In writing this review of William E. Connolly’s most recent book, I heard the news of his passing on February 25, 2026. At once, the shock of this development transported me out of my normal complacency about reviewing a venerable political theorist’s most recent salvo in the world of contemporary political theory. If anything, it initiated a sudden shift in sensibility, jostling my perception of the totality of his work, renewing memories and experiences, but also energizing my critical capacities and possibilities. The current work, I think, stands nicely with three more recent works in Connolly’s extensive oeuvre—Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008), The Fragility of Things (2013), and Facing the Planetary (2017). Namely, in Stormy Weather, Connolly continues his trenchant analysis of the reasons behind our gradual descent into ecological catastrophe, our incessant engagement in rampant neoliberal capitalist extractivism and accumulation, and the growing and enticing lures toward fascism. Such an engagement with the multiple crises facing us in the early twenty-first century reflects Connolly’s life-long commitment to a multifaceted critique of the conditions of social, cultural, economic, and political life and to an unerring articulation of possible platforms and strategies for bringing about deeper forms of democracy, pluralism, economic justice, and ecological sustainability. Of course, Connolly’s critical practice has not stayed the same over the years and has taken on different theoretical guises, moving from an early commitment to a form of democratic socialism a la the early Marx, to a vibrant and productive version of Left Nietzscheanism that queried identity/difference in the context of diverse political and social movements churning in the aftermath of the “long sixties,” to an anti-capitalist “new materialism” that takes seriously the divergent, though intersecting, paths of human and nonhuman processes and practices under climate wreckage and ecological catastrophe. Needless to say, this latest book continues this overall trajectory, while finetuning the ideas that have been percolating and germinating in the most recent work.
What is unique about Connolly’s last work is how he constellates these earlier ideas within a broad decolonial focus. For Connolly, what needs to be critically engaged is the role of “lived cosmologies” that dominate the West and Global North, which helped to, in an earlier period, set the stage for the devastating forms of settler colonialism that cascaded throughout the Americas. These cosmologies later joined forces with the material emplacements of capitalist growth and expansion that have led to the current climate catastrophe, and, more recently, have germinated into the new fascist movements arising and gaining traction in the United States and Europe. For Connolly, a “lived cosmology … consists of embedded understandings about the beginning of the cosmos and earth, the trajectories time then follows, and unfolding relations between events and gods, god, or godless processes. A cosmology, oriented either to the priority of god(s) (and eminent causality) or to ungodly forces (and emergent causality), informs how people live” (p. 1). Importantly, the story he wishes to tell is really a story of two competing cosmologies with different tributaries and inflections, each of which “folds into specific institutional patterns of expectations and discipline, existential hopes, familiar stories, and spiritual anxieties” (p. 3). In elucidating these differing trajectories of existential lures and embodied sensibilities, Connolly wishes to illuminate the hidden, and not so hidden, snares that push toward particular approaches to the human, nonhuman, and (un)godly worlds, and which can help us to realize our imbrication within practices that continue to propel us toward “climate wreckage.” Such disclosures, crucially, could also point toward other streams of possibilities that inhere within the rich and diverse “pagan” matrix.
The first “cosmology,” which Connolly wishes to excavate and disinter, is linked to what is traditionally known as “pagan” beliefs within the West, but also circulates within past and present indigenous discourses, practices, and epistemologies. It assumes a notion of emergent causality, in which divergent human and nonhuman actors, agents, and forces intersect, circulate, and combine to produce aleatory and open assemblages with zig-zagging temporalities that express the ultimate tragic quality of the world we confront and experience. Here, Connolly mentions the diverse lineage of this multiplural discourse in the West that can be traced from Hesiod to Ovid to Thucydides to Prodicus, and from Friedrich Nietzsche to James Baldwin to Catherine Keller to Michel Serres. All in all, this particular cosmological orientation is one that flourished in the pre-Christian West and, in turn, continues to arise in a variety of guises within the minor traditions that flourish outside/within the hegemony of Christianity and secular humanism. What ultimately makes the pagan matrix so important to Connolly’s analysis is that it does not assume a linear concept of time, nor a dominant hierarchy of meaning and power. It is open to the way in which diverse agents and forces (many of which are nonhuman) are deeply imbricated within human praxis and shape how humans aspire toward their goals, commitments, and concerns. Only with a renewed pagan cosmology can one begin to deal with the ultimate drivers of our current trajectory of capitalist rapaciousness and exploitation, ecological disaster, and fascist insistences toward White supremacy and indigenous exclusion and destruction.
