Mouffe: democracy is not the art of agreement but of taming conflict

The most comforting assumption of liberal democracy runs like this: talk long enough, reason carefully enough, and in the end we will meet on common ground.

Chantal Mouffe has spent forty years arguing that this is false.

And she adds something more uncomfortable still. It is not a defect. The search for common ground is itself what weakens democracy.

Belgian by birth, Mouffe is professor of political theory at the University of Westminster. She has taught in Europe, North America and Latin America, and has held research posts at Harvard, Cornell, California and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. From 1989 to 1995 she was a programme director at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris.

The turning point: 1985#

To understand Mouffe's thought one has to go straight to a single book: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, written with Ernesto Laclau and published in 1985.

Its target was an assumption of classical Marxism: that the working class is the privileged, pre-given subject of history.

The objection Laclau and Mouffe made was this. A ready-made political subject such as "the working class" does not simply appear of itself. Political identities are constructed. People are brought together around particular demands, symbols and struggles.

The consequence is heavy. Politics is not merely a reflection of the economy. It is also a struggle over meaning, and over the making of a society's "we".

From here comes the concept of hegemony — taken from Gramsci and rebuilt. No social order is natural; every order is established when certain meanings prevail over others, and that ascendancy has to be reproduced without pause.

Everything Mouffe has thought since grew from this ground.

Reading Schmitt without becoming a Schmittian#

Mouffe's most contested intellectual debt is to Carl Schmitt.

For Schmitt, the essence of the political is the friend-enemy distinction. A community constitutes itself by settling who stands outside it.

Mouffe took the diagnosis seriously — and turned the conclusion round.

Schmitt had used the distinction as a weapon against liberal democracy: if conflict is unavoidable, liberalism's promise of agreement is an illusion, and order can be founded only by sovereign decision.

From the same premise Mouffe drew a different conclusion: if conflict is unavoidable, the question is not how to abolish it but how to organise it.

And here she made her decisive conceptual move.

Enemy → adversary.

An enemy is someone to be destroyed. An adversary is someone whose views you oppose but whose right to contest them you acknowledge.

In an agonistic democracy the parties do not set out to eliminate one another. Nor are they obliged to agree.

The distinction separates Mouffe from the classical understanding of democracy as consensus. Democracy's task is not to make everyone think alike. It is to allow different people to quarrel together.

Why she is being read now#

Because the condition she diagnosed years ago has stamped itself on the last decade of Western democracy.

The centre announcing that left and right are defunct categories. Political argument reduced to questions of technical management. The voter who feels ineffectual in a system where the decisions are taken by experts.

Mouffe's thesis: when the political stage is emptied, political passions do not vanish. Another actor takes them up.

That is why her framework is invoked again and again to explain the rise of the far right. On her account the far right settled into the vacuum left by the "post-political" centre — because it alone offered people a "we" and a "they".

The overlap with the Judith Butler feature we ran in this column this week is instructive. Butler's claim was that democracy has never yet been realised; Mouffe's, that it can be realised only once conflict is accepted.

The case for a left populism#

In 2018, with For a Left Populism, Mouffe took a still more contentious step.

Her thesis: populism is not the property of the right. The left, too, can draw a political frontier between the people and the blocs that hold power.

The nicety here should not be missed. For Mouffe, "the people" is not a community that already exists. A people is politically constructed. Her populism is therefore a political strategy before it is an economic programme: the articulation of distinct demands — ecological, feminist, labour, minority — around a shared antagonism.

The book's starting point was that the political vacuum created by neoliberalism could be occupied from the right or from the left.

In 2022 she carried the argument into ecology. Towards a Green Democratic Revolution treats the climate crisis not as a technical environmental problem but as a democratic struggle for hegemony.

Mouffe's intellectual route can thus be set out in a line:

Marxism → radical democracy → agonism → left populism → green democratic revolution.

The objections#

Mouffe's framework attracts serious objections, and they are not of the kind that can be brushed aside.

The Schmitt objection. Carrying the friend-enemy distinction into democratic theory is dangerous. Mouffe says she has put the adversary in place of the enemy; but the distinction itself keeps antagonism at the centre. Who is to count as an adversary and who is not? Who draws that line?

The problem of the boundary. Mouffe holds that those who will not accept the rules of the democratic game cannot be adversaries. But this brings back a criterion of exclusion — and the criterion is set by whichever side already holds hegemony.

The normative objection. If every order is the product of a hegemony, and there is no neutral ground, on what does Mouffe rest her own preference? Why should left populism be better than right populism?

Her answer lies in radicalising the principles of liberty and equality — the principles liberal democracy has itself proclaimed. The criterion, that is, does not arrive from outside; it is drawn from the order's own promise.

Is that answer satisfying? It is disputed. It is at least consistent.

The uncomfortable question#

Mouffe's real value may lie not in her answers but in the damage she does to liberal democracy's comforting assumptions.

Are democratic institutions genuinely neutral? Is a "common reason" that everyone could agree on possible? Or is every democratic order the product of a particular system of values — of a hegemony that has prevailed for the time being?

Two features we ran in this column this week, visions of the digital future and Jill Lepore's "Artificial State", put the same question from the direction of technology: when it grows unclear where a decision was taken, where does politics go?

Mouffe's answer is plain and hard: politics does not disappear. It becomes invisible. And invisible politics is politics that has passed beyond democratic control.

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Her work available in Turkish includes Hegemonya ve Sosyalist Strateji (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, with Laclau), Siyasal Üzerine (On the Political), Demokratik Paradoks (The Democratic Paradox), Dünyayı Politik Düşünmek (Agonistics) and Sol Popülizm Üzerine (For a Left Populism).