The Return of the Political

Chantal Mouffe

Description

A powerful new understanding of citizenship, democracy and pluralism.
Chantal Mouffe is one of the most influential political theorists at work today. Her work has influenced political parties across Europe and continues to inform the direction of left politics. In this work, Mouffe argues that liberal democracy misunderstands the problems of ethnic, religious and nationalist conflicts because of its inadequate conception of politics.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie politique
• Political Ideologies
• Political
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Communism
• Social theory
• Politics
• Epistemology
• Communisme

Informations

• Publié par: Verso
• Date de parution: 24 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788739429
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE RETURN OF THE POLITICAL
THE RETURN OF THE POLITICAL
Chantal Mouffe
First published by Verso 1993
This edition published by Verso 2005
© Verso 1993, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN 1-84467-057-0
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Printed and Bound in the United Kingdom by Bookmarque
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction: For an Agonistic Pluralism
1 Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?
2 American Liberalism and its Communitarian Critics
3 Rawls: Political Philosophy without Politics
4 Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community
5 Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Politics
6 Towards a Liberal Socialism
7 On the Articulation between Liberalism and Democracy
8 Pluralism and Modern Democracy: Around Carl Schmitt
9 Politics and the Limits of Liberalism
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
The articles collected in this volume were originally published as follows: ‘Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?’ in Andrew Ross, ed., Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, University of Minnesota Press 1988; ‘American Liberalism and its Communitarian Critics’ (originally entitled ‘American Liberalism and its Critics: Rawls, Taylor, Sandel and Walzer’) in Praxis International, vol. 8, no. 2, July 1988; ‘Rawls: Political Philosophy without Politics’ in David Rasmussen, ed., Universalism vs Communitarianism, MIT Press 1990; ‘Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community’ in Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy, Verso 1992; ‘Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Politics’ in Judith Butler and Joan Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political, Routledge 1992; ‘Towards a Liberal Socialism’ is the edited text of a paper presented at the World Congress of the International Political Science Association in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1991; ‘On the Articulation between Liberalism and Democracy’ is the edited text of a paper presented at the conference ‘The Legacy of C. B. Macpherson’ in Toronto, Canada, in October 1989; ‘Pluralism and Modern Democracy: Around Carl Schmitt’ in New Formations, no. 14, Summer 1991; ‘Politics and the Limits of Liberalism’ was written for this volume.
Foreword
This volume brings together nine pieces written in the last five years. Some of them are articles already published, mostly in collective volumes; others are texts of presentations at conferences. The last one, ‘Politics and the Limits of Liberalism’ has been written especially for this book.
From different angles, all the essays deal with the same topics: radical democracy, liberalism, citizenship, pluralism, liberal democracy, community – which are here approached from an ‘anti-essentialist’ perspective.
The central theme that provides the unity of the book is a reflection on the political and on the ineradicable character of power and antagonism. I have tried to draw the consequences of such a reflection for a critique of the current rationalist and individualist liberal discourse, as well as for a reformulation of the left’s project in terms of ‘radical and plural democracy’.
Since the pieces were conceived for diverse audiences, there is obviously a certain amount of repetition due to the necessity of making the same points in different contexts. Nevertheless I decided to leave them in their original form because I consider that which is reiterated to be of the greatest importance.
Several of the essays were researched and written when I was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1988–89 and a Senior Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in 1989–90.1 am very grateful to both institutions for their support.
 
Alas, poor race of mortals, unhappy ones, from what conflicts and what groans were you born
Empedocles
Introduction: For an Agonistic Pluralism

The trick is not to fool oneself about certain things: small rocky islands in the sea of self-deception. Clutching them and not drowning is the utmost that a human being achieves.
ELIAS CANETTI
1
Not long ago we were being told, to the accompaniment of much fanfare, that liberal democracy had won and that history had ended. Alas, far from having produced a smooth transition to pluralist democracy, the collapse of Communism seems, in many places, to have opened the way to a resurgence of nationalism and the emergence of new antagonisms. Western democrats view with astonishment the explosion of manifold ethnic, religious and nationalist conflicts that they thought belonged to a bygone age. Instead of the heralded ‘New World Order’, the victory of universal values, and the generalization of ‘post-conventional’ identities, we are witnessing an explosion of particularisms and an increasing challenge to Western universalism.
Taken by surprise by such a convincing refutation of their optimistic forecasts, many liberals have reacted by evoking the deferred effects of totalitarianism or a new upsurge of ‘the archaic’. They respond as if it represented only a temporary delay on the road that necessarily leads to the universalization of liberal democracy: a short parenthesis before rationality reimposes its order, or a last desperate cry of the political before it is definitively destroyed by the forces of law and universal reason.
Because it is indeed the political which is at stake here, and the possibility of its elimination. And it is the incapacity of liberal thought to grasp its nature and the irreducible character of antagonism that explains the impotence of most political theorists in the current situation – an impotence that, at a time of profound political change, could have devastating consequences for democratic politics.
2
This evasion of the political could, I believe, jeopardize the hard-won conquests of the democratic revolution, which is why, in the essays included in this volume, I take issue with the conception of politics that informs a great deal of democratic thinking today. This conception can be characterized as rationalist, universalist and individualist. I argue that its main shortcoming is that it cannot but remain blind to the specificity of the political in its dimension of conflict/decision, and that it cannot perceive the constitutive role of antagonism in social life. With the demise of Marxism, the illusion that we can finally dispense with the notion of antagonism has become widespread. This belief is fraught with danger, since it leaves us unprepared in the face of unrecognized manifestations of antagonism.
In an attempt to bring a much needed corrective to that liberal vision, several pieces below engage with the work of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s critique of liberal democracy constitutes, in my view, a challenge that we cannot ignore. Yet I also think that, by revealing the deficiencies of liberalism, he can help us – unwittingly – to identify the issues that need to be addressed and thereby to gain a better understanding of the nature of modern democracy. My objective is to think with Schmitt, against Schmitt, and to use his insights in order to strengthen liberal democracy against his critiques. By drawing our attention to the centrality of the friend/enemy relation in politics, Schmitt makes us aware of the dimension of the political that is linked to the existence of an element of hostility among human beings. This can take many forms and manifest itself in very different types of social relations. This is an important idea, which I have tried to reformulate within the framework of the contemporary critique of essentialism that I take to constitute the most fruitful theoretical approach to pluralist democracy.
When we accept that every identity is relational and that the condition of existence of every identity is the affirmation of a difference, the determination of an ‘other’ that is going to play the role of a ‘constitutive outside’, it is possible to understand how antagonisms arise. In the domain of collective identifications, where what is in question is the creation of a ‘we’ by the delimitation of a ‘them’, the possibility always exists that this we/them relation will turn into a relation of the friend/enemy type; in other words, it can always become political in Schmitt’s understanding of the term. This can happen when the other, who was until then considered only under the mode of difference, begins to be perceived as negating our identity, as putting in question our very existence. From that moment onwards, any type of we/them relation, be it religious, ethnic, national, economic or other, becomes the site of a political antagonism.
As a consequence, the political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition. Such a view of the political is profoundly at odds with liberal thought, which is precisely the reason for the bewilderment of this thought when confronted with the phenomenon of hostility in its multiple forms. This is particularly evident in its incomprehension of political movements, which are seen as the expression of the so-called ‘masses’. Since they cannot be apprehended in individualistic terms, these movements are usually relegated to the pathological or deemed to be the expression of irrational forces. Witness, for instance, the incapacity of liberal theorists to come to terms with the phenomenon of fascism.
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On the eve of the twenty-first centu