientific claims to truth. Science, most political theorists held, attempted to solidify and depoliticize. …