Occupy Wall Street, November 15, 2011. Protesters regroup at Canal and 6th after being evicted from Zuccotti Park. Photo Credit: David Shankbone.
The multiformity of the social cannot be apprehended through a system of mediations, nor the social order understood as an underlying principle…the social itself has no essence.
—Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.
—Pierre Bordieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?
—Tyler Durden, Fight Club
The political theorist Chantal Mouffe and the sociologist Theda Skocpol are two of our most penetrating commentators on the condition of “liberal post-politics.” Both of them also have important things to say about how we should view political action if we hope to renew our commitment to living together in democratic societies.
Despite their common concern to identify the basis for an effective center-left solidarity and coalition politics, the differences between them are quite striking. Watching them speak at the same event (both headliners at the recent Civil Disobedience conference at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center) the chasm between them seemed somehow validated by the decision to hold their talks on different days.
Mouffe is Belgian, and teaches in Britain. Her work bears all the hallmarks of the post-1968 theoretical stew of structural Marxism, Left-Nietzschean post-structuralism, and the ethos of the new social movements that one would expect to find in a Parisian intellectual of that vintage. Also, despite being a socialist, Mouffe appears to get many of her ideas about liberal democracy from the Nazi legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt (more on this later). Finally, it seems like she doesn’t have all that much to say that is specifically addressed to American society and politics. In her recent For a Left Populism Mouffe says, “I limit my analysis to Western Europe…”. By way of explanation, she says that “while populism is [also] relevant to Eastern Europe,” its history of communism is a special case; and similar things apply with respect to Latin America. The USA, however, doesn’t even rate a mention. The closest she comes to writing on America in the book is to mention Claude Lefort’s remarks on Alexis De Tocqueville.
By contrast, Theda Skocpol is an Americanist if ever there was one, teaches at Harvard, and writes specifically about what she calls diminished democracy including the imperative to recover a shared American civic nationalism after “liberal post-politics.” As a sociologist/social historian rather than a theorist of political action, Skocpol’s approach is empirical rather than theoretical, and in Diminished Democracy she charts the rise and fall of certain aspects of American civic life with a bearing on cross-class fellowship. The story she tells goes from Reconstruction through the two World Wars, includes the rise of the Welfare State, and also the emergence of liberal post-politics after the cultural upheavals wrought by Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. As a historian, Skocpol is at great pains to demonstrate that there used to be something uniquely promising about American civic and political life (while recognizing its profound historic failures) that is now in serious danger of withering away under conditions of increasing polarization.
In the first article in this series, I argued that Mouffe and Skocpol’s standpoints could be productively mapped to two different interpretations of the Gramscian concept of hegemony—what has been called “thick” hegemony on the one hand, and a “thin” or “liberation” hegemony on the other. I described these two standpoints, and drew out some of their implications.
In the second article, I went on to try to frame Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy as consistent with this thin or liberation hegemony, even though her civic nationalism/constitutional patriotism is only implicit in her defense of the history and experience of American liberal civil society in the 19th and 20th centuries. The proponents of thin or liberation hegemony tend to see the civil society (with its “complex network of trenches” a la Gramsci) as a bulwark against authoritarian state control imposed from above. In the American context, this also gets expressed, I believe, as the instinct to find ways to “de-polarize” the civil society, and thus implicitly to restore some sort of a liberal hegemonic class compromise among working class, middle class, and social movement minority groups–to say, along with Rodney King (during the LA riots of 1992), “Can we all just get along?”
Where Skocpol appears to stand for the restoration of a reformed, liberal hegemonic détente among working class, middle class, and social movement constituents, (apparently believing that it is still possible that this bloc can regain and hold political power) Chantal Mouffe’s program for what she calls either “agonistic democracy” or “radical democracy” is intended to form the basis for an explicit counter-hegemonic challenge to the present neoliberal hegemonic formation. The project for the radicalization of democracy, she writes, “is not a simple return to the postwar model of compromise between capital and labor.”
In her most recent work, she starts in one of two ways—either with a critique of liberal political theory as “the way in” or else with a critique of socialist or social democratic politics.
In this article, I now turn to an account of Chantal Mouffe’s take on post-politics, her equivocal account of political liberalism, her theory of agonistic democracy/radical democracy, and the paradoxical foundation of her thick account of cultural hegemony.
