Resounding Events – Adventures of an Academic from the Working Class

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.