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Your Ontology, My Ontic Speculations … on the Importance of Showing One's (Ontological) Working

In a discipline such as ours, in which all contributions are necessarily preliminary – and should perhaps best be seen as openings to potential conversations rather than definitive statements in their own right – it is always pleasing to have one's work engaged with explicitly and directly. Yet the satisfaction that comes with a new opportunity for a fresh conversation about ontology in political analysis is tempered on this occasion by the length of the charge sheet in front of me. In the space of approximately 3,400 words, Nigel Pleasants accuses me of many things. My article on ‘King Canute and the “Problem” of Structure and Agency’ (Hay, 2009), he suggests, is part of a broader ‘crusade’, of which I am a ‘chief protagonist’ (Pleasants, 2009, p. 885), to convert political analysts to the value of arrant, arid and ultimately unhelpful ontological reflection, foisting this on unwitting and unwilling students of political science to boot. Even taken on its own terms, my contribution is flawed in almost all significant respects. It rests, it seems, on the false premise that ontological reflection is an aid to a reflective political analysis, it fails to differentiate between genuine ontologies (deserving of their designation as ‘ologies’) and mere ontic speculations, superstitions and hunches, it achieves no fresh analytical purchase on the story of King Canute and the waves and it adds next to nothing to our understanding of the structure-agency relationship. In fact, were we to bracket out the (numerous) references to structure, agency and ontology that litter the text, we would find ‘that nothing of significance is … lost to the historical and political analysis of the story of King Canute’ (p. 891). Indeed, ‘neither Canute himself, nor the current-day reader … need know anything about theories of structure and agency or “ontological reflection” in order to conceive or understand those events' (p. 891).