Mouffe, Chantal

Created: 2022-Oct-13

Bio: (1943-) Belgian political theorist. Chantal Mouffe was educated at the universities of Louvain, Paris, and Essex. She held research positions at Harvard, Cornell, the University of California, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, and now teaches at the University of Westminster, where she runs the Center for the Study of Democracy. She is known for her post-Marxist approach to democracy and socialism. Chantal Mouffe's most famous books are Hegemony and Political Strategy (1985), which she co-wrote with her partner Ernest Laclau, and The Democratic Paradox (2000).

In the book Democratic Paradox, she advocates for "agonistic pluralism" the concept by which she wants to emphasize the need for citizens to express their opposing views peacefully in a democracy. The democratic process is an arena where fundamental differences in values can be expressed and discussed but in such a way as to prevent hostility and violence. She believes that political participation and democratic engagement of citizens are in the public interest, in themselves. Since democracy is, at the same time, a form of government, but also a symbolic framework with specific rules, democracy can be defined as an "agonistic confrontation". The essence of democracy is not in the annulment of power relations, but in the establishment of forms of power and institutions through which power, that is compatible with democracy, is exercised. Democracy does not mean the existence of complete equality, because democratic equality requires a distinction between "us" and "them", and this separation creates inequalities. She opposes the idea of deliberative democracy, which she sees as a too bureaucratic form of democracy. The consensus that emerges in democracies is always an expression of asymmetric power relations, but there must be a way to protest so that democracy does not turn into a hegemonic regime.