Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Laclau and Mouffe reply to the liberals and communitarians
With the liberals, Laclau and Mouffe caution against the imposition of a substantial
conception of the common good. They would agree with Berlin, for example,
when he asserts that human values are so irreducibly plural that they cannot be

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reconciled in the form of a substantive common good (Berlin 1984:29–34). Laclau
and Mouffe also share Rawls’ view that the plurality in individuals’ conceptions of
their own good is a good in itself. Different individuals should be given the freedom
to determine and to pursue their own good. Where others offer us opinions as to
what our good should be, their views should never be raised above the status of
advice (Rawls 1971). Laclau and Mouffe would prefer Rawls’ skepticism about
our ability to know the good of the other over Sandel’s optimistic claim that
insofar as we are members of the same community and therefore bound together
by a shared discourse, we can substantially reduce the opacity between us (Sandel
1982:172). Where the communitarians represent political debate as a peaceful
and benevolent conversation between friends in which one’s best course of action
is determined through harmonious dialogue (Sandel 1982:181), Laclau and Mouffe
would invoke the Foucauldian principle of the ubiquity of domination and
resistance in all discursive situations.
Furthermore, Rawlsian liberalism combines its pluralistic perspectivism on the
question of the good with a prioritization of individual rights. It maintains that in
a well-ordered society, citizens ought to hold the same principles of right and the
same principles by which conflicting claims are heard and decided. Here perhaps
Laclau and Mouffe are lacking. After advising us not to place all our hopes in
institutionalist solutions, they offer neither substantially developed alternatives
nor extensive comments on specific debates about rights. Laclau and Mouffe do
establish several limitations to their autonomy principle. They insist that each
progressive struggle ought to reconstruct its identity with respect to the others’
demands (Mouffe 1996b: 247). Further, they maintain that difference should be
celebrated as a positive good, but only insofar as difference does not promote
domination and inequality (Mouffe 1992a:13). From this perspective, the right to
self-determination for all social groups must be upheld, except where the exercise
of that right stops a traditionally disempowered group from achieving equality.
Laclau and Mouffe would not extend autonomy rights, for example, to a dominant
group that wanted to trump the equal rights claim of a subordinate group in the
name of the preservation of its special way of life. The authors clearly state at
many junctures that radical democratic pluralism does not tolerate domination in
any form; as such, domination cannot be allowed to advance in the name of self-
determination. For Mouffe, an “extreme pluralism” that values all differences
equally in an unlimited manner suppresses the political, for it blocks us from
recognizing the ways in which some differences are constructed as relations of
subordination (1996b:246–7).
Mouffe is nevertheless right to take issue with some aspects of Rawls’ argument.
Against Rawls, she maintains that pluralism is not just a given condition that has
to be accepted, but is “constitutive of modern liberal democracy” (1996b: 246).
The task, then, is not just to cope with the fact of pluralism but to create the
conditions in which radical democratic forms of plural differences would thrive.
She also takes issue with Rawls’ circular argument that “political liberalism can
provide a consensus among reasonable persons who by definition are persons who

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accept the principles of political liberalism” (1996b:250). With this circular logic,
Rawls dismisses anti-liberals as unreasonable persons.
Mouffe explicitly accepts one aspect of Rawls’ argument, namely his insistence
that a just society cannot tolerate an infinite diversity with respect to the principles
of political association. How could a just society, for example, provide infinitely
tolerant conditions for fascists ? For Mouffe, however, Rawls deals with the problem
of setting the appropriate limits to pluralism by resorting to exclusionary definitions
of rationality. Rawls himself admits that rational agreement with respect to religious
and philosophical doctrines is impossible, but suggests that we can relegate our
inevitable disagreements on these issues to the private sphere, such that we will
be able to obtain a reason-based consensus in the public sphere. Mouffe, by contrast,
insists that when we struggle to define the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate
political principles, we are engaging in profoundly political struggles that cannot
be resolved by appeals to neutral rational standards. Rawls’ ideal image of a society
in which political contestation has been overcome, or at least greatly minimized,
also leaves no legitimate space for dissent. Dissenters in his best society would be
“irrational” or “unreasonable” persons. Mouffe’s concern is that without the
preservation of a legitimate space for genuine dissent, the unpredictable harms
that could be caused by even the most apparently progressive institutions would
not be revealed and addressed (1996b).
Against the Kantian liberals, Laclau and Mouffe share with the communitarians
the conception of the political subject as a socially-positioned self—the product
of the articulation of multiple subject positions that are in turn inscribed within
diverse social relations (Mouffe 1993b:97). Insofar as each subject position preserves
within itself traces of past articulations even as it is transformed through
articulation, it brings with it elements of previously sedimented shared traditions.
Taken together, the traces accumulated by the ensemble of subject positions create
a somewhat open and flexible moral horizon. As an incomplete horizon, it cannot
supply a substantial answer to specific moral questions, but it can at least provide
a framework for deliberation. If we can always assume that every individual is
situated with respect to multiple social solidarities through her positioning within
common traditions, we can never predict exactly what type of solidarity will prevail.
Laclau and Mouffe would agree with the Kantian liberals that a particular
commonality is like a contingent “good” in the sense that it may or may not be
constructed. However, where the Kantian liberals are content to designate
commonality as a good that may or may not be chosen, such that that choice
remains the product of an inscrutable accident, Laclau and Mouffe would insist
upon the constitutive effects of the strategic conditions in which competing
movements and social forces struggle to define the community.
Laclau and Mouffe therefore agree with the communitarians insofar as the latter
replace the Kantian liberals’ tendency towards arguments based on abstract
universalist hypothetical conditions with their explicit recognition of the
community-and tradition-specific character of the individual’s positioning. They
nevertheless sharply oppose the communitarians in many respects. Communitarians

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envision a rational succession of institutionalized moral frameworks, as a new
framework wins legitimacy and displaces the old one only insofar as it provides
better explanations of the previous framework’s failures and incoherences—better,
that is, according to the standards of the previous framework—and furnishes new
solutions (Maclntyre 1983:591). Power relations are virtually absent from this
account. For Laclau and Mouffe, by contrast, political struggle is ubiquitous; the
very notion of a power-free moral standard—however “rational” it may appear—
is impossible. Laclau and Mouffe do not return to the Thrasymachean position,
namely that justice is simply the will of the strongest. Power does nevertheless
shape the rules of legitimation and the determination of the contexts in which
those rules obtain (Lyotard 1984:47).
Where one moral argument prevails over another—where slavery, for example,
becomes widely understood as an unacceptable condition—it does so thanks to
political struggle, a process that redefines the very standards by which moral
arguments are assessed. Political struggles are precisely contests about moral
standards; changes in moral standards are never the straightforward products of a
tradition’s rational unfolding. Values are determined in struggle and embodied in
traditions of struggle; they are tested and re-articulated in conditions of struggle.
The pragmatic demands of a people in struggle are such that values are always
subject to some degree of redefinition. What people of color and anti-racists need
to include in the definition of racism, for example, has shifted to some degree in
the America of Reagan, Bush and Clinton, and yet retains many aspects from the
older concept of racism under slavery, imperialism and “Jim Crow” segregation.
The communitarian claim that each individual is located within a community
and that that community’s traditions operate as a moral horizon for her is also
problematic. For if every tradition is constructed, passed down through generations,
interpreted and reapplied in conditions of struggle, then it is by definition always
multiple in character. As Berlin insists, the ends within a single tradition—even if
we could assess those ends from a single common perspective—are plural and can
never be harmonized (1984:29–31). In actual history, political ends are never
assessed from a single common perspective. There will always be clashes between
different traditions and within a single tradition. The vigorous debate in the United
States on affirmative action is a case in point: all sides in the key cases (Bakke v.