With this said, Connolly provocatively argues that an early conquest of pagan cosmologies within what would become Europe would set the stage for “second conquest” in the Americas associated with settler colonialism. In this cosmology, Augustine becomes a key representative, given both the centrality of his ideas concerning the dominance of a preordained and transcendentally determined cosmos guided by the Christian god and his active attempts to eradicate and destroy the remnants of pagan worldviews and religious practices during his lifetime. If pagan cosmologies exhibit an understanding and commitment to “emergent causality,” the Augustinian position takes its cue from Platonic ideas of transcendence in terms of power, virtue, and meaning, articulating a notion of “eminent causality” in which “the capacity of humans to choose freely, to worship a god, to practice virtue—can only find its source from a yet higher mode of complexity and power” (p. 62). Once the Augustinian discourse becomes deeply emplaced within Western culture and politics, it initiates a totalizing investment in eradicating that which does not fit its cosmological commitments—to devastating effects within the Americas and other colonized territories globally. Yet the Augustinian perspective is only one version of the way in which West began to withdraw from the lessons of the pagan matrix and institute, via the Enlightenment, a general move toward instilling universalist, transcendental and essentialist features in the deep structures of Western thought, elements that reify the human/nature, subject/object, and mind/body binaries, and which obstruct attempts to reckon with the current climate crisis.
Connolly basically makes two particular moves in his analysis that show the decolonial inflection of this book: first, he squarely places the origins of our current malaise and ecological devastation in the Augustinian-inspired “European drives to empire,” which “precede, include, and exceed capitalism, without (at the other extreme) being detached from it or reducible to eternal, genetic drives” (p. 181). While the imperatives and dictates of capitalist accumulation are central to understanding our current condition associated with the Anthropocene, “no economistic rendering …suffices to capture the diverse civilizational forces that infuse and press upon it” (p. 181). Such imperatives include the “distinctive spiritual demands to separate the highest humans from an inert nature, imperial drives, racialization, Christian notions of superiority…” (p. 180), Connolly argues. Second, he draws upon important elements of current indigenous cosmologies that circulate within Amazonian culture to rethink the European discourse on human exceptionalism, finding sustenance in their insistence on “multiplying lived subjectivities and exploring how multifarious relations between them may be established” (p. 157). In this respect, the “multiperspectivism” associated with such cosmologies helps to complexify the picture of our world and universe so as to fully appreciate the divergent intersecting forces and agents that impinge upon the potential for ecological sustainability during times of climate wreckage.
As he develops more fully in his earlier work, Facing the Planetary, Connolly suggests that we should engage in a multiscale “politics of swarming,” inspired by the pagan matrix, to “dramatize multiple species vitalities … and to become more militant in staging radical actions and strikes against old capitalist states and newer members of the high-extraction club” (p. 209). Yet, here, we are caught in a particular conundrum that derives from the very onto-political picture that Connolly wishes to paint: to conceive of a “world of becoming,” in which there is a plurality of forces, actors, and agents involved in mutually imbricated and aleatory trajectories, may ultimately allow us to better conceive of the stakes we confront today, but it also, by necessity, shrinks the actual role that humans can have in steering the ship away from the shoals of climate wreckage and toward eco-egalitarian ideals. This, as may be expected of a theorist so attuned to the importance of political transformation in his work, was not something lost on Connolly. As one of the most important exponents throughout his life of a version of critical political science, his theory represented a mode of critical optimism concerning the possibilities of bringing about radical transformations toward deeper forms of pluralism, democracy, and ecological sustainability consistently. We can only hope that a new generation of political theorists will take up the necessary task that Connolly’s work, in Stormy Weather as elsewhere, sets before us.
