Agonism,Democracy,and the Moral Equality of Voice

Imperializing Agonism

How does one embrace a robust conflictual stance, while at the same time retaining a strong allegiance to democratic norms and the rule of law? Over the last three decades, many on the political left have looked to the work of the radical Belgian thinker, Chantal Mouffe, for orientation. ³ She excoriates Habermas and Rawls for obscuring oppression through their overemphasis on reason, consensus, and ideals of justice. ⁴ I want to explore Mouffe’s perspective, because doing so helps make clear why an affirmation of agonism that accords with democratic values presents a challenge not as easily met as is often thought.

Mouffe roots her work in Carl Schmitt’s 1932 essay, “The Concept of the Political,” that famously defines political life in existential-ontological terms as the struggle between “friends” and “enemies.” The decision as to who falls into which category is the originary moment of politics, unconstrained by any ethical-political norms. ⁵ This struggle between friends and enemies constitutes, Mouffe agrees, “our very ontological condition.” For her, this formulation effectively slashes through the liberal democratic “illusion of consensus and unanimity,” going directly to the core of what political life is really all about. ⁶ “[P]ower and antagonism” are the “very center” of politics. ⁷ An acknowledgement of this reality needs to suffuse our thinking about politics, and that is what an embrace of Schmitt provides.

But Mouffe, who is on the political left, is aware that her bold embrace of Schmitt carries with it a real danger, given the well-known fact that Schmitt served in a significant role in the Nazi regime and his thought is often accused of being fascist. It is essential, in evaluating Mouffe’s perspective (as well as that of other left agonists attracted to him ⁸ ) to be careful in how one assesses this nest of issues. ⁹

It is not the case that Schmitt’s account of the political, with its sovereign decision as to who is friend and who is enemy, is flatly fascist; for example, it is not explicitly racist, nor does it necessarily glorify violence. However, Schmitt’s way of making the friend–enemy dialectic the essence of politics implicitly authorizes certain reactions that progressively precipitate violent and racist outcomes. ¹⁰ Although there is nothing necessarily racist about Schmitt’s framework in “The Concept of the Political,” he does affirm that the people of a successful polity will have a “concrete,” homogeneous identity. Thus, when a racial minority is cast as the “domestic enemy” of the majority (defined as the friends) within the polity, there is no reason not to vigorously pursue racist policies against them, especially if it helps bind together the majority as a “fighting collectivity.” ¹¹ Schmitt’s own avid pursuit of the elimination of Jews from the legal profession in Germany would seem to follow this script. ¹²

A similar logic of deterioration is evident in terms of violence. In The Nomos of the Earth (1950), Schmitt claims that his conception of the political is embodied in the relatively peaceful functioning of the Europe-dominated international order from the late sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. That order, Schmitt argues, restrained the sort of violence typical of earlier times, when religious passions overwhelmed political thinking and turned enemies who should be subdued into those who must be “annihilated.” ¹³ Of course, this Schmittean account of a new intra-European restraint must be placed alongside the immense onset of violence that was authorized in the process of colonization. But, even if we hold aside the question of such “external” violence, the internal dynamics of peace may have actually rested on values that are quite different from those mandated by the stark confrontation of friend–enemy. Here it is interesting to turn to an analogy Schmitt suggests for understanding the restrained behavior of European powers. Those states acted, he says, like equals in a pistol duel between “men of honor.” ¹⁴ In both cases, conventions of honor and equal status controlled the amount and extent of violence. Interesting in this context is that what Schmitt points to as the ground of restraint, aristocratic honor, and equality is something that would have given way easily if the European monarchs had in fact fully internalized the primary existential mandate of subduing their enemies. My point is that whatever conventions exist in political life, they will, in a Schmittean world, give way over time to that prime imperative. Given the uncertainty, danger, and fear endemic to political life, it is hard to see why, on Schmitt’s own grounds, I would ever let a convention of fairness overrule the choice of a more secure way of subduing my enemy. In the real world of Schmittean politics, I should always choose to fire my pistol just a little before the handkerchief hits the ground. ¹⁵

This is because a Schmittean ontology provides the friend–enemy dynamic with a clear priority over any ethical-political norms that might conflict with it. Hence the Schmitt-Mouffe position can seem to affirm things like the rule of law, but that affirmation will effectively dissipate whenever one’s appeal to it runs afoul of what is necessary to aid my friends and smite my enemies. Whenever it is convenient and serves my friends’ and my interests, we will behave in a fashion that affirms democratic norms, but when such constraints hinder what we truly desire, we will, with clear-eyed realism, grind our opponents into the dirt of history. The friend–enemy dynamic—because it embodies the ontology of political life—thus exerts an imperializing force in relation to other values,

Now Mouffe clearly wants to avoid being implicated in this corrosive, Schmittean logic. As she says in an often-repeated line, the goal is “to transform [Schmittean] antagonism into agonism,” the latter implying a respectful struggle between “adversaries,” in which imperial hostility is subordinated to a “shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy: liberty and equality.” ¹⁶ But why should we expect such subordination to occur in the minds of those who have defined themselves politically in the way Schmitt recommends? Why would someone whose basic, existential-ontological comprehension of the world is cast in terms of friends and enemies not violate norms of liberty and equality whenever protecting one’s “friends” seems to call for it?

