Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Introduction
1 Laclau and Mouffe’s critics include Burawoy (1990), Callinicos (1989), Dickens (1990),
Eagleton (1991), Geras (1987, 1988), Hunter (1988), Massey (1992), Mouzelis (1988),
Osborne (1991), Rustin (1988) and Wood (1986).
2 I would like to acknowledge my debt to my University of Toronto and York University
teachers, especially Dušan Pokorný, Gad Horowitz, Alkis Kontos, Frank Cunningham,
Harvey Dyck, Donna Andrew, Mel Watkins, David Wolfe, Bob Gallagher, Sue Golding
and Juan Maiguashca.
1 Retrieving democracy: the radical democratic imaginary
1 On the concept of institutions, I am following Balibar’s definition: “As for ‘institution’,
it is generally a name signifying that any human practice involves a certain distribution
of statuses (or obligations) and functions (utility, efficiency, communication), susceptible
of being expressed and legitimated in discourses—whether they be codes, stories or
programs” (1995:183; original emphases).
2 Laclau and Mouffe’s interpretation of Arendt’s term, “the social,” is quite similar to
that of Fraser. Like Fraser and Arendt, they understand the social as a space that has
emerged within modernity, and that tends to embrace both the private and the public
spheres. With Fraser, however, they would oppose Arendt’s understanding of the private/
public distinction as an appropriate expression of the human condition. They would
also support Fraser insofar as she values the politicization of heretofore “private” needs
as a positive development, and contends that that process does not necessarily lead to
the triumph of bureaucratization and instrumental rationality (1989:160).
3 For a critique of Tocqueville’s pluralism, which was developed in part out of his extremely
hostile and distorted representation of the American native people as nomadic savages,
see Connolly (1995:163–73).
4 Many would argue that the upward mobility of white ethnic groups such as the Irish
immigrant population proves that the United States is a basically meritocratic society,
with the implication that impoverished minorities have only themselves to blame for
their condition. For a refutation of this “ethnicity theory” argument, see Takaki’s A
Different Mirror (1993).
5 In the Soviet workforce in the late 1980s, women were heavily concentrated in low-paid,
low-status occupations. Although the Soviet Union did enact “protective” provisions for
child care and maternity leave, abortion was the only widely available form of family
planning, women’s unequal burdens in terms of domestic labor and consumer labor were
not addressed, and women’s rights were inextricably linked to motherhood. The

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continuities in gender discrimination in the Soviet and Western economies are remarkable:
in both workforces, women were enormously overrepresented in precisely the sorts of
unskilled manual labor that would prove so vulnerable to displacement with the
acceleration of restructuration and globalization, and the gap between the average wages
of men and women was approximately 30 percent (Eisenstein 1994:19–35).
6 I thank Martin Bernal for sharing his thoughts on this point with me.
7 The work of demonstrating the plural character of Marx’s text, and the continuing
force of its heterogeneous traces in contemporary global capitalist conditions, has also
been performed by Derrida in his Specters of Marx (1994).
8 Individuals were categorized as “poor” in 1995 if their total family income was less than
$15,569. It was assumed that there were four members in their family.
9 It should be noted that there may be some tensions between the theoretical framework
that is being developed here and this survey of American inequality data. Class in the
Marxist tradition is a relational position that is constituted in exploitative conditions;
it can never be reduced to an individual’s socio-economic status. Wherever the smallest
possibility for mobility exists, an individual’s class may not necessarily coincide with
the socio-economic status into which they were born (Barrett 1988:xv). A more class-
oriented analysis of inequality in the United States would have to trace the production
and appropriation of surplus value. Such an analysis would become enormously
complicated insofar as we took the global character of American capital into
consideration. On race and inequality in the United States, see also Quadagno (1994)
and Oliver and Shapiro (1997).
10 Although Connolly’s outline for an egalitarian political economy is useful, it is not
entirely clear how his general emphasis on the transnationalization of the political
might be integrated into this program. The costs and benefits relating to different types
of consumption do not necessarily obey nation-state boundaries. A country might
actually transfer some of its public subsidies to favor inclusionary consumption, but it
could do so without addressing the environmental costs that it imposes on other countries
in the form of air- and water-borne pollution, exported nuclear waste, ozone-depleting
consumption and production practices, massive deforestation and hydroelectric projects,
and a high per capita consumption of non-renewable resources.
11 My thanks to Susan Buck-Morss and Nancy Hirschmann for helping me to clarify this
summary of Lefort’s argument.
12 “La liberté pour les seuls partisans du gouvernement, pour les seuls membres d’un parti—
aussi nombreux soient-ils—ce n’est pas la liberté. La liberté est toujours au moins la
liberté de celui qui pense autrement” (Löwy 1981:74).
13 Leftist theorists have rarely addressed homophobia and heterosexism. Notable
exceptions include Weeks (1977, 1981, 1985), Rubin (1975), the Gay Left Collective
(1980), D’Emilio (1993), Chauncey (1990), Davis and Kennedy (1990), Newton (1993)
and Bérubé (1990).
14 For example, the best answer to the demand for “gay marriage” would be the construction
of an alternative family values bloc, in which the rights of sexual minorities, single parents,
unmarried heterosexuals, divorced women, children born out of wedlock and welfare
recipients would be promoted. The aim here would be to stop the state from pursuing the
moral management of the population through the public subsidization of patriarchal
heterosexual marriage. Such a campaign would demand, for example, the dismantling of
marriage as a legal category and its replacement with domestic partner status, and universal
access to public goods such as health care and education on an individual basis. Where
the public subsidization of personal relationships—relationships involving, for example,
impoverished families, or individuals caring for the disabled and the elderly—is entirely
appropriate, it should be implemented in a truly secular manner without the imposition

