Chantal Mouffe has played an active role in promoting the ‘discursive hegemonic’ politics of left populism, not least in her two most recent books, For a Left Populism and Towards a Green Democratic Revolution: Left Populism and the Power of Affects. Taking these books together, this review article shows how these interventions build on Mouffe's earlier work on ‘the political’ and her vision of ‘radical democracy’ based on an ‘agonistic pluralism’. It argues that we find in Mouffe's latest work some of the salient problems of her overall project. The article focuses on two such problems: Mouffe's notion of antagonism (and its cognate, agonism); and the question of collective action.
It would be no exaggeration to say that Chantal Mouffe ranks among the most consequential theorists of left politics today. Together with Ernesto Laclau, her work has influenced a variety of political parties and electoral coalitions during the past two decades, most notably in Latin America and Western Europe, and their respective attempts to revive a moribund social democracy or conceive of a ‘socialism of the twenty-first century’. This influence has been pronounced since the economic crisis of 2008, especially among those emergent political forces in Western Europe that have defined themselves in more or less direct opposition to neoliberal capitalism. As is well documented, and as Mouffe herself has been the first to point out, Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise in France and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in the UK have all to some extent based their respective projects on the construction of transversal frontiers – la casta versus la gente, the many against the few – that signature gesture of left populism. Putting aside the obvious contextual and political differences between countries and organisations, one could argue that left populism has in fact become the dominant strategic orientation for a large part of the Western European radical left in recent years. The overall successes hitherto are certainly debatable, but there can be little denying that these parties and movements have rejuvenated left politics in the electoral realm.
Mouffe has played an active role in promoting the ‘discursive hegemonic’ politics of left populism, be it as private and/or public interlocutor of a number of high profile political figures (Pablo Inglesias, Íñigo Errejón, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, François Ruffin and others) or through written work. The publication of Towards a Green Democratic Revolution: Left Populism and the Power of Affects (2022) marks her latest contribution to this effort.
This short book follows For a Left Populism (2018). It adopts a similar approach to that earlier text such that they constitute a diptych of sorts. Rather than an original theoretical statement or elaboration, here Mouffe brings her basic project, ‘radical democracy’ based on an ‘agonistic pluralism’, to bear on the present political conjuncture as she sees it. Both pamphlets are indeed explicitly situated ‘in the conjuncture’ (Mouffe takes the phrase from Althusser's gloss on Machiavelli), their declared aim to delineate a political strategy adequate to confronting the ongoing crisis of neoliberal hegemony and the climate emergency. No doubt the immediacy of such aims, and the overall sense of political urgency informing the interventions, are reflected in their common form: slim volumes (neither numbers more than one hundred pages), simple structures (conjunctural analysis followed by strategic prescription), lucid prose (an otherwise often technical and complex theoretical idiom is rendered easily accessible for its intended general audience; For a Left Populism even contains a theoretical appendix). A certain amount of repetition creeps in across the two books. References reappear (Wolfgang Streeck on the crises of democratic capitalism, David Harvey on neoliberalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello on ‘the new spirit of capitalism’, Stuart Hall on Thatcherism…), as do, perhaps more understandably, structuring concepts and basic arguments. Of course much has changed since 2018. Of course Mouffe, a thinker whose theoretical point of departure is always an elucidation of the present state of things, is right to assess how the Covid-19 global pandemic and the ever intensifying planetary ecological crisis have altered the political landscape. Of course these two polemics are quite clearly intended to provide a reaffirmation, or, better, a rearticulation, of first principles rather than their reconsideration. Still, I was left wondering whether Mouffe had almost written the same book twice, and whether an updated edition of For a Left Populism, with a new chapter on ‘Green Democratic Revolution’ as the hegemonic signifier for left populism today and without quite as much going over old ground, might have been more incisive than an entirely new book. The duplication, if at times a bit wearing, doesn't detract from the appeal of the overall enterprise, though. Taken together, Mouffe's pamphlets present, with remarkable clarity and terseness, a distilled account of an elaborate body of thought and provide a sober warning against ‘authoritarian digital neoliberalism’, the latest version of the ‘post-politics’ that has dominated since the 1990s. Against the erosion of equality and popular sovereignty under neoliberal ‘post-democracy’, they outline an apparent means to ‘deepen’ or ‘radicalize’ democracy, no less than a strategic proposition to win power so as to tackle grotesque socio-economic inequalities and avert environmental breakdown. In bleak times, Mouffe's ambition is admirably simple: to furnish readers with manifestos for real alternatives. How convincing are the results?
