Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

particularism as the universalism that can include all differences (1996g:24–5).
He contends that oppressed cultural and ethnic groups should both appropriate
the common values of their broader communities and engage in the struggle to
redefine those common values at the same time. He recognizes that emerging
racial and ethnic minorities perform valuable work when they bring the
exclusionary effects of our society’s common ideals to light, for they can thereby

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make way for the construction of a more democratic, egalitarian, and pluralistic
society (1996g:34).
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In these passages, Laclau identifies a key resistance tactic, namely the attempt
to undermine the hegemonic discourse’s universalistic pretensions by drawing
attention towards its particularistic dimensions. Where hegemonic discourse
promises to deliver “all things to all people,” or claims that it establishes neutral
standards that apply equally to everyone, resistance discourse aims to expose its
limits and to bring its exclusionary character to light. Marx, for example, insisted
that although the liberal democratic system promised to deliver equal rights to
every individual, it actually constructed the conditions in which the particularistic
interests of the bourgeoisie in exploiting the proletariat could be perpetuated
(1975a, 1975b, 1977). Where hegemonic discourse suppressed its literal character
during its ascendance in order to symbolize the principle of order itself, counter-
hegemonic discourse attempts to reverse that process by foregrounding its literality.
The ultimate aim of counter-hegemonic discourse, then, is to provoke an organic
crisis by attacking the hegemonic discourse’s universalistic pretension and its
metaphoristic operation (Norval 1996:274, 301–2). Laclau concludes,
The democratic process in present-day societies can be considerably
deepened and expanded if it is made accountable to the demands of large
sections of the population—minorities, ethnic groups and so on—who
traditionally have been excluded from it. Liberal democratic theory and
institutions have in this sense to be deconstructed.
(1996g:33)
Laclau therefore rightly differentiates his argument on universalism from
Eurocentric discourse. He also distances himself from yet another political strategy.
The construction of differential identities on the basis of total closure to
what is outside them is not a viable or progressive political alternative. It
would be a reactionary policy in Western Europe today, for instance, for
immigrants from Northern Africa or Jamaica to abstain from all