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of official moral standards. In this manner, lesbian and gay rights could be aligned with
the rights of poor women to make free decisions about childbearing and the rights of
heterosexuals to construct their consensual adult relationships according to their own
personal values. The state should only intervene in cases of exploitation and abuse, and
these terms should be given feminist definitions to preclude their covert usage as
legitimations for right-wing social engineering. This is not to say that we should not
celebrate every kind of romantic commitment that is freely chosen by consenting adults,
but that we should do so without the involvement of state apparatuses. For a more detailed
discussion of the gay marriage issue, see Hunter (1995).
15 Plotke contends that the post-Marxist concern about the preservation of a social
movement’s autonomy only makes sense in the context of a political terrain that is
dominated by a powerful Communist Party on one side and a highly centralized state
and homogeneous culture on the other. From this perspective, he concludes that because
these conditions do not exist in the United States, and power is “relatively dispersed”
in the American setting, the autonomy principle does not have the same value here
(Plotke 1990:93). Plotke’s critique has some merit; it could be argued that Laclau and
Mouffe do not pay enough attention to historical specificities in advancing their
argument about autonomy. However, the problems of assimilationism and tokenism
remain serious obstacles for radical political activism in the United States, even if the
assimilating agents are neither a strong Leftist party nor a centralized welfare state, but
the Democratic and Republican parties, powerful transnational corporations and media
conglomerates.
16 Slavenka Drakulic, for example, criticized Clinton for declaring in December 1997
that peace in Bosnia depended on the will of the Bosnians alone. She pointed out that
there could be no peace in Bosnia when extremist nationalists remained in power in
Croatia and Serbia. From her perspective, Milsovic, Tudjman, and, to a lesser extent,
Izetbegovic are merely using the illusion of free elections to legitimate their authoritarian
“demokratura” regimes (Drakulic 1997).
17 The whole issue of “population control” has been the site of numerous complex
articulations whose political meaning cannot be determined according to a simple
typology or content analysis. The Clinton administration, for example, has taken an
apparently “feminist” “pro-choice” position in international contexts, such as the 1994
United Nations’ International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo.
While it should be recognized that with the Republican grip on the Congress, Clinton
pays a price for preserving any degree of official support for abortion rights, feminists
have charged that the administration is interested in population control for the sake of
international security first and foremost, and has only adopted feminist language in
order to disguise its policies (Flanders 1997:89–91, 92–4).
18 For a critical analysis of the Rock Against Racism and the And-Nazi League movements,
see Gilroy (1987:117–35).
19 Gramscian intellectuals also influenced the British Communist Party (CP) during this
period. They argued in Party policy documents published in the late 1970s that the CP
should recognize the importance of cultural struggles, attack narrow economistic
strategies in the labor movement, and pursue alliances with popular movements, but
without imposing a vanguardist leadership upon them (Forgacs 1989:80–2).
20 A right-wing anti-gay rights campaign, for example, might argue that although
heterosexuality is “natural,” sexuality remains socially constructed, for homosexuality
can be promoted. Or right-wing anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism campaigns
might charge that racial otherness can have a corrupting effect on white Anglo culture
(Smith 1994b).

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