If Mouffe's more recent work on populism is openly indebted to Laclau – the concept doesn't feature in her earlier work – that shouldn't cloud the manner in which she has, across several books, developed her own research programme, one that dovetails with but is also distinct from that of her erstwhile collaborator. The broad outlines and central concerns of this intellectual project will be largely familiar, but it is worth rehearsing some of its basic assumptions in order to highlight some of its enduring problems, as seen in these latest iterations. Here I will limit myself to two such problems: first, Mouffe's notion of antagonism (and its cognate, agonism); and second – more briefly but no less importantly – the question of collective action.
Mouffe's project
Mouffe's political theory is best understood as a response to two very particular politico-historical conjunctures: the crisis of the Marxian left and the emergence of the ‘new social movements’ in the 1970s-80s; and the seeming triumph of political liberalism and the emergence of the ‘third way’ in the 1990s-2000s. The first conjuncture led to a critique, elaborated with Laclau in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), of the ‘class essentialism’ or ‘reductionism’ of Marxism and its inability to account for the essential contingency of ‘hegemonic formations’ and the irreducible heterogeneity of collective political identities; the second a critique of the rationalism and individualism of liberal theory and its inability to recognise the constitutive conflict of human society and the collective dimension of democratic politics. Both conjunctures shaped Mouffe's formulation of ‘the political’, her foundational concept, and the attempt to produce an apparently more adequate conception of socio-political reality through which it would become possible to affirm a positive vision of a ‘radical and plural democracy’ based on the principles of ‘liberty and equality for all’ – and, perhaps most crucially, to develop a strategy to realise it. So emerged what could be described as the guiding question of Mouffe's (1999: 5) entire effort: ‘How can one envisage a democratic form of commonality which makes room for conflictual pluralism?’
What does Mouffe propose by way of response? Here ‘the political’ first and foremost acknowledges what she and Laclau call ‘radical negativity’ that ‘manifests itself in the ever-present possibility of antagonism’. Radical negativity, Mouffe (2018: 87–88) writes, ‘impedes the full totalization of society and forecloses the possibility of a society beyond division and power’. Carl Schmitt is the key point of reference here. Mouffe's return to Schmitt was central to her proclaimed ‘return of the political’ in the early 1990s; the German jurist shows that ‘the criterion of the political is the friend/enemy relation’. ‘Political life’, Mouffe (1993: 68–69) accordingly argues in The Return of the Political, ‘aims at the construction of a “we” in a context of diversity and conflict. But to construct a “we” it must be distinguished from the “them”, and that means establishing a frontier, defining an “enemy”. Therefore,’ she continues, ‘while politics aims at constructing a political community and creating a unity, a fully inclusive political community and a final unity can never be realized since there will permanently be a “constitutive outside”‘ – the notion is Derrida's – ‘an exterior to the community that makes its existence possible’. A recognition of pluralism both in the constitution of modern democratic society (with its multiplicity of interests, cultures, choices, values, etc. and according defence of individual rights and liberties) and in the discursive construction of collective political identities (a contingent ‘we’ that articulates a multiplicity of ‘subject positions’ and different democratic demands between which no necessary or a priori relation exists) is thus coupled with a form of Schmittian antagonism that precludes a ‘total pluralism’ and presupposes ‘acts of exclusion’. Against the ‘liberal illusion of a pluralism without antagonism’, Mouffe (2000: 20–21) never tires of repeating that antagonism is ‘ineradicable’ within any form of human society. Taken together, the most important statements of Mouffe's political theory – The Return of the Political (1993), The Democratic Paradox (2000), Agonistics (2013) – are indeed a sustained effort to affirm ‘the political’ as no less than the ontological dimension of antagonism.
Any radical politics worth the name must be capable of identifying a clear ‘enemy’ or ‘adversary’ – on this score Mouffe has consistently provided a salutatory counterpoint to the apolitical illusions that she identifies in the work of Rawls, Rorty and others, and which have inflected much recent and contemporary political theory. The inherent limitations of Mouffe's own politics, however, are apparent.