Such questions involve what can hardly be called arcane philosophical matters. We have had an agonist-in-chief of this imperializing sort in the White House. Donald Trump’s world is one of political friends and enemies. Of course, he has also frequently affirmed his support for basic democratic norms—until, that is, they grate against his and his friends’ interests. While it became increasingly clear that Trump himself distains such norms, many of his supporters certainly think of themselves that way. What is disturbing here is how imperializing agonism implicitly encourages a corrosion of those norms, such as we have seen in recent, blatant efforts to restrict access to voting and violently overturn elections. A truly tempered agonism can affirm all sorts of contentious political activity and partisanship, but it would presumably recognize a clear distinction between that, on the one hand, and the illegitimacy of wholesale efforts to undermine the integrity of democratic elections, on the other. Imperializing agonism corrodes such lines of demarcation.

What is supposed to prevent such undesired outcomes in the world of politics that Mouffe envisions? Her only attempt to move beyond merely announcing the need to see the political “other” not as an enemy to be eliminated, but an adversary to be respected, is a rather surprising one. Despite her deeply critical take on liberal democracy, she suggests that “the great strength of liberal democracy, pace Schmitt, is precisely that it provides the institutions that, if properly understood, can shape the element of hostility in a way that defuses its potential.” ¹⁷ In short, the task of preventing democratic norms from corrosion rests wholly with the existing institutions of liberal democracy. But does such an appeal not betray a curious, and rather excessive, faith in the capacity of institutions to function as impermeable walls that hem in citizens whose motivations are fundamentally at odds with them?

Would citizens affirming an existential ontology of friend–enemy not try to undermine such restraints? And why would we expect those who staff such institutions not to share the same orientation as those citizens? It appears that the agonistic nature of political life stops at the doors of institutions. Recent political events in the United States and elsewhere provide grounds for deep skepticism about Mouffe’s strategy for resolving the problem of keeping her agonism from undermining democratic norms. Consider how Trump and some of his supporters have tried to subvert every democratic institution that seemed to them to stand in the way of his and his “friends’” desires. These folks seemed to have internalized a Schmittean logic and thus had no qualms about trying to overturn—for no evidence-based reason—the legitimate outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Moreover, this stunning behavior was not unrelated to the ongoing Trumpian war on democratic institutions generally, carried out in the name of a politics of friends and enemies. The litany of violations was extremely long: politicizing the Justice Department; firing multitudes of office holders who objected to assaults on normal legal processes and restrictions; allowing unchecked official corruption, as long as the perpetrators were friends; and on and on.

Few observers of American politics before and after the 2020 election would share Mouffe’s naive faith in the saving power of institutions. Many were, no doubt, pleased that institutions, such as the judiciary and state election apparatuses, held their ground against the Trumpian onslaught, manifesting thereby a refusal to see the political world in simple friend–enemy terms. But there was widespread, legitimate concern about how close we came to having our institutions overpowered. And, if that level of threat could emerge so quickly in a polity with a constitutional tradition of almost 250 years, then the idea that institutions are magic saviors will sound especially facile to citizens of countries with less established democratic traditions.

My point is simply to highlight the unpersuasiveness of Mouffe’s simple, almost offhand turn to the saving quality of institutions. Her full embrace of Schmitt’s knockdown power against Habermas and Rawls is thus never followed up with anything like a comparable effort to grapple adequately with the potential ethical-political drawbacks that attend such a move. Mouffe simply does not take seriously the fact that her commitment to a Schmittean ontology—something she has never renounced—creates real problems for any subsequent affirmation of democracy.

The validity of this criticism of Mouffe does not have to rest on a claim that the embrace of an ontology must necessarily determine everything about how we perceive public life; however, an ontology should at least be broadly congruent with the normative orientation we affirm. To be sure, the usage of “ontology” has become looser in recent years, so that some use it almost interchangeably with terms like “conceptual framework” and speak of an ontology being “deployed” for a variety of purposes. We might think of this as a reaction against what “strong” ontologies (whether Aquinas’s or Schmitt’s) traditionally claimed—namely, that they capture the essential entities, values, and interactions embedded in the world and thus that our lives should conform tightly to the normative shape they dictate. This looser use of “ontology” obviously rejects that notion wholesale; however, it also pretty much empties the concept of any philosophical distinctiveness.

But there are not just two options here. The idea of “weak ontology” opposes strong ontology’s absolute truth claim; rather, it sees our ontologies as fundamental but contestable. ¹⁸ This alternative does not simply reduce to the other, looser usage, however. To speak of weak ontology is to argue that an ontology is not something we choose to deploy or not, as we might a hammer or conceptual frame, but rather it is embedded in our lifeworld, the background upon which we draw to make coherent ethical-political distinctions.