Mouffe as the Aspiring Etruscan Minerva
For more than thirty years now, Chantal Mouffe has repeatedly sought to reconfigure the basic concepts and ideas found in Hegemony & Socialist Strategy (1985), each time with reference to the leftist “crisis de jour.” She does this theoretical reset Minerva-like, in hopes of being able to set the war strategy; in order to point the way to a new conception of radical democracy and effective counter-hegemonic practice for the forces of the left. The crisscrossing trail of these repeat performances highlights the risks associated with playing the part of Minerva – especially if one’s owls are let fly too soon.
It is for this reason that identifying the precise medicinal prescription Mouffe has in mind is so difficult—the ingredients have to be collected from her various writings in response to the crisis of theoretical Marxism in the 1960s; the crisis of social democracy in the 1970s; and finally the overall crisis of liberalism, with the evacuation of political liberalism by economic neoliberal governmentality culminating in the recent successes of right-wing populism.
In order to come to some conclusions in relatively short order about the prospects for Mouffian agonistic/radical democracy with respect to center-left social solidarity and counter-hegemonic politics, it is necessary to zig and zag a bit through her various writings.
Mouffe has been lately using her theoretical resources to argue in favor of a what she calls a left populism, to counter the ascendant populism of the radical right. In her most recent work, she can be seen to make her case by starting in one of two ways—either she starts with a critique of liberal political theory as “the way in” or else she starts with a critique of socialist or social democratic politics. In “Agonistic Democracy and Radical Politics” she takes the first approach, while in her recent book For a Left Populism, Mouffe takes the second of these approaches. It helps to look at each of these in turn, since her populism rests on her theory of agonistic democracy, which in turn is exposed in and through her strangely oscillating encounter with political liberalism.
The Left Populist Fight Club
Juxtaposed to Theda Skocpol’s instinct for liberal détente described above in the opening section, it’s important to recognize that there are a lot of other people who are in much more of what one could call a “fighting mood.” These people tend to be more politically radicalized–either they come from social movement activism, where doing politics is always already framed as engaging in political struggle–or else they are sufficiently Marxist that the prior liberal hegemony always seemed like an unsustainable enterprise. For these people, it has always been self-evident that economic liberalism doomed political liberalism to ever intensifying social pathologies because of the contradictions inherent in the logic of capitalism.
The first thing that we need to understand about so-called agonistic democracy, however, is that it means something more than just that the liberals/democrats need to break the habit of powerlessness, of being unwilling to openly contest for power, in order to be able to craft messages that will “win elections.” Proponents of agonistic democracy are not just trying to get liberals to reluctantly accept the fact that the basic attitudes and institutional mechanisms of governmentality that have normally supported resolution of political differences through compromise are now superseded by the conditions of out and out political struggle.
Instead, the adherents of the Mouffian version of agonistic democracy want to us to do more than just get comfortable with using political power tactics—they want us to accept that the essential terrain of politics is in fact antagonism and confrontation, and that even under ideal conditions of liberal democracy, the contest between opposing hegemonic projects can never actually be settled rationally, as most liberal theories of politics would have us think.
From this, one can see that Mouffe’s account of liberal post-politics cuts much deeper than the one offered by Theda Skocpol and others who fall more or less in the civic nationalist camp. Where Skocpol shows us how liberal post-politics arose via the un-reflected abandonment of a certain kind of civic/social contract that maintained liberal hegemony as a form of cross-class cultural rapprochement, Mouffe wants us to see that political liberalism itself is already post-political.
Political Liberalism & Thick Hegemony
The agonistic theory of democracy, Mouffe tells us, takes its departure from liberal theories like the so-called deliberative democracy of Habermas and Rawls. The divergence has to do with a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the political as such. “There are those,” Mouffe writes, “for whom the political refers to a space of liberty and common action, while others view it as a site of conflict and antagonism.” Where “the liberal theory” believes that we “live in a world where a multiplicity of perspectives and values can coexist,” Mouffe explains, we get projects, like that of Habermas, which “envisages the public sphere as a place where consensus can be established.”
The problem with the liberal theory with respect to pluralism, Mouffe says, is that “in imagining that these perspectives and values, brought together, constitute a harmonious and non-conflictual ensemble,” the liberal theory is incapable of accounting for the necessarily conflictual nature of pluralism, and this inability thus leads it to “negate the political in its antagonistic dimension.”
