Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Chapter 3: “Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antagonisms and Hegemony”; Chapter 4: “Hegemony and Radical Democracy.” London: Verso, 2014 (second edition).
In their first two chapters, Laclau and Mouffe traced the course of the “Crisis of Marxism,” the embarrassing failure of ‘scientific socialism’ to deliver on its prediction, namely, the proletarian revolution. Increasingly, Marxian thinkers saw the need to make political strategy and choice, even free will, central to socialist politics, to give politics its independence back, refusing to claim that political life merely ‘reflects’ underlying social and economic forces. This led Antonio Gramsci to hold up “hegemony” or ruling as indispensable to socialist politics, just as it has been to political life from the beginning.
“We now have to construct theoretically the concept of hegemony.” The authors thus follow in the line of modern epistemology, which inclines to make knowledge a matter not so much of perceiving as of making. Leo Strauss (a thinker the authors do not consult) remarks that Machiavelli shoulders aside the metaphor of knowledge as seeing (offered by Plato and the other philosophers of classical antiquity) and the metaphor of knowledge as hearing (as prophecy, hearkening to the voice of God) in favor of the metaphor of knowledge as touching, ‘grasping.’ Unlike seeing and hearing, touching perceives by means of direct contact with the object perceived; simultaneously, it affects that object, lays it open to grasping, shaping, making. Modern theory is no longer ‘merely theoretical.’ Modern, Machiavellian, philosophy thinks of thinking as intervention, construing—not quite the creatio ex nihilo of the Biblical God, who fully knows what he has fully brought into being, but somewhat in the imitation of, and sometimes as a rival to, Him.
As historicists, the authors understand their effort not as a dialectical ascent from the ‘cave’ of convention, lit by fires ‘built’ by its rulers, to sunlit nature, but as a “strategic movement requiring negotiation among mutually contradictory discursive surfaces” (emphasis added). This isn’t quite Socrates’ political philosophy, which does indeed require dialogue, strategically inflected, with fellow citizens inside the political ‘cave,’ because Socrates aims at an ascent to a nature that the authors deprecate. They would stay within the cave, while rearranging and indeed reconstructing the fires and idols within it. The objects within the cave are the only things there are, at least for political purposes. Political life requires speech or articulation, implying “some form of separate presence of the elements which that practice articulates or recomposes.” Those elements, they maintain, “were originally specified as fragments of a lost structural or organic totality.” By “originally,” they mean in the thought of the late eighteenth century, the thought of German Romanticism. The Enlightenment thinkers of the generations immediately preceding them had dismantled, at least to their own satisfaction, the cosmos of Christendom and of the classical philosophers who preceded it, ‘disenchanting’ the world. The Romantics undertook “an eager search” for “a new synthesis,” a reintegration of body and soul, reason and feeling, thought and the senses. Politically, they sought a modern equivalent of the ancient polis in the face of the modern state, with its complex civil societies of many ‘classes,’ increasingly bound together by impersonal, scientistic bureaucracies—a disenchantment, indeed. But any synthesis must be, well, synthetic—artificial, therefore unlike “the natural organic unity peculiar to Greek culture,” as they conceived it. [1]
As the poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin explained it, Romanticism upheld “two ideals”: reducing human needs to their “natural simplicity” while aspiring to “the highest cultivation” through “the organization which we are able to give ourselves.” Laclau calls the first ideal “articulation,” the second, “mediation.” They describe the distinction as “a nebulous area of ambiguities,” not nearly so clear as the Romantics wanted it to be. Enter Hegel, whose work “is at once the highest moment of German Romanticism” and the first fully post-Enlightenment “reflection on society.” Hegel takes the fragments of the modern world and reunites them in a grand synthesis by means of his historical dialectic—history conceived as the rationally understandable unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. The “cunning of reason…leads separation back to unity,” in “the highest movement of rationalism,” “the moment when it attempts to embrace within the field of reason, without dualisms, the totality of the universe of differences.” Unfortunately, “this synthesis contains all the seeds of its dissolution” because “the rationality of history can be affirmed only at the price of introducing contradiction into the field of reason.” By this, the authors evidently mean that the principle of contradiction, first articulated by Plato’s Socrates in the Republic, states simply that the same thing will not do, or suffer having done to it, opposites, in the same part, at the same time, in relation to the same thing. (So, for example, to say that a child’s top both stands still and moves isn’t a contradiction, since it stays still with respect to its axis while moving with respect to its circumference.) Socrates leaves it at that; if two opinions contradict one another, one or both must be false, insofar as they are contradictory. Hegel would like to treat opinions and indeed everything else as if they were paints of opposite colors; when mixed together, they form a new color. This is “introducing contradiction into the field of reason,” thereby undermining the principle of reasoning itself. [2] In making Hegelian dialectic a supposed science explaining the dialectical unfolding of economic-material relations in society, Marx and his followers imported such “ambiguities and imprecisions” into socialist theory.
