Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?

Social Research, Fall, 1999 by Chantal Mouffe

Another distinct character of our approach concerns the question of the de-universalization of political subjects. We try to break with all forms of essentialism. Not only the essentialism that penetrates to a large extent the basic categories of modern sociology and liberal thought and according to which every social identity is perfectly defined in the historical process of the unfolding of being; but also with its diametrical opposite: a certain type of extreme post-modern fragmentation of the social that refuses to give the fragments any kind of relational identity. By putting an exclusive emphasis on heterogeneity and incommensurability, such a view impedes recognition how certain differences are constructed as relations of subordination and should therefore be challenged by radical democratic politics.

An Agonistic Model of Democracy

The consequences of the above-mentioned theses for democratic politics are far-reaching. They provide us with the theoretical terrain necessary to formulate an alternative to the model of "deliberative democracy," one that I call "agonistic pluralism."

In order to clarify the basis of this alternative view, I propose to distinguish between "the political" and "politics." By "the political," I refer to the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in all human society, antagonism that can take many different forms and can emerge in diverse social relations. "Politics," on the other hand, refers to the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seek to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of "the political."

It is only when we acknowledge this dimension of "the political" and understand that "politics" consists in domesticating hostility, only in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations, that we can pose the fundamental question for democratic politics. This question, pace the rationalists, is not how to arrive at a rational consensus reached without exclusion, that is, indeed, an impossibility. Politics aims at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the creation of an "us" by the determination of a "them." The novelty of democratic politics is not the overcoming of this us/them distinction--which is what a consensus without exclusion pretends to achieve--but the different way in which is established. What is at stake is how to establish the us/them discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy.

In the realm of politics, this presupposes that the "other" is no longer seen as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an "adversary," i.e., somebody with whose ideas we are going to struggle but whose fight to defend those ideas we will not put into question. This category of the adversary does not eliminate antagonism, though, and it should be distinguished from the liberal notion of the competitor, with which it is sometimes identified. An adversary is a legitimate enemy, an enemy with whom we have in common a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of democracy. But our disagreement concerning their meaning and implementation is not one that could be resolved through deliberation and rational discussion, hence the antagonistic element in the relation. To come to accept the position of the adversary is to undergo a radical change in political identity, it has more of a quality of a conversion than of rational persuasion (in the same way as Thomas Kuhn has argued that adherence to a new scientific paradigm is a type of conversion). To be sure, compromises are possible; they are part of the process of politics. But they should be seen as temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation.