Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Mouffe’s theory of citizenship and Walzer’s spheres of justice
While Mouffe values citizenship as an identity that is central to the promotion of
radical democratic pluralism, she refuses to impose citizenship as the preconstituted
type of solidarity that would determine all other identities. Individuals should be
free to pursue their individual goods in their various spheres of interests, but they
should also develop at least a minimal common political identity through their
participation in the public debates in which shared political norms and rules are
constructed. The democratic principles of equality and liberty are in this sense a
peculiar type of common good: they constitute the only common good that can
be upheld without contradicting genuine rights to individual liberty and pluralist
self-determination (Mouffe 1993b:46–7). In Mouffe’s terms, citizens should be
bound together by a collective identification with a radical democratic
interpretation of the principles of liberty and equality, for it is the democratic
tradition that binds differences in the modern society together (1992b:236;
1993b:15–16).
With this approach, the citizen is no longer the passive recipient of rights whose
freedom resides in the sphere in which the sovereign remains silent. Further,
citizenship becomes the “articulating principle” through which the linkages
between each individual’s diverse memberships, and the linkages between
individuals and micro-communities, are mediated. As an articulation, the
constitutive logic works in all directions: citizenship shapes other memberships,
but it is in turn shaped by them as well (Mouffe 1992b:233–5). Again, it is only
when the conception of the social agent as pre-constituted and fixed is displaced,
and the social agent is conceived as the “articulation of an ensemble of subject
positions, constructed within specific discourses and always precariously and
temporarily sutured at the intersection of those subject positions,” that such an
approach to citizenship becomes thinkable (Mouffe 1992b:237).
Mouffe maintains that her theory of radical democratic pluralist citizenship
can actually work in a productive manner, in spite of the tensions that persist
between its basic concepts. Mouffe refers at this juncture to Walzer’s conceptions
of “complex equality” and multiple spheres of justice. Walzer argues that the
liberals’ and communitarians’ description of contemporary Western societies
are both partly correct. Although these societies are marked by profound forces

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of disintegration, they are also characterized by enduring social ties and political
traditions. Walzer points to, for example, the appropriation of the liberal
democratic tradition by the civil rights movement. Although this tradition can
be bent in an almost infinite number of political directions, he contends that it
still operates as a unifying horizon across multicultural America. He insists that
the best conception of the political subject is that of a rights-bearing, separate,
voluntarily associating, freely speaking liberal individual, but maintains that we
ought to teach individual selves “to know themselves as social beings, the
historical products of, and in part the embodiments of, liberal values” (Walzer
1990:21). For Walzer, a liberal democratic order operates best when it is subjected
from time to time to such a “communitarian correction.”
Walzer accepts that in contemporary societies, each individual operates in
many different social spheres, and that each sphere has a distinct set of criteria
by which the good is determined. Each member therefore has a plurality of goods:
“We require many settings so that we can live different kinds of good lives”
(Walzer 1992:99). It would therefore be unjust to impose a singular good and
set of criteria onto the whole community. Each social sphere is loosely defined
with respect to a specific set of social relations. The individuals who meet through
their interactions in one sphere may come from a plurality of cultural traditions,
but they nevertheless share a common pragmatic interest with respect to the
successful conclusion of relations in that sphere. Again, what counts as “success”
depends on the sphere in question: “success” in an economic sphere is of a
radically different order than that obtained in a kinship or religious sphere.
Because Walzer conceptualizes the social as an ensemble of spheres—loosely
defined with respect to practical relationships and pragmatic interests—rather
than culturally-defined “ways of life,” he is able to avoid the problem of cultural
norms that is built into Young’s model. Walzer concludes that justice would be
achieved insofar as the specificity of the criteria for determining the good is
respected within each sphere, and a person who is successful in one sphere is not
allowed to accumulate resources that could be used to obtain success in another
sphere (1983). For Walzer, some degree of economic inequality is in fact tolerable,
but the expansion of inequality into “domination and radical deprivation”
through the translation of economic success into trump cards in other spheres
should not be allowed (1992:100).