Thus, where liberalism attempts to constitute a “we” in the context of diversity and conflict, it fails to recognize that in order to constitute a “we” one must distinguish it from a “they.” Far from envisioning the public sphere, as Habermas does, as fertile ground in the search for consensus, Mouffe writes, “my agonistic approach conceives it as the battlefield on which hegemonic projects confront one another, with no possibility whatsoever of a final reconciliation.”
As can be seen from this remark, if one wants to understand why we must see politics in this manner, the answer that she gives has everything to do with ideas she holds about the nature of society and the functioning of hegemony (notions which, needless to say, are at rather a great distance from traditional liberal theories of popular sovereignty and social contract).
Politics as such is always “us vs. them,” Mouffe says, because of “the absence of a final foundation and the undecidability that pervades every order.” The concept of hegemony, she tells us, indicates that every society is the product of practices that seek to institute an order in a context of contingency. Because society is hegemonic, practices that appear to proceed from a natural order thus always conceal the “originary acts of their contingent political institution” under their layers of sedimentation. Political legitimation is everywhere essentially without foundation, and consent is only putative, since it is always given against a backdrop of coercion.
As Murat Ince writes in “A Critique of Agonistic Politics,” Mouffe’s conviction that the political is “an expression of the perpetually reconstructive nature of the social domain,” and her belief that “antagonistic power relations can be transformed via agonistic confrontation,” sets the stage for a vision of radical democracy that does not reflect an understanding of democracy “as an institutional formation or a governmental regime.” Here, he writes, democracy will have to be understood first and foremost, “as a form of subjection.”
Why would antagonists, confronting each other in the ring of the agonistic fight club, be constrained to respect the constitutive rules of the game?
It’s little wonder then, after such an overwhelmingly contextualist social analysis (anti-foundationalist, anti-transcendentalist, anti-voluntarist), that Mouffe would eschew the heirs of the liberal enlightenment, and be open to the seducements of something like Carl Schmitt’s völkisch political decisionism. In her 1999 work, “Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy,” Mouffe attempts to walk us part way down Schmitt’s dark road, while still somehow avoiding its ultimate destination (i.e., the Führer principle). As should soon be clear, Mouffe’s partial and rather abstract reading seems designed to avoid the chilling implication of Schmitt’s most famous saying: “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.”
Political Liberalism & Agonistic Democracy
Mouffe begins her account with Schmitt’s contention from The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1929) that “homogeneity is the condition of democracy,” and that given this requirement, “if the need arises, [democracy] also requires the elimination of heterogeneity.”
If you immediately ask yourself what is meant by this, it is likely that the trajectory of events inside Germany from 1933-45 help to provide you with some very concrete answers. Instead, Mouffe answers as follows: “Homogeneity,” she says, “means substantive equality. In order to be treated as equals, citizens must partake of a common substance.” What matters, Mouffe adds, “is tracing a line of demarcation between those who belong to the demos, and therefore have equal rights, and those who, in the political domain, cannot have the same rights because they are not part of the demos.”
In saying this, Mouffe explains, Schmitt stands opposed to the liberal idea of popular sovereignty derived from “the general equality of mankind,” which he considers to be “a nonpolitical form of equality, because it lacks the correlate of a possible inequality from which every equality receives its specific meaning.” Against the liberal theory, whose aim is to transform the state into a voluntary association through the theory of the social contract,” Mouffe writes, “he urges us to acknowledge that the political entity is something different and more decisive.”
To understand what is be alluded to with use of the term “decisive,” it needs to be pointed out here that Schmitt is making an argument about the basis of the state’s sovereignty. Liberalism gives rise to parliamentary democracy, and under these conditions, he says, the state is weak; it is nothing more than an aggregate of compromises between heterogenous groups, the sum total of their agreements. But for the state to have unity and purpose, and thus for it to be an object of loyalty, according to Schmitt, it must be a given concrete unity. Therefore, it must rest on the unity of a people that is also already given. By this Schmitt means exactly what you think it means–that they (the people) must be members of the same nation, or to be more accurate to the romanticist, völkisch metaphysics-belong to the same race, the same blood, the same soil.
The attempt to get from Schmitt’s account of popular sovereignty to a minimally liberal democratic fight club is not her last word on the subject.
Under liberalism, however (fortunately or unfortunately depending on your status) you don’t get to treat equals equally, and unequals unequally, as was famously recommended by the formal justice of Greek antiquity. The simple reason is that at least in principle, in modernity there are now only equals under the universal category humankind, and thus there are no unequals to treat unequally.