Thus, “this area of ambiguity constituted by the discursive uses of ‘dialectics’ is the first that has to be dissolved.” The authors undertake to do so by denying that ‘society’ is a coherent totality, rationally understandable because governed by laws of dialectical development, its elements ultimately to be harmonized as if it were a Hegelian syllogism, the grand concluding synthesis of a set of theses and antitheses. The elements of ‘society’ are “diverse” and “precarious,” contingent on one another, ever-shifting—more Heraclitean than Hegelian. “The social itself has no essence.” Human beings determine the ‘nature’ of these contingent relations. More, they determine the identities of the elements themselves—nowadays, for example, as ‘L,’ ‘G,’ ‘B,’ ‘T,’ ‘Q,’ and on, perhaps, to infinity. That is, social relations and identities are not “merely ‘cognitive’ or ‘contemplative’ but instead defined by “an articulatory practice which constitutes and organizes social relations.” Today’s complex “industrial societies” see “a growing proliferation” of such relations and identities. Analyzing “articulation” will “give us our starting point for the elaboration of the concept of hegemony.” This requires establishing “the possibility of specifying the elements which enter into the articulatory relation” and then determining the relations among them.
Before doing so, they offer a critique of some “theoretical discourses” which move in the direction they seek but remain “inhibited by the basic categories of an essentialist discourse”—essentialism being the claim they are most eager to refute because they regard it as limiting egalitarianism, and thereby preventing a radical democratic politics. They begin with the then-famous French Algerian Marxist, Louis Althusser. Althusser rejected both Stalinism and the fashionable ‘Marxist humanism,” which described Marxism as a benign extension of Enlightenment thought. His own “structural Marxism”—holding, against Lenin, that the modern state is not the instrument of the bourgeois class but a framework ensuring the viability of capitalist enterprise—diverged from the current line of the erratic French Communist Party leader, Roger Garaudy, who was promoting ‘socialism with a human face,’ at the moment. For the authors, Althusser’s analysis exhibited an unrealized potential. Althusser demystified the modern state by denying Hegelian immanence; the state isn’t really the instantiation of ‘God,’ that is, the Absolute Spirit. Such concepts as state and society have symbolic meaning but they are not to be taken literally as coherent causes, as drivers of ‘History.’ “Society and social agents lack any essence, and their regularities merely consist of the relative and precarious forms of fixation which accompany the establishment of a certain order.” But Althusser failed to take this idea far enough. He retained an ‘essentialist’ notion of economic life, thereby “laps[ing] into the very defect he criticizes.” He sees that the state, society, and even individuals are not essences, but he takes the economy as “an abstract universal object…which produces concrete effects,” determining the character of society. What Althusser implied but did not realize was a “critique of every type of fixity, through an affirmation of the incomplete, open and politically negotiable character of every identity.” The presence of other identities prevents the “suturing” of my own identity. That is why the working class has not been and can never be what Marx said it would be: the unified and decisive driver of the last stage of history.
Having established that point, the authors can now offer four definitions of the terms that serves as touchstones for their theory. They define “articulation” as “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identify is modified as a result of the articulatory practice.” A “discourse” is “the structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice.” A “moment” is a position differentiated by an articulation with a discourse. An “element” is “any difference that is not discursively articulated.” That is, talking about something or someone changes the thing or person talked about. If I say I’m an angel and you say I’m a rotter, both of those claims alter what and who I was before the claims were made. It is not merely an exaggeration to regard this as a theory which gives some credence to the belief that saying something make it so—although only some credence, as the authors will soon explain.
Given these definitions, one must pay careful attention to “the characteristic coherence of the discursive formation” one is examining, the “dimensions and extensions of the discursive,” and the “openness or closure exhibited by” that discursive formation. The coherence one perceives in a discursive formation owes its existence not to “the expression of any underlying principle external to itself,” such as a law of history. ‘Values’ are relative to each other. They “depend closely upon one another.” They can be seen to cohere only in the sense that they coalesce, for a time, a “moment,” in a regular “system of structural positions.”
One must also reject “the distinctive between discursive and non-discursive practices” because “every object is constituted as an object of discourse.” The dichotomy between “the linguistic and behavioral aspects of a social practice” is a false dichotomy. For example, while it is true that an earthquake “is an event that certainly exists,” independently from what anyone wills, the question of whether we think of the earthquake as a natural phenomenon or an act of God “depends on the structuring of a discursive field.” It is in that sense that saying something about an event ‘makes it so.’ Discursive structures, furthermore, are not mental but material structures; speech is an act. Articulation is “a discursive practice [emphasis added] which does not have a plane of constitution prior to, or outside, the dispersion of the articulated elements,” whether that plane is mental or material. “The main consequence of a break with the discursive/extra-discursive dichotomy is the abandonment of the thought/ reality opposition, and hence a major enlargement of the field of those categories which can account for social relations.” Metaphor, for example, no longer takes second place “to a primary, constitutive literality of social relations.” Laclau and Mouffe to this extent may be said to ‘poeticize’ political thought.
They are careful not to take such “moments” too far. They are limited, if not ‘essentially’ defined by exterior factors. Positing something doesn’t entirely make it so. “The transition from the ‘elements,'” the differences not discursively articulated, “to the ‘moments'” in which they are, “is never fully realized”; “there is no identity that can be fully constituted.” “Here we arrive at a decisive point in our argument”: ‘society’ is not “a sutured and self-defined totality.” It has “no single underlying principle fixing—and hence constituting—the whole field of differences.” Identities are never fully fixed within it. “Neither absolute fixity nor absolute nonfixity is possible.” In this, they partake of the ‘postmodernism’ of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida, with their insistence “on the impossibility of fixing ultimate meanings.” There are, however, “partial fixations”; if there were not, “the very flow of differences would be impossible,” and a night in which all cows are black would descend upon us. The authors call these (temporarily) “privileged discursive points of this partial fixation” “nodal points.” Identities float, but they are identities. “The practice,” the act, “of articulation, therefore, consists in the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning; and the partial character of this fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity.”
Where does this leave the human individual, the “subject”? Laclau and Mouffe stand with Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger in denying the accounts of both rationalism and empiricism, which view the subject “as an agent both rational and transparent to itself,” unified and homogeneous, and as the “origin and basis of social relations,” as in social contract theory. They regard the critique of rationalism as definitive, although of course, given their own anti-essentialism, this amounts to a tacit admission that the critiques themselves might be redefined. To the authors, subjects are really “subject positions,’ identities that exist in relation to other identities, in many ways unfixed. This is why they reject ‘humanist’ Marxism. “What is important is to try to show how ‘Man’ has been produced in modern times, how the ‘human’ subject—that is, the bearer of a human identity without distinctions—appears in certain religious discourse’s, is embodied in juridical practices and is diversely constructed in other spheres.” ‘Man,’ as produced or constructed, is indeed “a fundamental nodal point from which it has been possible to proceed, since the eighteenth century, to the ‘humanization’ of a number of social practices,” but today it must be understood as only a nodal point, lest a presumption of fixity interfere with the project of radical democracy. The same goes for feminism. It, too, must avoid a rigid dichotomy of feminine and masculine, both ‘essentialized’ and thus distorted. And, obviously, the familiar Marxist dichotomy of capitalists and proletarians brings distortions in its wake, which is why Marx’s supposedly scientific predictions never came true. Nodal positions are established politically, not by the immanent nature or historicity of subjects. “Neither the political identity nor the economic identity of the agents crystallizes as differential moment of unified discourse, and…the relation between them is the precarious unity of a tension.” Human subjects do not give meaning to themselves or anything else, since “the subjectivity of the agent is penetrated by the same precariousness and absence of suture apparent at any other point of the discursive totality of which it is part.” Articulation is hegemonic, a political act of agents interacting with one another.
Social antagonisms are not the same as physical collisions, although they can lead to physical collisions. And social antagonisms are not, strictly speaking, contradictions, which in logic amount to the juxtaposition of two entirely opposite ideas, as in the impossibility, ‘blackwhite.’ A social antagonism arises when “the presence of the ‘Other’ prevents me from being totally myself.” For example, “it is because a peasant cannot be a peasant that an antagonism exists with the landowner expelling him from his land.” This renders the peasant’s ‘being a peasant’ precarious, partial, so long as the landowner can kick him out. Thus, “antagonism, far from being an objective relation,” like a physical collision or a logical contradiction, “is a relation where in the limits of every objectivity are shown.” The landowner may be able to dispossess the peasant, and indeed the peasant, or more likely a group of peasants, might be able to dispossess the landowner. “The limit of the social must be given within the social itself as something subverting it, destroying its ambition to constitute a full presence.” The social is no more fully constituted than the persons who interact within it. At the same time, antagonism also has its limits in the continued existence of the antagonists. The dispossessed peasant or landlord need not be destroyed; new social relations may coalesce.
Considered politically, antagonism takes place not so much among individuals as among social groups. The authors give the example of the antagonism between peasant culture and urban culture. As “not one but two societies” within a political community, a “millenarian rebellion” may occur—a “fierce, total and indiscriminate” assault on the city. “The only alternative is massive emigration towards another region in order to set up the City of God, totally isolated from the corruption of the world.” On the more mundane level, Benjamin Disrael considered the “two nations” in England, the poor and the wealthy; another example is the Continental antagonism between the old, throne-and-altar monarchies and the regimes of popular sovereignty. As a statesman, Disraeli sought to unite the two nations into one, avoiding revolution, by extending voting rights to the working classes and meeting some of the social demands of the workers. Laclau and Mouffe call this policy of expanding and ‘complexifying’ the political sphere the “logic of difference.” As complexity increases, the demands of one group antagonistic to the existing regime might not collaborate with another group just as antagonistic, but on different grounds. For example, feminists might not collaborate with racial minorities. Such struggles are democratic but they are not “popular” in the sense that they consist of ‘the people, united.’
How, then, to achieve democratic “hegemony” or rule? The Marxist claim that a socioeconomic class could be the agent to achieve this has failed, thanks to “the generalized crisis of social identities” that democratic social complexity itself has caused. But if “nodal points” are possible to establish, then Gramsci’s notion of social antagonism as a “war of position” becomes salient, if imperfect. He is right to think that a popular identity needs to be constructed, cannot be assumed to exist as a precondition of antagonism. He is wrong to think that there is one main antagonism, the working class against the capitalists. “We will therefore speak of democratic struggles,” not the grand “popular” one, a plurality of struggles. As the authors put it in their somewhat tiresome jargon, “The hegemonic dimension of politics only expands as the open, non-sutured character of the social increases.” In a complex, modern society, “there can be a variety of hegemonic nodal points,” not just one (e.g., ‘capitalism’). “Insofar as the social is an infinitude not reducible to any underlying unitary principle, the mere idea of a center of the social has no meaning at all.” This plurality must become “the starting point” of social-democratic analysis. This disposes of ‘totalitarian’ forms of Marxism. The Soviet or Chinese Communist attempts to harmonize the entirety of a modern society into one coherent thing is impossible. Instead, the various social groups, understanding their own precariousness in relation to all the others, will need at times to cooperate and resist all the others, with no supreme Leader or Party to ‘guide’ them. “No hegemonic logic can account for the totality of the social and constitute its center, for in that case a new suture would have been produced and the very concept of hegemony would have eliminated itself.” To rule means to rule over someone or some thing, but ‘totalitarianism’ absorbs all into one, an impossibility. However, “it would be equally wrong to propose as an alternative, either pluralism or the total diffusion of power within the social, as this would blind the analysis to the presence of nodal points and to the partial concentrations of power existing in every concrete social formation.” No one “logic” can account for such complexity. This means that “a ‘scientific’ approach attempting to determine the ‘essence’ of the social would, in actual fact, be the height of utopianism.” Marx and his followers have decried the folly of ‘utopian socialism,’ but they have fallen into it from another angle.
Democracy arose in the first half of the nineteenth century, socialism in the second half. As a result, a unified popular pole, “far from becoming more simple” to obtain, as Marx predicted, “grew increasingly difficult” to obtain “as the growing complexity and institutionalization of capitalist society” led to “the corporatization and separation of those sectors which should ideally have been united as ‘the people.'” Politics saw “the very identity of the forces in struggle” subjected to “constant shifts,” calling for “an incessant process of redefinition.” Mere economic-class antagonism “is incapable of dividing the totality of the social body into two antagonistic camps, of reproducing itself automatically as a line of demarcation in the political sphere.” For “radical democracy” to form, a “radically libertarian and more ambitious” politics will be needed.
Even granting this, why is radical democracy good? In search of an answer, one must turn to the authors’ discussion of “the democratic revolution.”
On the grounds (as it were) from their rejection of anti-essentialism, they rule out not only history but nature as a source of right. Admittedly, with “the anthropological assumption of a ‘human nature’ and of a unified subject,” one can reject at least some forms of subordination, namely, those that stunt human nature itself. In rejecting “this essentialist perspective,” they need another approach. They begin by distinguishing subordination from oppression, and both of these from domination. A relation of subordination is one in which one “agent is subjected to the decisions of another”—an employee to an employer, a child to a parent. A relation of oppression is one in which subordination has sparked antagonism. A relation of domination is one in which subordination is “considered as illegitimate from the perspective, or in the judgment, of a social agent external to” the subordinate and his subordinator. So, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft vindicated the rights of women by transferring the more generally accepted principle of “political equality between citizens”—a social agent external to men and women as such—to “the field of equality between the sexes.” Citing Tocqueville, Laclau and Mouffe take his democratic revolution, “the end of a society of a hierarchic and inegalitarians type, ruled by a theological-political logic in which the social order had its foundation in divine will,” society’s replacement of that with the “affirmation of the absolute power of its people,” as morally dispositive. The argument of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, an argument from natural right, derives its authority not from the substance of its claims but from its “establishment of a new legitimacy,” the “invention of democratic culture,” by means of “provid[ing] the discursive conditions which made it possible to propose the different forms of inequality as illegitimate and anti-natural, and thus mak[ing] them equivalent as forms of oppression” (emphasis added). That is, saying it made it so, once French society assented.
This democratizing tendency in modern societies, beginning in the political realm, argued in the realm of male-female relations by Wollstonecraft, eventually influenced discourses on economic inequality, with socialists “putting in question” the “forms of subordination” seen in the workplace and “demanding new rights” for the workers. This is as Tocqueville predicted, when he wrote, “It is impossible to believe that equality will not finally penetrate as much into the political world as into other domains. It is not possible to conceive of men as eternally unequal among themselves on one point, and equal on others; at a certain moment, they will come to be equal on all points.” Tocqueville worried about that, not because he sought to defend the privileges of the titled ‘aristocracy’ to which he belonged but because the effort to achieve thoroughgoing equality in all spheres of human life might well put an end to liberty, the precondition of moral conduct, either under a Napoleonic despotism or under a softer, bureaucratic despotism. To their credit, Laclau and Mouffe share some of his caution, humanity having seen tyrannies far worse than anything Napoleon attempted, and bureaucracies at least as stultifying as those Tocqueville envisioned. Nevertheless, as socialists, they remain fixated on ‘capitalist’ oppression. Indeed, “a good proportion of the new political subjects have been constituted through their antagonistic relationship to recent forms of subordination, derived from the implanting and expansion of capitalist relations of production and the growing intervention of the State.” These include “the waste of natural resources, the pollution and destruction of the environment,” the ills of urbanization, and even the attempts to meliorate social equality by means of “the Keynesian Welfare State,” which “has been accompanied by a growing bureaucratization” of State practices, which is “one of the fundamental sources of inequalities and conflicts.” Indeed, “expansion of capitalist relations of production and of the new bureaucratic-state forms” have proven “mutually reinforcing” in many instances. “Given the bureaucratic character of State intervention, this creation of ‘public spaces’ is carried out not in the form of a true democratization, but through the imposition of new forms of subordination,” resulting in “numerous struggles…against bureaucratic forms of State power.” By this (and again consistent with their socialism) the authors mean not the resistance of small businesses against public and corporate bureaucracies but rather such phenomena as the “Welfare Rights Movement” in the United States, whereby clients of the Welfare State demand more benefits, more transfers of wealth from the upper and middle classes to themselves, in the name of social equality. Once again, “the categories of ‘justice,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘equality’ have been redefined and liberal-democratic discourse has been profoundly modified by this broadening of the sphere of rights.”
On the level of ‘culture,’ the “new mass culture” has “profoundly shake[en] traditional identities,” as it “contains powerful elements for the subversion of inequalities.” In particular, the young “constitute a new axis for the emergence of antagonisms,” since the they are simultaneously advertised to, treated as consumers, and thereby enticed to spend money they don’t have, “stimulat[ing] them to seek a financial autonomy that society is in no condition to give them.” This generates antagonism, antagonism further exacerbated by the erosion of family bonds, and especially parental authority, which grates against egalitarian sentiment. Liberty, now reconceived as ‘diversity,’ not only disoriented parents and the bourgeoisie but the left, especially the ‘Old Left’ of Marxism, ill-disposed to an emerging “radical and plural democracy.” “Pluralism is radical only to the extent that each term of this plurality of identities finds within itself the principle of its own validity, without this having to be sought in a transcendent of underlying positive ground for the hierarchy of meaning of them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy.” Radical pluralism is democratic insofar as its self-constituting, self-validating character has been universalized; everyone gets to do it. At the same time, radical democracy, precisely because it has no foundation below it, no essence within it, and no standard above it, teeters on precarity, even more than previous societies have done.
The authors identify the main threat to a democratic outcome as “neo-liberalism,” initiated by Friedrich von Hayek’s “violent attack on the interventionist State and the various forms of economic planning that were being implemented” in the mid-1940s, when he published The Road to Serfdom. Although Hayek argues that the Welfare State will cause “the power of the law” to decline, the power of bureaucracy to increase, Laclau and Mouffe are having none of that. “In reality”—that is to say, in terms of their own agenda within agon of the Left in the precarious democratic world—the issue “is the very articulation between liberalism and democracy which was performed during the course of the nineteenth century,” the extension of asserted democratic rights from the political to the economic sphere. Hayek’s “central political objective,” individual liberty, ought to outweigh egalitarianism. “All State intervention” in the name of “social or redistributive justice,” “except in connection with matters that cannot be regulated through the market, is considered as an attack on individual liberty.” Oddly, they associate Hayek with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who aimed to “remove public decisions more and more from political control and to make them the exclusive responsibility of experts”—a bureaucratizing move Hayek would have detested. Hayek criticized democratic political control of the economy, but had no objection to political engagement in any decent regime, so long as it permitted individual liberty, very much including property ownership. This (very likely deliberate) confusion enables the authors to claim that neoliberals propose “a new definition of democracy which in fact would serve to legitimize a regime in which political participation might be virtually non-existent.”
They are surely right to contend that “the form in which liberty, equality, democracy and justice are defined at the level of political philosophy may have important consequences at a variety of other levels of discourse, and contribute decisively to shaping the common sense of the masses” in “the constitution of a hegemonic left alternative” to neo-liberalism. At this point, they admit that the plausibility of neo-liberal ideas in contemporary politics owes much “to the growing bureaucratization of social relations.” To refute it, one must challenge “possessive individualism,” the claim that “the rights of individuals,” including property rights, exist “before society, and often in opposition to it.” However, to defend pre-social, pre-political individual rights, neo-liberals understand what Locke, the American Founders, and many other earlier thinkers and statesmen now called ‘liberals’ understood: that government is necessary to secure those rights. Since they reject scientistic-bureaucratic government, the authors argue, neo-liberals recur to “a set of themes from conservative philosophy,” particularly conservatism’s “profoundly anti-egalitarian cultural and social traditionalism.” This is the real agenda; neo-liberals fly “under the cover” of liberty, but in fact only intend to “legitimate inequalities and restore the hierarchical relations which the struggles of previous decades had destroyed.” They offer no proof of this charge; given the intended audience of their book, they don’t need one.