Phillips objects that Walzer creates such strong boundaries around each sphere
that a wrong being committed within one sphere could not be addressed by a
discourse that is mostly developed in another sphere (1993:156–68). While Walzer’s
primary concern remains the conversion of goods across different spheres, his
argument rests on the fairly reasonable assumption that his conversion ban would
either prevent the formation of monopolies or oligopolies in a single sphere, or
would at least make such concentrations of power more vulnerable to strong
challenges (1983:19, 117). He also readily admits that there is no necessary linkage
between a high degree of differentiation in a society and its just character. Tyranny
could indeed triumph in an autonomous sphere within a differentiated society

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(1983:315). Social differentiation on its own does not automatically give rise to
complex equality; progressive social change can only be achieved through
democratic struggle at the “local” level in each sphere and at the over-arching
level of citizenship. Further, Walzer maintains that appropriate principles of justice
should prevail in each sphere. With respect to the capitalist market, Walzer does
not merely argue that a gain in the market should not be allowed to become the
basis for power in other spheres; he also contends that the principle of free exchange
should govern relations within the market sphere (1983:120–1). Where sphere
boundary disputes arise, Walzer rightly suggests that they ought to be addressed in
the political sphere, and that the state ought to play the crucial role of sphere
boundary guardian (1983:121–2, 281, 319).
Walzer’s conversion ban could in fact create favorable conditions for radical
social change. If, for example, relations in the kinship sphere, such as the
patriarchal nuclear family and heterosexual marriage, were completely detached
from their numerous supports in the state and religious spheres, the lesbian and
gay challenges to these institutions would benefit enormously. Walzer anticipates
that a shift towards an autonomous kinship sphere would render the family much
more fragile and open to democratic challenge (1983:241–2). Far from embracing
an agnostic laissez-faire attitude, Walzer insists that an appropriate principle of
justice ought to prevail in each sphere, that the boundaries of each sphere should
always remain open to contestation, that debates between the discourses that
emerge in different spheres should be encouraged, and that interventions by a
democratic state are needed to sustain democratic associations within civil society
(1993:319; 1992:100–1).
Indeed, because the democratization of the state is crucial to the creation of
democratic associations, Walzer, like Mouffe, holds that citizenship must be
privileged over all other memberships (1992:104–5). A state apparatus that would
enhance radical democratic pluralism could not be neutral. It would have to refrain
from undue intervention in various social spheres such that genuine multicultural
rights to self-determination would be upheld, but it would also have to promote a
specifically democratic form of citizenship in a vigorous manner. Public schools,
for example, should be operated in such a way that they reflect the special needs,
interests and identities that flourish in the particular communities that they serve.
But the schools must also teach children the skills that prepare them to take up
civic roles in the larger community, such as respect for diversity and cooperation
across differences (Walzer 1983:223).
Notwithstanding Walzer’s substantial contribution to radical pluralist thought,
his emphasis on the nation-state as the primary site of political identification
suppresses the value of transnational movements and thereby impoverishes the
whole concept of democratic citizenship (Connolly 1995: xxviii, 146–9). As a
fixed territorial imaginary, the nation-state framework is somewhat obsolete in
an era in which transnational capital is becoming more prominent. If we granted,
for example, that one’s political obligations ought to correspond in part to one’s
ability to earn a profit from other people’s labor, what effective citizenship would

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we establish for a New York investment banking executive who manages complex
international portfolios or a computer software engineer who writes programs
in his Colorado home for a German-Japanese-American media conglomerate?
New York City taxes people who live elsewhere but work in the metropolitan
area on the grounds that they consume public goods and services just like
everyone else. Capital, however, often enjoys massive public subsidies through
its hidden transnational consumption of public goods and services. What are,
for example, the political obligations of wealthy American shareholders in the
corporate agri’ cultural sector towards foreign communities when their companies
purchase the labor of immigrant farm workers at bargain-basement prices, keep
the surplus value from that labor, and then send them back to their home
countries, without paying a penny towards the public cost of the reproduction
of that labor from cradle to grave—the workers’ health care, education, pensions
and so on? What are, for that matter, the international political obligations of
all wealthy share-holders—regardless of their nationality—in the transnational
companies that are reaping super-profits through their exploitation of “Third
World” labor? Clearly, there are no simple solutions to these problems, but an
exclusive emphasis on nation-state territoriality only renders contemporary
political theory increasingly anachronistic. Nation-state-centric theory also
virtually erases transnational forms of political activism. The stories of
movements such as the Women in Black, an anti-war coalition between Serbian
and Bosnian women (Eisenstein 1996:167–9), Stitch and Madre, American
feminist organizations that work with women in Central America (Flanders
1997:70, 240, 260, 273), and joint American-Mexican labor movements aimed
at organizing independent unions in the maquiladora sector (Dillon 1997), are
rendered irrelevant by a political theory that conceptualizes political participation
solely in terms of nation-state frontiers.