But belief in the equality of all persons as persons is not democracy, Schmitt counters. It is [rather] a certain kind of liberalism…not a state form, but an individualistic-humanitarian ethic and worldview.” Or in another place, “It is through their belonging to the demos that democratic citizens are granted equal rights, not because they participate in an abstract idea of humanity.”
For her part, Mouffe says (rather astonishingly) that she in fundamental agreement with Schmitt. “He is right to say that a political democracy cannot be based on the generality of all mankind, and that it must belong to a specific people.” On the matter of just who we mean by ‘the people,’ Mouffe says “it’s worth noting that…he never postulated that this belonging to a people could be envisaged only in racial terms.” Democratic equality for Schmitt, she writes, “is expressed through citizenship, which is the ground of all other forms of equality.”
But what does Schmitt mean by citizenship? In my view, the record on this is unambiguous. The common substance to which he refers, is clearly national identity. And the use of the word substance should be a strong clue that he understands national identity in terms of the romanticist metaphysics of race.
We must also ask what it is that is so “democratic” about the demos based on homogenous cultural identity, since this bears no resemblance to modern liberal democracy in any way we have historically understood it in Western political institutions. After all, why would there be a need for the working out of a democratic politics under condition of substantial homogeneity? Mouffe herself acknowledges the point, saying, “Schmitt’s main concern is not democracy, but political unity. He considers that such a unity is crucial, because without it the state cannot exist.”
The agonistic democracy Rodney King, therefore, would instead be heard to utter an alternative lament, something like “Can we all just NOT get along?”
Given the abstractness of Mouffe’s presentation, it is easy to lose track of what is at issue in Schmitt’s account. We must remember, once again, that the authoritarian Bismarckian state saw itself to be in a state of crisis between the wars. Under condition of parliamentary democracy, so the story went, the state had become subordinate to the various social and economic associations that med up the contemporary socio-political landscape.
Schmitt believed that a decision could not be evaded: either the state must collapse, or there must be reaffirmation of national unity and approval of authoritarian presidential rule. The content of “the decision” was the declaration of a state of emergency and the sorting out of friend versus foe. The decision was to give the Leader, on behalf of the people, the authority to abrogate or suspend law. The decision was to make rightful authority the basis of law rather than the values and norms from which the law derives.
After stating her agreement with Schmitt that it is “necessary to constitute the people politically” Mouffe nonetheless attempts to depart from Schmitt with respect to the matter of either friend or foe. “I do not believe that this must commit us to denying the possibility of pluralism,” she says. We can accept his insight about liberalism versus democracy “without agreeing with the conclusions that he draws.”
But in saying this, Mouffe still wants to stick by her conviction that “consensus is and will always be the expression of a hegemony and the crystallization of power relations.” And if she thinks that Schmitt is also still right to say that “agreement on mere procedures can assure the cohesion of a liberal society,” then the obvious next question is the one that sets the horizon line for her theory of agonistic democracy: “how then, should we envisage the unity of a pluralist society?
As this progression shows, Mouffe is left with a theoretical challenge that more or less arises out the action-theoretic poverty of her account of society. The crucial question of democratic politics, she writes, “is not to reach a consensus without exclusion” (which would amount to creating a ‘we’ without a corollary ‘they’) but rather “to establish the we/they discrimination in a manner compatible with pluralism.”
In other words, having pretty much banished rational self-determination from the field of political will formation, Mouffe needs to be able to show what any of this has to do with defending or promoting norms of democratic socio-political legitimation. It is for this reason that she is at pains to go on to describe the difference between antagonism and agonism, a positive framework “where the opponent is not considered an enemy to be destroyed, but an adversary whose existence is legitimate.”
In the agonistic conception of democracy, she says, the category of enemy is reserved only for those who, “by questioning the very principles of pluralist democracy, cannot form part of the agonistic space.” As Mouffe herself concedes, “democracy cannot survive without certain forms of consensus, relating to adherence to the ethico-political values that constitute its principles of legitimacy and to the institutions in which these are inscribed.”
The agonistic democracy Rodney King, therefore, would instead be heard to utter an alternative lament, something like “Can we all just NOT get along?”