The limits of agonistic pluralism
Recall Mouffe's theoretical point of departure: the rejection of any essentialist conception of the social totality or of political subjects. Insofar as Marxism, in this view, tends to homogenize social identities and deny the constitutive pluralism of modern social orders (understood as discursive ‘hegemonic formations’ that articulate a series of ‘hegemonic practices’), heterogeneity is deemed properly unthinkable from a Marxian-socialist perspective. But for all the insistence on the radical indeterminacy of the social and the rejection of preconstituted points or definite forms (as expressed in the vocabulary of ‘essential non-fixity’ and ‘partial fixations’ of meanings and identities, of ‘diversity of discourses’ and ‘open system of differences’, and so on), this entire approach itself presupposes a determinate socio-political form in which heterogeneity – and, by extension, the political – can and must be thought. ‘Once the very possibility of achieving homogeneity is discarded,’ writes Mouffe (1993: 104–105), ‘the necessity of liberal institutions becomes evident.’ She suggests that ‘far from being a mere cover-up for the class divisions of capitalist society, as many participatory democrats seem to believe, such institutions provide the guarantee that individual freedom will be protected against the tyranny of the majority or the domination of the totalitarian party/state’. With echoes of Tocqueville, if not Burke, liberal institutions are deemed to defend individual rights and inclusive pluralism against the excesses of mass political participation and oppressive political forms – and are imperative as such. Once anti-essentialism becomes shorthand for a form of liberal pluralism, liberal democracy in turn becomes agonistic pluralism's condition of possibility.
Although Mouffe might claim otherwise, politics in this sense undoubtedly does have a fixed horizon, a given structure: ‘radical and plural democracy’ is simply a form of liberal democracy. Indeed across her writings Mouffe consistently and explicitly situates her project, negative critique and positive vision alike, fully within the framework of the existing social order. ‘There are still numerous social relations where the process of democratization is needed,’ she declares, ‘and the task for the left today is to envisage how this can be done in a way that is compatible with the existence of a liberal democratic regime’ (Mouffe, 1993: 90). And again, after Norberto Bobbio: ‘socialist goals can only be achieved acceptably within the liberal democratic framework’ (Mouffe, 1993: 105; 2018: 51). In later work she presents her project as ‘a post-social-democratic answer to neo-liberalism’ in which ‘the taming of capitalism’ and the attempt ‘to make finance capital more accountable’ are basic aims (Mouffe, 2000: 127). In this respect, Mouffe's agonistic pluralism is remarkably dependent on, and uncritically reproduces some of the most salient features of, the very ‘post-political’ consensus that she herself – rightly so – sees as imperilling politics. Mouffe's more recent interventions at times appear to suggest a more transformative agenda – Towards a Green Democratic Revolution states that the titular ‘revolution’ denotes a ‘break with the neoliberal order’ that aims to ‘erode’ or ‘displace’ capitalism (Mouffe, 2022: 65–66) – but given Mouffe's fundamental and abiding investment in discourse theory one suspects that the primary concern here is articulation, the construction of an effective discursive strategy within a particular conjuncture, rather than a newly avowed commitment to the establishment of a post-capitalist or socialist mode of production. For it goes without saying that there is a stark difference between ‘challenging the capitalist relations of production’ or realising ‘an economic framework with several socialist characteristics’, as Mouffe (2018: 49, 51) describes the aims of left populism, and abolishing such relations through an altogether alternative framework. The equivocations are instructive. If the signifiers alter, the politics remain the same.
What does this mean for antagonism? Mouffe's rejection of class struggle is of course foundational, a corollary of her critique of Marxism's ‘economism’ and ‘reductionism’. Here ‘the democratic struggle’ – or, more precisely, ‘the democratic agonistic struggle’ (Mouffe, 2000: 118, 127) – supersedes the class struggle. ‘For the agonistic perspective, the central category of democratic politics is the category of the “adversary”, the opponent with whom one shares a common allegiance to the democratic principles of “liberty and equality for all”, while disagreeing over their interpretation’ (Mouffe, 2013: 7). Mouffe (2000: 102–103; 2013: 7; 2022: 28) affirms agonism (‘struggle between adversaries’) over antagonism (‘struggle between enemies’), an important conceptual qualification that becomes more pronounced in her later work. Rather than ‘an enemy to be destroyed’, agonism constructs the ‘them’ in a way that recognises ‘the legitimacy of [the] opponent's right to fight for the victory of their position’. The implication of this shift for socio-political struggle follows as a matter of course. ‘One should not hope for the elimination of disagreement’ in society, Mouffe (1993: 50) states, ‘but for its containment within forms that respect the existence of liberal democratic institutions’. ‘The task for democratic theorists and politicians’, we are duly told, ‘should be to envisage the creation of a vibrant “agonistic” public sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted’ (Mouffe, 2005: 3). Or in other words, ‘the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism’ (Mouffe, 2000: 103). But what about opponents who do not share a ‘common allegiance’ to such principles? What remains of ‘the agonistic perspective’ when faced with the (presently resurgent) organised politics of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia and the seeming breakdown of the political community?
