Democracy as a Non‐Hegemonic Struggle? Disambiguating Chantal Mouffe's Agonistic Model of Politics

According to Carl Schmitt, the political is essentially characterized by the antagonistic opposition between friends and enemies. In several recent books, Chantal Mouffe has taken hold of this central Schmittian idea and has used it as a starting point for a critique of the consensual nature of both contemporary political theory and contemporary political practice.1 On the theoretical level, Mouffe argues that the current emphasis on the need for a reasonable political consensus, as found in John Rawls’s political liberalism or in Jürgen Habermas’s model of deliberative democracy, is misguided.2 Theories like these are based on a universalistic logic which misrepresents the true nature of the political and fails to understand its dynamics. Because of its individualistic framework, so the argument goes, consensualism lacks the conceptual means to understand politics as a power struggle between collective identities. Moreover, as a result of its rationalistic premises, it refuses to accept that political oppositions cannot be resolved by rational means and that politics is ultimately about making decisions in an undecidable terrain. Finally, because of its universalistic aspirations, consensualism is unwilling to recognize that our social order is not organized on the basis of universal rational or moral principles, but rather on the basis of necessarily contingent and, therefore, “hegemonic” articulations of power relations.3 On the political level, Mouffe claims that the tendency to downplay the importance and the persistence of political oppositions is dangerous because it tends to hamper the proper workings of the political sphere. Political oppositions that are unable to appear in the political arena are bound to re-emerge elsewhere in a much less tractable guise. In this regard, Mouffe associates the rise of right wing populist parties in Western Europe with the dominance of “third way” politics and the alleged disappearance of the left/right distinction. Similarly, she believes the emergence of international terrorism to be the result of the unipolar nature of our current neoliberal world-order, in which the hegemonic dominance of the United States leaves no opportunity for the representation of real political oppositions on the international scene.4 According to Mouffe, the main problems connected to consensualist theories and practices stem from their one-sided commitment to a liberal strand of political thinking. Consensualists fail to appreciate that liberal democracy is a political regime based on a paradoxical mixture of two political traditions and thus combines the universalistic logic of liberalism with the antagonistic logic of democracy. In order to reinstate the importance of this latter logic, Mouffe elaborates her own model of agonistic pluralism. Therein, she acknowledges the importance of a thin consensus on the ethico-political values of liberty and equality as the constitutive symbolic framework of any liberal democratic regime. At the same time, however, the agonistic model emphasizes that this thin consensus remains conflictual. Democracy is characterized by an open-ended political struggle in which agonistic opponents advocate different and incompatible interpretations of the core values of liberty and equality.