As is no doubt obvious from that last bit, I remain skeptical of Chantal Mouffe’s version of the democratic political fight club. Given the account of the nature of the political that she defends, its hard to see how the democratic rules of the fight club are anything but arbitrary, unless of course one smuggles in a set of stronger normative foundations (the kind provided by the much-maligned liberal theories). Why would antagonists, confronting each other in the ring of the agonistic fight club, be constrained to respect the constitutive rules of the game?
At the more fundamental level, however, I also want to reject Mouffe’s account of the political as such, because the critique of liberalism she offers tell us that we need to forget about the concept of ‘the people’ found in things like the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution’s preamble. The claim that citizens must partake of a common substance in order to be treated as equals, and that this substance (conceived as popular sovereignty) is something given rather than a voluntary commitment to a set of modern democratic principles, is pretty much the very antithesis of the tradition of American civic nationalism and constitutional patriotism.
In fact, if Mouffe and Schmitt have their way here, and we reject the idea that the general equality of mankind could serve as the basis for a state or any form of government, we also have to send the entire American experiment itself off to the dustbin of history. I can’t really say whether European democracies can survive without reference to the “Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen” (Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen); on purely pragmatic grounds, however, all of this seems like something of a non-starter for a reinvigoration of American democracy.
Thin Hegemony & Radical Democracy
It remains to say something more about the project for a so-called radical democracy (since in the end she says she rejects Schmitt’s account of democracy in relation to pluralism). The attempt to get from Schmitt’s account of popular sovereignty to a minimally liberal democratic fight club is not her last word on the subject.
In her recent For a Left Populism, Mouffe writes that “the strategy of left populism seeks the establishment of a new hegemonic order within the constitutional liberal-democratic framework, and it does not aim at a radical break with pluralist liberal democracy…”
The basic argument of For a Left Populism is that the inability of center-left social democratic parties to get beyond what she calls their “class essentialism” has led them into accommodationist, post-political relationships with the forces of hegemonic neoliberalism. Also, inasmuch as this status quo is now unraveling (giving way to an interregnum) we find ourselves in a populist moment in which a leftist radicalization of democracy is possible as an alternative to populist right-wing, authoritarian, neo-nationalism.
We should note that the critique of class essentialism is one of the “Gramscian moments” in Mouffe’s thinking, one that goes back to her early work with Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. The main point is to deny the existence of the working class as a singular, revolutionary agent of history, and in so doing, to point out the counter-hegemonic potential of new social movement identity-based groups, if they can find a way to come together in a shared political project.
The historic failure to embrace this potential, and to construct what she calls a frontier between “the people” and “the oligarchy” is what has led to our most recent post-political condition. Accepting the hegemonic neoliberal terrain of Thatcher and Reagan (TINA=There Is No Alternative) and manifesting an anemic progressive neoliberalism, Mouffe says, has meant that there was “no space left for citizens to have a real choice between different political projects,” and thus opened the door for right wing populism pretending to offer an alternative.
Under condition of the neoliberal hegemonic formation that replaced the Keynesian welfare state, she says, economic liberalism, with its defense of the free market, has become increasingly central, and many aspects of political liberalism have been “relegated to second place, if not simply eliminated.”
The claim that neoliberalism eliminates a necessary tension between understanding human being as the market’s ‘homo economicus’ and political liberalism’s ‘rights-bearing individual of moral worth’ is a critique of neoliberalism that is consistent with liberal political theory’s self-understanding — liberalism is indeed an alloy of market laissez faire, Enlightenment rationality, and Republican political sentiment.
And where the ideal of freedom is reduced to merely the market-friendly notion of negative liberty, Mouffe says, liberal democracy comes to signify only “the presence of free elections and the defense of human rights” and we also see, she says, the eclipse of the democratic principles of equality and popular sovereignty.
What then is the alternative vision of “Us and Them,” different from that proposed by Schmitt, that constitutes a project for radical democracy? Only a very rough outline is suggested, but it looks like something much closer to thin or liberation hegemony than the thicker version that undergirds her agonistic democracy pronouncements.
If you are somewhat surprised by Mouffe’s account of radical democracy, given her prior writings on liberalism, you are probably not alone.
Mouffe writes that it is through the construction of a people, a collective will that results from the mobilization of common affects in defense of equality and social justice that it will be possible to combat the xenophobic policies promoted by right-wing populism.” A left populism, she says, “provides the adequate strategy to recover and deepen the ideals of equality and popular sovereignty that are constitutive of a democratic politics.”