Mouffe argues that Walzer provides one of the best frameworks for
conceptualizing radical democratic pluralism’s embrace of the simultaneous pursuit
of egalitarianism and the preservation of liberty (1992:7–8). Like Walzer, Mouffe
contends that we need to guard against the excessive accumulation of power in
one group or in one social sphere. The democratization of the economy and the
state should be accompanied by the decentralization of power such that diverse
social associations obtain effective decision-making authority (Mouffe 1993b: 100).
She further contends that the multiple spheres in the social should not be thought
in terms of the traditional private/public distinction, for each sphere has both a
private and public dimension. The individual’s practices in each sphere are “public”
in the sense that they must conform in some minimal way to the rules established
by the political regime. In this sense, the régime regulates the “grammar” of the
citizen’s conduct. These political rules reflect the prevailing hegemonic order; in
a radical democratic pluralist society, they would tend towards an ideal point in
which egalitarianism and individual liberty would both be maximized. A radical
democratic pluralist society’s rules would refrain as much as possible from regulating
the content of the individual’s actions and utterances. The “private” sphere of the

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individual’s choices would thereby be protected from illegitimate “public”
intervention (Mouffe 1992b:237–8).
The “public” rules in a radical democratic pluralist society would enhance the
conditions necessary for the promotion of challenges to all forms of domination.
Democratizing institutions would never remain agnostic vis-à-vis the perpetuation
of domination within a specific social sphere (Mouffe 1993b:84). Again, different
social movements working against domination in different spheres should be
articulated together such that the various democratic struggles would begin to
influence each other. In this manner, a “chain of equivalence” would be formed
wherein each struggle would retain its specificity, but would also bear within it the
traces of the democratic wisdom found in its sister struggles. A democratic “we” is
constructed as this chain is opposed, in a symbolic or actual tactical manner, to a
“them”: the forces of inequality and domination (Mouffe 1993b:84–5). If the “we”
of the citizens is brought together negatively in this sense—as it stands opposed to
the “them”—the “we” also has a positive dimension. Allegiance to democratic
institutions and identification with the principles of equality and self-determination
must be fostered among the diverse social groups (Mouffe 1993b:151).
Thinking democratic political struggles in terms of the construction of chains
of equivalence also provides a practical means for dealing with the inevitable
tension between “equality” and “difference.” “Equality” is often misunderstood
as the complete elimination of difference. Feminists, for example, have debated
whether women should demand rights on the grounds that they are “the same as
men,” or on the grounds that they are essentially “different from men.” Scott
remarks that “equality” and “difference” should not be viewed as utterly
antithetical. Citing Walzer, she contends that egalitarianism can be considered
not as the total elimination of difference, but as the act of temporarily ignoring
certain differences for specific purposes in a given situation (Scott 1988:172–
3). In certain cases, we should ignore the differences in the wealth that is held
by two different citizens—in voting, for example—in other cases, we should
acknowledge that difference as requiring an appropriate remedy—through
redistributive taxation and governmental programs. While the logic of
egalitarianism ultimately does come into conflict with the logic of diversity,
some temporary compromises can be worked out. By conceptualizing democratic
struggles as the construction and mobilization of chains of equivalence that
would, by their very nature, acknowledge and value difference, Mouffe’s theory
provides a useful solution to this dilemma.
Furthermore, resistance to domination would ideally take a “grassroots” form.
Resistance strategies would seek, first and foremost, to work with the organic
philosophies of resistance that are already in motion within the sphere in question,
and to use them as a basis for further radicalization. Articulating linkages between
grassroots groups would be subsequently promoted. Only when those grassroots
forms of resistance had developed and matured to the point that they could take
on leadership roles would efforts to coordinate the struggle from the bureaucratic
level of state or party agencies be launched. The aim throughout the process would

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be to enhance mobilization, self-determination and empowerment from below,
and to guard against bureaucratization and containment from above.
The radical democratic pluralist approach to the expansion of democratic
diversity never stops short at the mere inclusion of a new difference. The best
regime would be one in which individuals of different genders, religions, races,
ethnicities and sexualities were granted equal rights. Beyond this, however,
traditionally disempowered minority groups would also have access to the material
means that they need to sustain their particular way of life. As Gutmann contends,
“Liberal democratic states are obligated to help disadvantaged groups preserve
their culture against intrusions by majoritarian or ‘mass’ cultures” (1992:5). Once
again, this raises the thorny question of cultural norms and the complex problem
of institutionalizing distributive justice in hybrid social formations. Which
multicultural programs are genuinely oppositional and which ones are really just
pacifying diversions that conceal education cuts? Which kind of lesbian and gay
relationships ought to be officially recognized? How exactly should affirmative
action programs be designed ? The temporary solutions that we implement will
have to be carefully shaped with reference to prevailing historical conditions.
