Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

participation,” but as a means for securing compromises between ruling elites
(Habermas 1975:123). To the extent that the liberal pluralist vision of the political
is successfully popularized, the fundamentally anti-egalitarian, anti-participatory,
and anti-liberatory aspects of the contemporary Western democratic systems are
insulated against radical democratic critique (Habermas 1975:123–4; Phelan
1990:438).

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Liberal pluralist theory therefore does not construct the critical tools that are
needed to detect the formation of identities, the rigidification of interests and the
monopolization of power (Cunningham 1987:165). Even Rawls, with his
commitment to an egalitarian form of liberal pluralism, cannot overcome the
limitations of this tradition. Liberal pluralist theory presupposes a power-free social
space in which new differences are merely added to the existing totality. Referring
to Rawls’ pluralism, for example, Mouffe writes, “Conflicts, antagonisms, relations
of power disappear and the field of politics is reduced to a rational process of
negotiation among private interests under the constraints of morality” (1993b:113).
Confronted with recalcitrant anti-liberals, Rawls simply asserts that their exclusion
from political conversations is a “moral requirement” that is produced by the “free
exercise of democratic public reason” (Mouffe 1996a:10). Consensus, according
to the liberal pluralists, is supposed to be achieved through rational discussion—
and rational criteria for limiting participation in that discussion—alone. Mouffe
points out that the rules that determine what counts as a “reasonable” argument
are themselves highly political (1993b:142–3). Power relations are constitutive of
discursive rules and identities; they cannot be ignored. Laclau and Mouffe take
subject positions, historic blocs social formations, and hegemonic power relations
as their units of analysis, rather than isolated individuals or naturalized interest
groups. Laclau and Mouffe contend that power does not come later to the subject;
the subject’s formation is a response to and an effect of antagonism and hegemony.
Liberal pluralism also fails to uphold radical democratic pluralism’s diversity
and autonomy principles. Rawls aims to protect plural differences only because he
takes the differentiated character of modern society as a “fact” and estimates that
the type of state coercion that would be needed to eliminate that difference would
be illegitimate. This approach amounts to the mere tolerance of social differences.
Radical democracy, by contrast, builds on Mill’s conception of self-determination:
it takes radical pluralism as “something to be celebrated and valued because it is a
condition for personal autonomy” (Mouffe 1993b:137). Once again, this principle
has a material dimension. The commitment to the promotion of democratic
pluralism must entail the social obligation to construct the conditions in which
self-determination for everyone—and especially for the traditionally
disempowered—becomes possible. In the United States, for example, progress
towards this goal could only be made after radical changes to the political system
and massive redistributions in income, employment, access to education and access
to health care took place.
Because power relations are integral to Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democratic
pluralist theory, their arguments imply that every privileged group has a profound
ethical responsibility with respect to rights. Rights are only won through
antagonistic conflict; “some existing rights have been constituted on the very
exclusion or subordination of the rights of other categories” (Mouffe 1992b:236).
Radical democratic pluralism therefore requires the dismantling of the systems of
rights that by their very nature block the democratic and egalitarian claims to
justice by those who have been disempowered by those systems. The dismantling

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of the rights of whites in post-apartheid South Africa to make way for equal rights
for blacks and a new democratic constitution is a case in point. Another example
would be the debate on “color-blindness” in the United States. Charging that
goods ought to be distributed in a “color-blind” manner, some white Americans
have described themselves as the victims of affirmative action programs. They
argue that the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and
1965 gave full citizenship rights to African-Americans and that henceforth every
racial group should receive exactly the same treatment. Neo-conservative jurists
have gone as far as to equate affirmative action with racism (Smith et al.1996;
O’Connor et al.1995). Again, a radical democratic pluralist approach to this issue
would consider the historical power relations that have obtained between the
different racial groups in the United States. Emphasis would be placed not just on
isolated hiring and admissions decisions, but on the structural patterns that have
led to the dramatic over-representation of blacks among America’s poor. Anti-
racism would not be simply thought in terms of “color-blindness” but in terms of
the structural reforms that are needed to redistribute power to those who have
been traditionally disempowered. Under the current conditions that prevail in
the United States, recognition of racial difference in the form of well-crafted
affirmative action programs would be one important aspect of these reforms
(Eisenstein 1994:39–69).
We have seen in this chapter that Laclau and Mouffe consistently differ with
liberal, communitarian and liberal pluralist theorists in the treatment of power
relations. Where some communitarians envision an ideal condition in which
citizens deliberate on the common good in a coercion-free environment, and
progress towards justice is made in each new era as laws and norms become
increasingly rational, Laclau and Mouffe insist on the centrality of political struggle.
Where liberals contend that the individual has the right to challenge her
community’s norms, they imagine her doing so from a power-free position outside
the social. Laclau and Mouffe argue that each political subject is always situated
in overdetermined force-fields that have been produced by multiple normative
systems, and that one gains the ability to loosen the grip of one of those normative
horizons only insofar as one identifies with a constellation of subject positions
within another horizon. Resistance against a dominant tradition cannot come
from a blank space; it can only be generated from oppositional traditions. Finally,
we have seen that the liberal pluralists, like the neo-conservatives, tend to ignore
the ways in which enduring power relations structure contemporary societies. I
will consider Laclau and Mouffe’s treatment of power relations in more detail in
the following chapter.

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5
POWER AND HEGEMONY
Laclau and Mouffe’s work on power relations constitutes one of their most
important contributions to social and political theory. Many of the approaches to
power that are central to the political theory tradition are incompatible with the
authors’ project. As we have seen, radical democratic pluralist theory contends
that all identities remain in some way open to contestation. As Bowles and Gintis
suggest, the models of social practice that we find in liberal and Marxist theory are
generally inadequate in this respect because they specify the contours of social
agency in advance, when in fact “individuals enter into practices with others not
only to achieve common goals but also to determine who they are and who they
shall become as social beings” (Bowles and Gintis 1986:150). Political struggles
do not merely realign already fully-constituted subjects. Every struggle entails the
far more profound process of working with partially formed popular identities and
reconstructing them according to the values of the warring forces. Laclau and
Mouffe have been at the forefront of the effort to develop a theory of power—or,
to follow their Gramscian terminology, hegemony—that is appropriate to this
specifically post-structuralist conception of identity. In this chapter, I will examine
Laclau and Mouffe’s approach to power and consider its implications for political
practice.