Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Universalism and particularism, multiculturalism and social
control
The promotion of radical democratic pluralism fundamentally depends upon the
maintenance of the tension between opposed and mutually limiting social logics.
The principle of equality is ultimately incompatible with the principle of liberty.
Democracy, the participation of the many in decision-making, is ultimately opposed
to diversity, the defense of unassimilated difference. For Mouffe, these irreducible

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tensions are not fatal; on the contrary, they keep the very possibility of radical
democratic pluralism alive (Mouffe 1993b:133; Coles 1996:379).
The debates on multiculturalism turn precisely on this problem. The imperfect
communitarian mechanisms that we use to organize democratic participation can
threaten difference with assimilation, discipline, colonization and neutralization;
the diversity principle in this sense productively limits the democratic principle.
At the same time, the diversity principle can be mobilized to legitimate exclusionary
and reactionary demands by those social groups who wish to defend the privileges
that they have won thanks to the work of exploitative and oppressive structures.
Some Afrikaner South Africans have sought special education programs for their
children (Nkomo et al. 1995) while some white Americans from the South have
defended the Confederate flag. Both groups have made these arguments on the
grounds that the “special way of life” of their “minorities” ought to be defended.
Commenting on the deployment of the principle of “minority rights” by white
conservative South Africans in the post-apartheid era, Norval remarks that
although this tactic is launched in the name of democracy, it ultimately aims “to
foreclose [democracy’s] radically egalitarian thrust” (1996:279). Here the diversity
principle must be limited by the democratic principle; diversity rights should be
upheld only in the cases in which those rights do not contradict democratic values.
The evaluation of multiculturalism requires a differentiated approach to
difference. A voluntary multicultural program that serves an ethnic, racial, cultural,
gender or sexual minority that has been historically excluded from democratic