The legal disputes on affirmative action in the United States, for example, often
turn precisely on the question of what historical data is admissible as evidence,
and how the boundaries of the relevant social context should be drawn. We should
expect even greater conflict on these issues. In every case, however, fundamental
human rights must remain primary. The right to cultural survival—the right to
defend, for example, the French language and francophone culture in Québec—
must never be given precedence over basic human rights such as gender equality
or free speech (Taylor 1992:58–9).
Kymlicka’s contribution to the multiculturalism debate is particularly helpful
with regard to the inadequacies of liberalism’s neutral state. For Kymlicka, liberal
individualists from across the political spectrum have placed too much faith in
the individual human rights model. Developed after the Second World War, the
latter seeks to protect racial and ethnic minorities by guaranteeing basic civil
rights and political rights for every citizen regardless of her group membership.
Kymlicka suggests that the human rights model reproduces the liberal democratic
solution to religious conflicts. Just as the doctrine of church/state separation bans
state intervention on behalf of a specific religious minority, so too does the
individual human rights model ban the state from recognizing permanent racial
and ethnic differences. In practice, however, the neutral state model has all too
often resulted in the subjection of disempowered minorities to the will of the
majority. Kymlicka concludes that individual human rights principles must be
supplemented by a liberal theory of minority rights (1995).
Under radical democratic pluralism’s diversity principle, the democratic
demands of the newly included group must be satisfied as much as possible. Further,
the democratic impact that is created as the new group’s demands are met should
be transmitted throughout the social system: the particular identities within that
system should be reconstructed and citizenship—the articulating principle that

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links all of these identities together—should be renegotiated in a more democratic
manner. The newly recognized groups should not be treated as the childlike
recipients of the established group’s generosity; where appropriate, they should be
recognized as valuable teachers who can reveal the anti-democratic moments
within the established group’s tradition and provide alternative solutions.
The democratic critique offered by the newly recognized group becomes all the
more valuable to the extent that the established group’s tradition has declined
into increasingly rigid and ossified forms of closure. Citing Derrida’s L’autre cap,
Mouffe defines diversity in a radically anti-assimilationist manner.
If we conceive of this European identity as a “difference to oneself,” as
“one’s own culture as someone else’s culture,” then we are in effect
envisaging an identity that accommodates otherness, that demonstrates
the porosity of frontiers, and opens up [our identity] to that “exterior”
which makes it possible. By accepting that only hybridity creates us as
separate entities, it affirms and upholds the nomadic character of every
identity.
(1994:111)
Many practical steps need to be taken to realize the democratic potential of this
anti-assimilationist approach. Cultural minorities should generally have access to
the resources that they need to sustain their traditions. This does not mean,
however, that the state should take a neutral position with respect to a minority’s
illiberal practices. The rights of a cultural minority end where that group attempts
to limit basic human rights and to censor internal dissent. Religious minorities in
the United States and Canada such as the Amish and the Mennonites currently
enjoy an exemption from laws that impose mandatory education for children on
the grounds that such an experience would weaken their communities by opening
their children to outside influences (Kymlicka 1995:41). The state has a legitimate
interest, however, in providing for the exposure of every resident child to basic
democratic, egalitarian and pluralist values. The religious community leaders should
have no power to stop a young adult from choosing to leave the community; nor
should they have any power to stop them from accumulating the tools that would
help them to make a sound decision in this respect.
If, to take another example, two rival leaderships of an immigrant community
emerge, and the first proposes a multicultural curricula for a local public school
while the second proposes compulsory sex-segregated schools with a dogmatic
religious fundamentalist curricula, then the first proposal must be chosen over the
latter. The claim of cultural authenticity and an oppositional stance against Western
imperialism should never be allowed to trump basic human rights such as gender
equality and liberal democratic principles such as the separation of church and
state. It is of course problematic to state this argument in isolation, for the risk is
that it will be used to perpetuate the myth that the West is inherently prodemocracy
and that the worst threats to democracy come from outside the West. If we take

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the pursuit of radical democratic pluralism seriously, we will in fact find that some
of the most serious attacks against the democratic revolution are coming from
predominantly Western sources, and that non-Western traditions can become
effective resources for progressive social change.
Liberal individualists in university administrations, judicial positions and
parliamentary settings alike generally argue that any recognition of group rights
will inevitably contradict individual rights and take us down the slippery slope of
social disintegration. Once again, Kymlicka provides a useful framework for the
consideration of this question. Group rights can be defined as “internal restrictions”:
the right of a collectivity to limit the freedom of its members in order to safeguard
what the group’s most influential leaders construct as its “traditional way of life”
and “shared values.” Group rights, however, can also be defined as “external
protections,” as the right of a minority to remain free from economic exploitation
and political domination by a more powerful majority.
“Internal restrictions” usually contradict human rights and therefore deserve
strict scrutiny. If, for example, Irish lesbian and gays are not allowed to participate
fully in Irish community events on the grounds that homosexual acts are sinful
under Catholic doctrine and Catholic doctrine defines the Irish identity,
appropriate state agencies ought to intervene to protect this sub-group from
exclusion. “External protection” claims, by contrast, may be entirely compatible
with liberal democratic pluralist principles. The endorsement of this principle
would not in itself lead to a chaotic situation in which virtually any minority
could make virtually any claim. Public policies based on “external protection”
claims ought to reflect the relative degree of systemic disadvantage suffered by a
given social group, as measured in terms of historical data relating to discrimination
patterns, material well-being, the group’s position in the cultural market and its
ability to participate equally in the political system.
Furthermore, properly crafted policies of this kind, such as those that secure
affirmative action for African-Americans, land entitlement for the indigenous
peoples, or the survival of the French language in Québec, may enhance individual
rights. Kymlicka insists that we ought to understand individual rights as entailing
the freedom to develop one’s own special talents and to form and to revise one’s
understanding of the good life. As we have seen, subject positions in Laclau and
Mouffe’s theory are never constructed in isolation; they only become meaningful
through differential relations with other subject positions and with respect to a
prevailing political imaginary. Kymlicka similarly contends that individuals can
only deliberate and make choices in a meaningful way to the extent that they can
situate themselves with respect to viable cultural traditions. Individual freedom is
therefore inextricably linked to one’s access to cultural resources; the self-
determining individual must be able to give concrete content to her identity by
locating herself within a vibrant cultural tradition that is not threatened by extreme
pressures from a dominant culture. At the same time, individual freedom also
entails the right to step back from the cultural space into which one is thrown,
and to select alternative moral horizons. An individual’s cultural rights therefore

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also entails the right to engage in vigorous dissent within one’s cultural space, to
participate in hybridized combinations of multiple cultural traditions, and to move
into an alternative cultural space (Kymlicka 1995).
From this perspective, then, multicultural diversity is not antithetical to
individual freedom; on the contrary, the protection of the democratic elements in
minority cultures from the pressures of the dominant culture is one of the basic
conditions for individual freedom. Kymlicka’s solution, however, only works where
a strong consensus prevails on the question of the minority’s membership. The
ban on internal restrictions does not necessarily prevent exclusions from the group
that receives the external protection benefits. Native peoples, for example, are
sometimes divided on the question of membership qualifications in their tribal
group, and some of their disagreements turn on gendered definitions of kinship
relations.
Minority communities should be granted access to public debates where they
can express their critique of the dominant community’s culture and political
tradition in an effective manner. If a dominant community has decided to grant
entry to immigrant populations, it must not be allowed to use these people merely
as a source of cheap labor without any regard to their rights and quality of life. Nor
should it be allowed to demand total assimilation according to the values of the
dominant culture as the price of inclusion. If a dominant community has emerged
out of traditions of genocide, displacement and slavery with respect to indigenous
peoples, colonized groups and imported slaves, it must acknowledge its substantial
political and economic obligations towards the descendants of these peoples.
Democratic inclusion must entail a redistribution of material resources from the
wealthiest to the poorest, and redistributions should criss-cross the boundaries
between the dominant community and the minority communities where necessary.
The minority communities’ right to self-determination is meaningless without
access to resources such as health care, housing, employment, education, majority
language training and minority language preservation programs, access to the media
and the culture industry, access to political representation, and so on. In some
cases, such as that of the indigenous peoples, what is required is not just access to
mobile resources but the right to establish self-government and territorial
sovereignty as well.