From here, Mouffe’s narrative appears to be all about smuggling back in a set of liberal assumptions. A liberal democratic society, she says, presupposes the existence of an institutional order informed by ethico-political principles that constitute its principles of legitimacy.” It is the democratic tradition since the French Revolution, which allows us to put subordination into question in the most general sense, which is the “decisive mutation” in the political imaginary of Western societies and is that which remains, after the discrediting of the Marxist Jacobin moment, with its postulation of a single event of political rupture (seizure of power by the revolutionary working class).
The strategy of left populism seeks the establishment of a new hegemonic order within the constitutional liberal democratic framework, in order to re-establish the articulation between liberalism and democracy that has been disavowed by neoliberalism. As such, it rejects both “pure reformism” that accepts both liberal democracy and the existing neoliberal hegemonic social formation, and a revolutionary politics, which seeks a total rupture with the existing socio-political order. Instead, radical democracy should be understood as “radical reformism” which accepts liberal democracy, but seeks to implement a different hegemonic formation.
What is decisive, she says, is that the radical reformist sees the state differently than the other two options—where the pure reformer sees the state as a neutral institution whose role is reconcile the interests of various social groups, and the revolutionary sees it as an oppressive institution that has to be abolished, the radical reformist position takes its bearings from Gramsci, with his conception of the integral state, which he conceives as including both political society and civil society.
With this conception, she says, Gramsci appreciates the profoundly political character of civil society as the terrain of the struggle for hegemony. In this expansive concept of the state, the public spaces of the civil society are envisaged as a surface for agonistic interventions, and as such can also provide the terrain for “important democratic advances.”
Counter Hegemony & the Imaginary Institution of Society
If you are somewhat surprised by Mouffe’s account of radical democracy, given her prior writings on liberalism, you are probably not alone. In an effort to be charitable, one could say that people are entitled to change their minds, especially after decades. But Mouffe offers no such renunciation of prior positions. In fact, the tension among the different moments of her thinking—her account of the nature of society, the working of hegemony, and her critique of liberalism on one side, and her efforts to forge counter-hegemonic solidarity on the other—are fully evident all the way back to Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
In For a Left Populism, Mouffe writes: “What does it mean to radicalize democracy? Serious misunderstandings have arisen with respect to the radical and plural democracy that we defended in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Some people believed that we were calling for a total rupture with liberal democracy…”
As we have just seen with the case of For a Left Populism, the narrative of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy also exhibits a two-fold (Janus-faced) set of characteristics.
On the one hand one finds in HSS the following thick hegemony elements:
- The non-concept of hegemony emerges as a response to the conceptual crisis of theoretical Marxism, as an account of power relations where ideas about society and state no longer reference a concept of totality
- All assertions of social and political identity are thus to be regarded as articulations of practices
- The impossibility of society as totality means more than just that identities are precarious; it means that they must stand in relation to each other in terms of antagonisms
- The fundamentality of antagonism thus marks the impossibility of society to ever fully constitute itself
- Since antagonism defines sociality, it is also the phenomenon that gives rise to the political
- The movement from articulation to antagonism to politics defines the space for the working of hegemony
- The identity of articulating subjects is changeable in relation to antagonistic forces, constructed in and through the logic of hegemony
- Autonomy and subordination also only acquire meaning in the field of hegemonic construction
- Power is never foundational
On the other hand, when the HSS narrative moves to discussions of democracy, we also find the following thin hegemony elements:
- New political subjects have been constituted through their antagonism to recent capitalist forms of subordination
- New social struggles have expressed resistance against the new forms of subordination
- What is living in the socialist imaginary stems from its embeddedness in the democratic revolution begun with the French Revolution
- Liberal democratic ideology connects the nineteenth century and the social movements of the present
- It is through the extension of the field of democratic struggles to the whole of civil society and the state that the possibility resides for a hegemonic strategy of the left
- Gramsci’s war of position gives us a resource; the multiplication of political spaces and the prevention of concentrations of power are preconditions for democratic transformations
- It is necessary to broaden the domain of the exercise of democratic rights beyond the traditional field of citizenship, since the logic of democracy cannot be sufficient for the formulation of the hegemonic project
I list these two-fold characteristic of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy as a way of getting down to what should be fairly obvious by this point: the radical contextualist, thick hegemony of the first set does not well-support the counter-hegemonic thin or liberation aspirations of the second set, because the necessary normative-utopian moment that could orient a voluntarist understanding of political struggle in the conflict of hegemonies appears to be seriously under-theorized.
In the earlier discussion of agonistic democracy, it was observed that Mouffe’s understanding of politics has everything to do with the ideas she holds about the nature of society and the functioning of hegemony. Mouffe gravitated to the ideas of Carl Schmitt primarily because his critique of liberal democracy and notions concerning popular sovereignty aligned with her thickly hegemonic view of the nature of society.
It’s worth pointing out that Mouffe’s thick account of hegemony is also reflected in a wide selection of post-Marxist, post-structuralist viewpoints found along the left bank of the Seine beginning in the 1960s. That civil society is primarily the sphere in which hegemony is exercised and reproduced (the realm of Michel Foucault’s “relations of power” where the state and the dominant class hegemonically maintain a culture of putative consent) has functioned as almost an unreflected axiom of French social theory.
So where Mouffe tells us that “the contest between opposing hegemonic projects can never actually be settled rationally” or that “political legitimation is everywhere essentially without foundation” she is simply offering variations on the theme from Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, where together with Laclau, she says that “the social itself has no essence.”
How does a new radical democracy practically emerge from recognition of the impossibility of society?
I must admit to being rather skeptical of this highly contextualist mood. Where it holds sway as a kind of univocal gestalt, it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to defend liberal, social contractarian notions of popular sovereignty and their institutional frameworks (if it only makes sense to describe subjects as constituted hegemonically, then there can be no element of sovereignty that can be ceded to the state out of rational self-interest).
Thin Solidarity and Counter-Hegemonic Practice
Writing more as a ‘thin hegemonist’ at the end of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Mouffe says that the “multiplication of political spaces and the prevention of concentrations of power are preconditions for democratic transformations of society.” She then asks the following question: “Is there not an incompatibility between the proliferation of political spaces proper to a radical democracy and the construction of collective identities on the basis of the logic of equivalence?” This is precisely the question that besets the populism of the left today, the problem of the basis of democratic social solidarity among diverse groups under conditions of political pluralism.
Mouffe is worried that what she calls “the logic of equivalence,” taken to its ultimate consequences, “would imply the dissolution of the autonomy of spaces in which each of the struggles is constituted.” She is right to be concerned, if we require the solidarity to be more than just a kind of a pacta sunt servanda (the logic of private contractual agreement).
Autonomous struggles in the aggregate, she acknowledges, amount to a system of differences that can’t form a properly hegemonic bloc. If the logic of democracy cannot be sufficient for the formulation of any hegemonic project, as Mouffe contends, then what else then is the basis for democratic, inter-group, civic solidarity?
Comparing her remarks from her latest book For a Left Populism to those in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, it doesn’t seem like she has made very much progress in answering this question, despite the fact that her account of “democratic deficits under neoliberal globalism” and “the need for a democratic fight club” are having something of a cultural moment just now.
It is only when the “open, unsutured character of the social is fully accepted,” Mouffe writes in HSS, “that the potential becomes clearly visible, and hegemony can come to constitute a fundamental political tool of the left.” These conditions are met, she concludes, “when democratic politics is founded on affirmation of the contingency and ambiguity of every essence, and the constitutive character of social division and antagonism.”
I must admit to being completely flummoxed by this answer. Precisely how does a new and radical democracy emerge from a general recognition of the impossibility of society? I feel rather like Dennis in Monty Python and the Holy Grail arguing with King Arthur about systems of government. If we’re going to be operating on the terrain of thin hegemony anyhow, why must we search for something somehow more compelling than a form of voluntary constitutional patriotism backed by the social solidarity of a pluralistic civic nationalism? Does the answer to the question of what forges a diverse, democratic country into a people–into one civic nation–really need to be so mysterious? Why not work to support this by re-establishing the conditions for an effectively reinvigorated liberal cross-class détente? Couldn’t it make more sense to describe, in some specific detail, what such a counter-hegemonic practice might look like?
In the next installment in this series, we revisit Mouffe’s post-structuralist account of hegemony, and attempt to bring hegemony “back down to earth” by means of cultural anthropologist James C. Scott’s criticisms of the doctrine of false consciousness, and his “paper-thin theory of hegemony.” The reading of Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts sets the stage for the final article on Ira Katznelson’s City Trenches, which offers us a way to re-think the unique dynamic of American class consciousness and the trenches of civil society.