In face of this threat, acknowledging the precarity of all hegemonic arrangements in democracies, Laclau and Mouffe declare that “the task of the Left therefore cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology,” as Marxists do, “but on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy.” As they have previously (and indeed repeatedly) remarked, there are no natural rights inherent in individuals because “the meaning of the liberal discourse on individual rights is not definitely fixed.” “The radical changes which are necessary in the political imaginary of the Left, if it wishes to succeed in [ahem!] founding a political practice fully located in the field of the democratic revolution and conscious of the depth and variety of the hegemonic articulations which the present conjuncture requires” must begin with overcoming “the fundamental obstacle” to that revolution, namely, any “essentialist apriorism” that “sutures” the social. From there, the Left will need to reject its own inclination to establish “privileged points”; for Marxism, this was the claim that socioeconomic classes drive ‘history.’ This error has led to the political ruinous claim that “the expansion of the role of the State is the panacea for all problems,” and that a technocratic economism will serve as the basis for State action against capitalist inequality. More, the “classic concept of ‘revolution'” as propounded and practiced by the Jacobins, animated by essentialist apriorism and instantiated in statism, must also be abandoned. This concept “implied the foundational character of the revolutionary act,” but this perspective “is incompatible with the plurality and the opening which a radical democracy requires.” Revolution should be reconceived as process. The Left should encourage more autonomous “spheres of struggle and the multiplication of political spaces,” against the “concentration of power and knowledge that classic Jacobinism and its different social variants imply.” In this effort, socialism will become not the but “one of the components of a project for radical democracy.” Socialism is indeed “necessary to put an end to capitalist relations of production, which are at the root of numerous relations of subordination,” but it is no more than that. Socialists need to understand that, accept it, and act accordingly.
To say this, however, raises “a whole set of new problems.” Where and in what form shall Leftists determine the antagonisms they wish to foster in the ever-shifting terrain of social and political activity? To what extent can pluralism comport with the commonalities of “equivalences” among the many social actors? Can this neo-Heraclitean conception of human life really lend itself to “define a hegemonic project,” or is it a mere recipe for anarchism?
In terms of “equivalences,” Leftists should regard them as “family resemblances” (a phrase borrowed from Wittgenstein), not entities lending themselves to systematic unity. For example, feminists should think of the State as “an important means for effecting an advance, frequently against civil society in legislation which combats sexism”—the supposed ‘patriarchy’ of the family, pay differentials, and so on. Fortunately, the vast modern State itself “is not a homogeneous medium…but an uneven set of branches and functions,” whose internal conflicts may be turned toward egalitarianism in civil society. “Neither the State nor civil society is the surface of emergence of democratic antagonisms.” The same goes for political parties and (although they do not yet see it) business corporations, which can also be induced to deploy power in the service of egalitarian claims. “What we are witnessing is a politicization far more radical than any we have known in the past, because it tends to dissolve the distinction between the public and the private, not in terms of the encroachment on the private by a unified public space, but in terms of a proliferation of radically new and different political spaces.” This thoroughgoing politicization will, the authors hope, prevent anarchy, since disputes will center on ruling, albeit in the fluid manner they envision, not on not-ruling.