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Moreover, to what extent is Mouffe's form of democratic politics actually capable of realising the ideals of ‘liberty and equality for all'? What if one interprets the concrete realisation of these ideals in a manner that is incompatible with the formal structure in which Mouffe contains their contestation? What we have, in other words, is an essentially circumscribed form of antagonism: only issues that are not at odds with and that do not potentially threaten the existing structures of power are at stake in this account of politics. If liberal political institutions are taken for granted, abolition of capitalist social relations is by and large taken off the agenda, the constituent exclusions (from power, wealth, basic material needs, self-fulfilment…) of this particular form of socio-political community, and the antagonisms they generate, seemingly unavoidable, not up for debate. The socio-economic determinations of capitalism are therefore evacuated from the scene; any class interests that might underpin this ‘conflictual consensus’ are eliminated from the terrain of agonistic confrontation (see Mouffe, 2000: 103–105). Again, Mouffe effectively forecloses conflict in a manner not dissimilar to the ‘post-politics’ she herself supposedly seeks to challenge. Rather than genuine antagonism, rather than struggle over basic systems, relations or principles, the result is more or less tacit reconciliation: accommodation with, not transformation of, society as presently constituted.
Articulation or action?
Perhaps the displacements – from capitalism to hegemony, from class struggle to agonistic struggle – would not be so questionable if Mouffe (2000: 118) did not also claim to offer a corrective to liberal theory's inability to recognise ‘the constitutive role of relations of power’ in modern societies. Indeed she criticises John Rawls for advancing a ‘political philosophy without politics’ (Mouffe, 1993: 41–59), yet her own approach, in which social orders and social agents are conceived as ‘discursive surfaces’ and ‘articulations’ strictly detached from empirical referents or material groundings, renders the precise nature and structure of power relations unintelligible. For A Left Populism and Towards a Green Democratic Revolution do very little to correct this.
Any notion of collective agency is in fact conspicuously absent from Mouffe's left populist strategy. She is right that ‘it is imperative to confront the powerful economic forces that resist [a real ecological bifurcation] and to break with the neoliberal order’ (Mouffe, 2022: 65). But what sort of political force might be required to overcome these economic forces and to enact such a break or rupture? Does such a confrontation not presuppose a combative and resolute collective actor? Is this not a matter of active struggle and its material conditions of possibility – a struggle that will require the simultaneous exercise of both state power and popular power? The effective articulation of diverse subject positions through programmatic vision and clarity is one thing; organising an actual political force capable of implementing a genuinely transformative programme is quite another. And it is on this latter problem that Mouffe, and indeed the contemporary left more generally, falters.
To its credit, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution more or less hits on perhaps the most fundamental political question of today – how to overpower ‘the power of fossil capital'? (Mouffe, 2022: 66) – but its proposed answer is not equal to the task in hand. Rather than emphasising the establishment of a toothless ‘chain of equivalence’ and assuming articulation to be an adequate basis for decisive collective action, we would do better to prioritise the development of the collective capacities of a potential popular actor itself. This means, among other things, attending to forms of popular power, embedded in the workplace and the community, which help to cultivate forms of popular participation and mass engagement, to facilitate collective deliberation, to support local struggles and align these with a broader project that seeks to gain power through – but is not reducible to – electoral politics.
Neoliberal hegemony has established ‘a truly oligarchic regime’, Mouffe (2022: 2) writes in Towards a Green Democratic Revolution. ‘All those who oppose this post-democratic “consensus in the centre” are presented as extremists and denounced as populists’. Few readers – not those among any potential ‘we’, at least – are likely to disagree with such an assessment of the contemporary moment. Mouffe's strategic prescriptions, however, ultimately don't offer much of a way out of the current political impasse. Where we might anticipate a transformative agenda, we have a version of the established order of things. Where we might look for a strategy that emphasises mass mobilisation and grassroots militancy as essential both to enforce and encourage government initiatives, we have a transversal ‘collective will’ that says nothing about matters of organised collective action. The stakes, as Mouffe herself insists, couldn't be higher. Can articulations save the planet? I wish I shared her confidence.
