Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

University of California 1978; Richmond v. Croson, 1989; Metro Broadcasting v.
FCC 1990; Adarand Constructors v. Peña 1995; and Hopwood v. Texas 1996) cite
the same passages in the American Constitution, but offer radically different
interpretations of such basic concepts as “equality,” “racial classification” and
“compelling governmental interest.”
The problem of conceptualizing the relation between the individual and her
community positionings is centered on the definition of the principle of self-
determination. For Kymlicka, Kantian liberal theory does not actually construct
the individual as an atomistic entity. It does, however, reserve for the individual
the right to question the beliefs, values and traditions that have become normalized
within one’s community. Individuals may find themselves thrown into specific

---

S E L F - D E T E R M I N AT I O N , C O M M U N I T Y A N D C I T I Z E N S H I P
122
social roles, but they are not fully defined by those roles. The liberals contend that
they should be allowed to challenge any of the moral obligations that follow from
their communal memberships. It is only with this fundamental freedom of choice
that the individual can pursue a meaningful life. The liberals’ insistence on the
construction of a state that is neutral with respect to the common good arises
precisely from this concern. For the communitarians, by contrast, the common
good is supposed to operate not as a reflection of individual preferences but as a
standard by which individual preferences are evaluated. Where the liberals believe
that the moral individual should ask herself, “Who should I become?” the
communitarians would like her to attempt to discover who she already is by virtue
of her social positionings. From the communitarians’ perspective, the individual
can interpret the meaning of her roles, but she cannot reject them altogether as
worthless, for in the end, there is no self that is prior to the totality of one’s positions
in the community (Kymlicka 1990:204–15).
The communitarians therefore tend to remain silent on the following question:
if we did grant that the community’s tradition should operate as a moral horizon,
what would we establish as the moral obligations of those peoples who have been
systematically exploited and oppressed within that tradition? Hegel, for example,
allowed that in a corrupt regime, the outlaw who opposed her community’s
traditions could become a moral hero. It should be noted, however, that his heroic
outlaw figures, such as Socrates and Jesus, belonged to ancient communities. Hegel
maintained that ultimately, morality can only be achieved within a communal
setting, for it is only the community’s traditions that can give definitive content
to the individual’s decisions. A subject who finds herself in a transitional period
in which historical rationality has become corrupted must resort to her own
individualistic deliberation. Hegel assumed, however, that modern nation-states
were generally progressing towards the realization of an increasingly rational
morality. His faith in that progress was such that he believed that the modern
individual ought to determine her moral views with respect to her community’s
way of life in all but the most extraordinary conditions (Hegel 1953:39–43; Taylor
1975:376–8).
Hegel badly mis-judged the predominant moral traditions in contemporary
Western societies. If we follow the critiques by contemporary revolutionaries such
as Malcolm X (1965), the later Martin Luther King, Jr. (1991, 1968), and Angela
Davis (1981), then the concern of the Kantian liberals about the individual’s
right to self-determination remains well founded. The communitarians’ solution
to the traditions of exclusion, namely the simple inclusion of the previously
excluded, misses the point. Systematic forms of oppression such as racism are not
necessarily accidental to a communal tradition; they are often constitutive of their
basic principles. Further, the communitarians ignore the morality of radical
rebellion: militant workers; revolutionary blacks, Latinos, indigenous peoples and
other oppressed racial/ethnic minorities; feminist women; radical queers and many
others find their moral paths precisely by denouncing their assigned social roles
within traditional communities as worthless and by entering oppositional moral

---

S E L F - D E T E R M I N AT I O N , C O M M U N I T Y A N D C I T I Z E N S H I P
123
universes. Kymlicka concludes that what is needed in our diverse and historically
exclusionary societies is not heightened conformity with communal traditions
but the empowerment of the oppressed to define their own aims (1990:226, 229).
Kymlicka’s emphasis on the enduring presence of social structures of domination
is crucial. From Laclau and Mouffe’s perspective, both the liberals and the
communitarians ignore the impact of power relations and overdetermination when
considering communal obligations and the right to rebellion. The communitarian
call for respect for the authority of tradition is obviously problematic. The liberals’
suggestion that the individual should stand back from all of her positionings and
deliberate about their legitimacy is also impractical. Such a totally asocial self
would have no reason to make any choices. If we examine actual practices of
contemporary rebellion, however, we can observe the ways in which every
individual and group is always situated with respect to multiple traditions and
their corresponding moral obligations. A subject gains the ability to loosen the
grip that a corrupt tradition exerts over her identity only to the extent that an
oppositional tradition provides her with the solid ground from which rebellion
becomes possible. In Laclau and Mouffe’s post-structuralist terms, it is through
the discursive interruption of a “constitutive outside” that the democratic
revolution is extended and politicized resistance becomes possible. Every social
formation is destabilized by its “constitutive outside”: the antagonistic otherness
that simultaneously operates as its defining principle and lethal enemy (Mouffe
1994:107–10).
In some cases, destabilization effects can become transformed into useful tools
for resistance discourse. When the black power movement, for example, identified
the myth of an inclusionary liberal democratic America as a lie, and sought to
radicalize the masses of African-Americans vis-à-vis the moral bankruptcy of the
existing political and economic system, they drew upon numerous oppositional
traditions, such as African-American anti-racist resistance, global anti-colonial
struggles, the socialist tradition, and the most radical moments in the liberal
democratic tradition itself. Progressive black nationalists did not reject dominant
American values in order to enter an amoral world, and they did not step back
from all moral traditions into a blank space in order to deliberate. On the contrary,
they struggled to situate their revolutionary program as the embodiment of
oppositional traditions (Malcolm X 1965; Marable 1991; Brown 1992). In this,
and many other similar cases, the democratic revolution can be advanced by radical
disobedience to hegemonic values and by articulating new moral principles. Those
alternative principles are not conjured up out of thin air according to an individual’s
voluntaristic whim. They are drawn from a “constitutive outside”—the marginal
and even “foreign” traditions of resistance that have survived in the shadows cast
by the hegemonic value system.
Radical democratic pluralist theory therefore both borrows and departs from
the liberal and communitarian traditions. Communitarian theorists rightly reject
the claims of universal rationality; they favor instead a conception of morality
and rationality that is specific to particular historical traditions and communities.

---

S E L F - D E T E R M I N AT I O N , C O M M U N I T Y A N D C I T I Z E N S H I P
124
Like communitarianism, radical democratic pluralist theory is based on a
commitment to egalitarianism; the overcoming of domination, exploitation and
oppression; and to the supersession of the atomism, instrumentalism and alienation
that is specific to capitalism. Radical democratic pluralism, however, is also
fundamentally committed to a liberal pluralist vision of the social in which multiple
individual goods would be valued and the right to self-determination would be
upheld. Communitarianism recognizes the specificity of morality and rationality
for each particular community, but insufficiently values diversity within a single
community or tradition, and fails to address adequately the ways in which systematic
patterns of oppression can become central to a community’s “way of life.” Finally,
both the liberals and the communitarians do not pay sufficient attention to the
role of overdetermination: the fact that every individual is positioned vis-à-vis an
irreducible plurality of communities and traditions, and that every resistance is
fashioned out of the traces of oppositional traditions.