Mouffe, Chantal (1943–)

Chantal Mouffe is a political theorist who works with feminist, Marxist, and poststructural theory in order to develop critiques of neoliberalism. She is often described as post-Marxist in her approach. Born in Belgium, Mouffe studied at the universities of Louvain, Paris, and Essex, where she completed her doctorate. She has taught in Europe, North America, and South America and is a professor in the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster in London.

Mouffe's most important work is Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which she wrote with Ernesto Laclau. The book proposes a number of ways of revitalizing the emancipatory politics of Marxism in light of poststructural theories, which reject such Marxist tenets as Hegelian dialectics and the project of universality. Laclau and Mouffe propose that it is necessary for contemporary politics on the left to actively construct a new hegemony, a term that they adopt from the writing of Antonio Gramsci. Such a socialist hegemony needs to articulate itself in a discursive field that recognizes the contingency of any political decision. That is, since any political decision is, ultimately, reversible and not predetermined, it is possible to build an alternative to the neoliberal politics that Laclau and Mouffe see as characterizing the contemporary era. Hegel's model of dialectics, upon which Marxist theory relies, is inadequate to this task because it treats political relations as objective ones, whereas Laclau and Mouffe see politics as a subjective field. As a result of this subjectivity, the strict universality that Marx envisioned for communism is impossible. Universality, though, which is also necessary to the creation of a socialist hegemony, is to be conceptualized as a specifically political universality. Because this polity is social, such universality is able to account for the anti-racist, anti-sexist, and otherwise anti-oppressive agendas of the new social movements. [Page 980]The goal of this post-Marxist construction, state Laclau and Mouffe, is a form of radical democracy.

In subsequent books such as The Return of the Political, Mouffe has elaborated a notion of agonistic pluralism, which she sees as one means of fostering a democratic society based upon difference. Difference, she argues, should not be negated—hence the impossibility of universality—but social structures should be built in such a way that differences can be overcome politically by being accepted. This acceptance leads to difference having an agonistic role, rather than an antagonistic one. This debate is situated in the context of urban cosmopolitanism and multipolar politics in her recent book On the Political, and she continues to theorize radical democracy in her ongoing work, which focuses in part upon the contemporary rise of right-wing populism in Europe.