Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

participation may itself become too costly—are assumed to be atomistic and given
in advance (Macpherson 1977:77–86). Radical democratic pluralism, by contrast,
envisions participatory mechanisms through which rigid and antagonistic subject
positions might be transformed by their democratic interaction with other subject
positions.
Liberal pluralist theory also tends to celebrate the dispersal of power and
therefore fails to recognize the fact that power resources are in fact monopolized

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over time by dominant groups (Phillips 1993:145). Parenti notes that this process
is self-perpetuating since “those who enjoy access to resources are best able to
parlay such advantages into greater advantages, using the resources they already
possess to accumulate still more” (Green 1993a:189). Contemporary liberal
democratic systems may at times operate like the capitalist market in the sense
that they often tend towards political “equilibria” or the formation of relatively
stable points of consensus among competing elites. Those equilibria points,
however, are by definition equilibria that preserve and perpetuate fundamental
inequalities, for the “political market” is “oligopolistic” and responds most to those
with the greatest “purchasing power,” namely the social agents who already occupy
the dominant positions in power relations (Macpherson 1977:86–91). With the
neo-pluralists, such as Lowi and Lindblom, Laclau and Mouffe would affirm that
in contemporary Western societies, the state is hardly a “neutral referee,” for the
political “playing field” is fundamentally tilted in favor of large corporations and
wealthy individuals (Smith 1990:316–17). As Bachrach points out, the mainstream
elite theory of authors such as Kornhauser, Lipset, Truman and Dahrendorf can
serve as a legitimating ideology insofar as it “reflects…a receptiveness toward the
existing structure of power and elite decision making in large industrial societies”
(Green 1993a:126). Guinier (1991) and Hero (1992) further argue that the existing
pluralist political structures in the United States systematically exclude blacks
and Latinos from effective political participation.
Finally, liberal pluralist theory empties the ethical dimension out of the liberal
democratic tradition: democracy is defined as nothing but a sphere in which elite
groups compete with one another for the power to govern the whole of society.
The normative content of Mill’s theory—his insistence that a democratic society
should strive to maximize every individual’s powers to develop her human
capacities-is entirely absent from liberal pluralist theory (Macpherson 1977:78).
Democracy is assessed in an extremely narrow and mechanistic way according to
a set of procedural criteria such as universal suffrage, free speech, majority rule
and free periodic elections. More substantial concerns about the attainment of a
truly democratic culture are concealed or brushed aside. Bachrach contends that
for mainstream elite theory, “the charge…that the common [person] is not given
sufficient opportunity to participate in meaningful decision making and is therefore
deprived of an essential means to develop [her] faculties and broaden [her] outlook
is, under this concept, irrelevant” (Green 1993a:127). Liberal pluralism defines
democracy not as “the conditions under which all legitimate interests can be
fulfilled by way of realizing the fundamental interest in self-determination and