Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Pluralism, power and responsibility
With their numerous references to the complex nature of contemporary society,
and their embrace of a non-essentialist vision of social change, Laclau and Mouffe
may be misread as supporters of the liberal pluralist tradition. For a liberal pluralist
theorist such as Schumpeter or Dahl, every individual enters the political arena
with a more or less fixed set of interests. She pursues the realization of her
preferences by joining an appropriate interest group that competes with other
interest groups for political goods. Liberal pluralists generally assume that when a
group gains in one moment or in one sphere, it cannot translate its gain into a
trump card that ensures its success at other moments or in other places. The power
of a small wealthy group, for example, is supposed to be held in check by a poor
group because the latter has a larger number of voters. Competing elites are said
to check each other’s growth in power, such that, over time, power resources are
dispersed across multiple sites in the social (Green 1993b:6). Because she has
many different interests, however, the typical individual will affiliate with many
different interest groups over the course of her political activity.
The liberal pluralist image of multiple group membership resembles in some
small way the radical democratic pluralist conception of the overdetermination of
political subjects, but the resemblance goes no further. Liberal pluralist theory is
inherently anti-participatory: it reduces the role of the citizen to the periodic
selection, through elections, of a set of politicians who make the actual political
decisions on behalf of the citizen. The liberal pluralist model therefore reduces
democratic participation to voting in a market-like political system. The voter
becomes a consumer who chooses among the political goods offered by each party’s
set of politician-entrepreneurs. Her choices are supposed to be determined by her
own possessive individualist instrumental rationality, namely her fundamental drive
to maximize her political utility. Again, the interests of the citizen-as a benefit-
maximizing possessive individualist for whom the expenditure of energy in political