Chantal Mouffe: The Return of the Political. New York: Verso, 1993.
John Exdell: “Feminism, Fundamentalism, and Liberal Democracy.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994) 441-464.
Chantal Mouffe and John Exdell offer contrasting, though equally vigorous, critiques of John Rawls’s political liberalism from the ‘Left.’ In some respects the unintended dialogue between themselves is more illuminating than either of their dialogues with Rawls.
Exdell brings Rawls before the bar of feminism, arguing that political liberalism fails to join the battle against “the fundamentalist values of the religious right” with sufficient force. Rawls apparently consigns those “values” to the private realm, ruling them out of public discourse. Not good enough, Exdell rejoins: “To achieve justice for women, liberals must abandon the search for a legitimating consensus and take sides in what may be the most impassioned cultural and political struggle of our time.” What goes on in families, houses of worship, and workplaces affects what goes on in the public sphere in a thousand ways.
Perhaps Rawlsian liberals will altogether refuse to intervene in private life, or perhaps they will intervene but only in ways legitimized by public discourse. Insofar as they do interfere, Exdell contends, liberals will encourage secularization, making themselves anathema to fundamentalists. Thus, given the authoritative character of the public sphere, particularly its governance of public schools, the liberal state will threaten the religiosity of the children of many fundamentalists. At the same time, these interventions will likely be too flaccid to satisfy feminists. Neither side will rest content with the relativism (or, to put it more cautiously, the self-limitation) of Rawlsian liberalism, and therefore will work to undermine it as the agent of peaceful pluralism.
Feminists demand regime change—specifically, “a form of democratic socialism” in which “the state can provide much of the material and educational resources” to reconstruct social institutions. These resources will include sex education, abortion rights backed by abortion provision, and “various measures to alter the balance of power between husbands and wives.” The means by which democratic socialism will arrive at decisions concerning such provision will not be based upon liberal-democratic (even if ‘progressive’) pluralist “consensus” à la Rawls. “The quest for legitimacy through consensus cannot be undertaken without betraying core liberal commitments to equality and self-determination for women.” Because Rawls’s ideology cannot secure these types of equality and self-determination, liberal democracy must give way to social democracy.
I am calling Exdell’s position ‘neo-Hobbesian.’ By Hobbesian I mean the use of state power to enforce equality and to impose opinions. In his characteristic tough-mindedness, Hobbes sees that social life constantly generates inegalitarian institutions; churches and other associations are breeding grounds for authoritarianism. The Hobbesian monarch to some degree recreates natural equality by re-atomizing society: All members of civil society will be equal before the One who is unequal, the One who will use his power to enforce equal conditions on all others. (In this enterprise, atomizing economic competition will replace polarizing religious contention.) At the same time, Hobbesian civil society avoids the poverty, nastiness, brutishness, and shortness of life in the state of natural equality by imposing ‘equality’—i.e., sameness—of opinions on his subjects.
By ‘neo’-Hobbesian I mean whatever it is that Exdell may mean by a statism that is social-democratic while at the same time ‘orthodox’ with respect to feminism. I am not sure exactly what that means, inasmuch as Exdell gives his readers no guidance. Monarchy need not apply, I trust, but some form of statism is involved. This state might or might not be overbearing; for example, it might use such mild means as tax incentives to foster family restructuring. Even so, tax incentives imply a tax code; a tax code implies tax lawyers to write the code and then spin through the revolving door to the ‘private sector’ in order to manipulate the code. This implies a certain priesthood, a certain inequality. Also, a state powerful enough to enforce a far-ranging tax code will likely gather inertia for any number of purposes, none of them unqualifiedly egalitarian. And of course the socialist side of social democracy must regulate and/or nationalize the means of production, again empowering the state apparatus. If the social-democratic state reaches into the household itself, as Exdell proposes, then it will need even more power at its disposal.
That is, the softer Hobbesianism gets the more it collapses into the arms of John Locke (‘liberal’ democracy). The softer Exdell’s neo-Hobbesian social democracy gets, the more it will look like Rawls’s liberal state, in practice if not in theory. The ‘harder’ it gets, it will end by out-Hobbesing Hobbes.
None of this will muffle Mouffe, who wants to get out from under liberalism, the Hobbes-Locke-Kant axis, altogether. Mouffe endorses Rawlsian pluralism, “the end of a substantive idea of the good life.” But she goes further. Do not recognize pluralism as a mere fact of modern life, she urges. View it rather as “constitutive at the conceptual level of the very nature of modern democracy.” That is, get rid of such overarching principles as natural right or the categorical imperative altogether and replace them with pluralism, plurality or ‘diversity’ as the principle of the regime. Liberalism from Locke onwards has wanted to preserve a balance between liberty and equality. Following Derrida, Mouffe wants for the first time to fuse liberty and equality by recognizing that equality must involve the perpetual deconstruction of all inegalitarian institutions. This sounds very much like Trotsky’s notion of the ‘permanent revolution,’ but apparently without the statism, apparently by starting with ‘the withering away of the state.’ Subordinating power relations can only be demolished freely, and the typical liberal problem of governing for equality can only be solved, by denying ‘essentialism’ and recognizing that “everything is constructed as difference.” Power is not an external relation among pre-constituted ‘atoms’ (as in Hobbes). Power constitutes the ‘atoms’ or identities themselves. E = MC, squared. Not Hobbesian or Lockean peace (a “dangerous utopia of reconciliation,” vulnerable to inegalitarian ossification) but Heraclitean conflict and flux can alone bring genuine equality or “democratic determinacy.” Professor Heidegger, meet the New Left.
Mouffe’s position might appear to lead toward the same goal as certain forms of ‘conservatism.’ Conservatism is obviously an empty term, its content dependent upon what a given ‘conservative’ wants to conserve. Throne and altar? The ‘free market’? The New Deal? There are at least two kinds of contemporary ‘conservatism that would oppose Exdell. Libertarianism of the sort defined by Murray Rothbard and Richard Epstein puts a premium not on equality but on liberty. It opposes inequality only insofar as it impinges upon personal liberty, and is particularly concerned with economic liberty. A second ‘conservatism,’ the small-government or Jeffersonian type espoused by such writers as the late M. E. Bradford and Thomas Fleming, would regard Exdell as the latest version of Herbert Croly—or maybe, horror of horrors, Abraham Lincoln—urging Hamiltonian means at the service of Jeffersonian ends. Sorry, they would say, but you can’t get to Monticello by way of Pennsylvania Avenue any more than you can get there by way of Wall Street. To these ‘conservatives,’ Mouffe would reply: smallness does not preclude inequality. It may only make it more concentrated and intense.
Even as Exdell does not say much about social-democratic statism, Mouffe does not say much about how the deconstructionist society would hold together—remain a society. It appears that Mouffe harkens to Derrida, who harkens to Heidegger, who harkens to Heraclitus. Mouffe and Derrida say that flux is not an invitation to authoritarianism, as Heraclitus and Heidegger evidently suppose, but the only ground (more accurately, anti-ground, anti-foundation) for radical equality. To which Hobbes would reply: ‘Congratulations. You have converted civil society into the state of nature, in which no human being will want to stay for long. Welcome back into my web, the tensile structure of egalitarian statism.’
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