This is where Laclau and Mouffe define the newest ‘New Left’ project, which is in some respects a reprise of the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s, without the ‘essentialist’ Marxist assumptions that made the Communist Party such an untrustworthy partner in that movement. The Left must expand the “chains of equivalence” to include “anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-capitalism.” Notice that these will indeed be “chains” of equivalence, “symbols of a unique and indivisible struggle.” Yet, somehow, “each of these struggles retains its differential specificity with respect to the others.” There is no contradiction, they claim, so long as no one group on the Left seeks preeminence over the others—the working class over feminists and civil rights advocates, as seen in the past. No one group serves as the foundation of the struggle; instead, each mixes its efforts with the others, limiting the others while strengthening the Left as a whole against the Right. “From this we can deduce a basic precondition for a radically libertarian conception of politics: the refusal to dominate—intellectually or politically—every presumed ‘ultimate foundation’ of the social.” If the Left fails in this, the familiar “Rousseauian paradox”—that “men should be obliged to be free”—must triumph, and they are back to some new version of Bolshevism. Here, a Marxian phrase actually helps: “The free development of each should be the condition for the free development of all.” Marx is referring not to socialism but to the end of history, to communism. Laclau and Mouffe want communism without state socialism, without the dictatorship of the proletariat or of anyone else.
Admittedly, “this total equivalence never exists,” given the precariousness and “unevenness” of the social. Equivalence, “the demand for equality,” ought always to be “balanced by the demand for liberty”—a “radical and plural democracy.” This tension need not descend into contradiction because reality, including human individuals, is fluid. The appropriate defense against bureaucratic excesses on the Left is not “to return purely and simply to the defense of ‘bourgeois’ individualism,” as neo-liberals want to do. Rather, we need “the production of another individual, an individual who is no longer constructed out of the matrix of possessive individualism” along the lines of “‘natural’ rights prior to society.” Such natural rights conduce to claims of private rights. Instead, individual rights ought to be defined “only in the context of social relations which determine subject positions,” rights “which involve other subjects who participate in the same social elation,” rights which “can only be exercised collectively,” in accordance with a “social theory [that] defends the right of the social agent to equality and to participation as a producer and not only as a citizen.”
But what about the chain of democratic equivalences”? The authors recognize a threat in it. “Paradoxically,” this “very logic of openness and of the democratic subversion of differences” brings with it “the possibility of a closure far more radical than in the past.” Once all “traditional systems” are broken, now that “indeterminacy and ambiguity turn more elements of society into ‘floating signifiers,’ the possibility arises of attempting to institute a center which radically eliminates the logic of autonomy and reconstitutes around itself the totality of the social body.” That is, if there are no standards exterior to society to which citizens can appeal—no divine or natural laws, not even the supposed laws of history—then “the logic of totalitarianism” might recur, “an attempt to re-establish the unity which democracy has shattered between the loci of power, law and knowledge.” To avoid this, and to avoid the opposite pole of anarchy, “an implosion of the social and an absence of any common point of reference,” the “experience of democracy should consist of the recognition of the multiplicity of social logics along with the necessity of their articulation,” an articulation “constantly recreated and renegotiated,” with “no final point at which a balance will be definitively achieved.” Partial social stability can prevail by undertaking “the search for a point of equilibrium between a maximum advance for the democratic revolution in a broad range of spheres, and the capacity for the hegemonic direction and positive reconstruction of these spheres on the part of subordinated groups.” Leftist utopianism remains where it should be, in the quite different minds of those who seek the elimination of their own subordinate positions in society, but at the same time think seriously about what the conditions of the equality they aspire to should be. These many utopias should never be allowed to coalesce into one, as that would result in a reprise of totalitarianism. This limited utopianism will avoid the other danger, the mere pragmatism of “reformers without a project.”
Thus, for the newest New Left, “the epistemological niche from which ‘universal’ classes and subjects spoke has been eradicated, and it has been replaced by a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity.” An egalitarian Heracliteanism reigns over all, preventing any one ruler from destroying either equality or liberty. Latterly, their attempt has been encapsulated in the slogan, ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’—a reformulation of the now somewhat long-in-the-tooth New Left ambition to maximize incommensurables. In abandoning the modernist epistemology of ‘grasping,’ they recur to the Biblical epistemology of hearing—their “polyphony of voices”—replacing the God of the Bible with the lesser god of Vox Populi.
Notes
- That Greek philosophers themselves did not understand the polis to be simply natural or “organic” may be seen in the Platonic-Socratic metaphor of the cave and throughout Aristotle’s Politics.
- The authors identify the philosopher who formulated this critique of Hegel as the German Aristotelian, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg in his 1840 book, Logische Untersuchungen. It is fair to say that they do not follow Trendelenburg into Aristotelian ethics or politics.
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