But, as Taylor also admits, this does not mean that there is a complete fit between one’s ontology and one’s ethical-political orientation. ¹⁹ Once we see ontologies as weak, we also must admit there is always some play between them and our actions. We are continually engaged in bringing the depth interpretations that our ontologies carry into engagement with specific life problems, and in that interaction, gaps open up and modifications can occur on both sides. This process of cultivation includes the possibility that one, over time, may reject an internalized ontology, slowly allowing another to gain traction in one’s life. Neither Connolly nor Honig were likely born into an environment suffused with the agonistic ontology they have come to affirm; but, over time, they have rearticulated their basic orientations to the world.

In short, a weak ontological perspective can accommodate the ideas of cultivation, gaps, and modifications in relation to one’s ethical-political affirmations. But none of this helps lend coherence to Mouffe’s unequivocal embrace of a strong ontology followed by an unrelated ethical-political affirmation that points us in a radically opposed direction.

Tempered Agonism

“Tempering” does not equate to “softening.” Rather, the tempering of a piece of metal refers to a process by which it is strengthened and made more resilient than an untempered one. Accordingly, I want to consider other formulations of agonism that are not as corrosive for democracy as the Schmitt-Mouffe variant. The best come from Connolly and Honig, whose contributions, like Mouffe’s, emerged in the 1990s. Although I will argue that they move us toward a cogently tempered agonism, a crucial sense of equality that they tacitly affirm needs to be better articulated.

Connolly’s Identity\Difference (1991) develops an ontology with agonism at its center. ²⁰ He argues that the process of constituting the identity of anything can only proceed by progressively contrasting it, even if only implicitly, with that which is different. Identity is ontologically dependent on difference. Distinctive here is not just that the identity of human agents emerges in this persistent dynamic of “identity\difference,” but that this dynamic has ethical-political implications. This is where the significance of agonism comes in. Humans, as mortal creatures, are perpetually anxious and insecure about “owing” their identity to that which they cannot control, whether it be other humans or events in nature, and hence, they are deeply liable to existential resentment in relation to their constitutive lack of pure freedom and sovereignty in relation to what is different from them. The propensity of each to feel that she owes too much of herself to what is “other” embeds an underlying agonism in life.

This tendency to proto-hostility in engagement with the world is, however, just that—a tendency, not an iron necessity. Our mortality and the ontology of identity\difference do not cast us automatically into a political world of unrelenting conflict between friends and enemies. How humans understand and negotiate their mortality can vary. One may give in wholeheartedly to resentment of the other and cast them as an “enemy.” This, for Connolly, is a continual propensity of all social life, but it is not the ontological fate of specifically political interaction that we get with Schmitt. As the former says, the challenge is that we are always confronting an agonistic relation with difference; however, we can cultivate resistance to this temptation to transform that contestation into a war of self and other-as-enemy. Connolly’s ontology, unlike Schmitt’s, thus leaves some conceptual space within political life in which one is able to imagine a robust role for norms that can align with democracy. In short, it gives us what Mouffe desires, but what her prior, and continuing, embrace of Schmitt’s ontology forecloses.

As I have indicated, Connolly imagines human interaction as suffused with the dynamic of identity/difference. This dynamic is one manifestation within a broader sense of being characterized by the Nietzschean notion of “being as becoming”; in short, being that is always transforming itself. Connolly urges us to cultivate an attitude of “protean care” for the perpetual movement of becoming and “agonistic respect” for the difference such becoming continually presents. This responsiveness best enacts our role as witness and participant in this ongoing drama. ²¹ Connolly’s onto-ethical scene is thus one in which I cultivate restraint on what might be my initial reaction to the other and show openness to their expressions of self. I temper how the inevitable agonism that emerges between self and other expresses itself, respecting its persistent reality but also not allowing it to manifest as a preemptive hostility that attempts to secure my world by freezing the process of becoming.

Thus, Connolly evokes for us what I am calling an “exemplary scene” of agonism in social interaction, portraying both how I am tempted by a deep-seated propensity to frame the other actor as an object of denigration and hostility, as well as how I can begin to cultivate attitudes that slacken that propensity. This onto-ethical scene is meant to help orient us to the concrete challenges of political life in pluralistic societies in which there is a continual tendency for majority populations to categorize minorities—racial, ethnic, religious, national, sexual—as threatening “others.” In general terms, then, Connolly intends for the scene to be a continual source of insight and motivation for orienting ourselves in ways that unsettle relations of inequality that are too often insufficiently foregrounded by theories of justice. Accordingly, for Connolly, agonism is a way of focusing attention initially not on the theorization of justice, but on the persistent occurrence of injustice and inequality. ²²

For anyone acquainted with agonism, this emphasis on equality is one of its hallmarks. But it is precisely here that I want to raise some doubt. Clearly, it is Connolly’s intention to affirm equality, and he sees his ontology as moving us in that direction by exposing how social difference metamorphoses into categories of political otherness. But there is a problem. It manifests itself if one asks: what is the object of agonistic respect? It might seem as though it is the status of the other human being. But that is not exactly correct. The object of respect is, more fundamentally, becoming itself in its manifold presencing. With this as the object, humans have lost their special place in the world, usually assigned to them because of their capacity for language. For Connolly, that capacity has too often been the basis of domination over both other humans as well as nonhuman nature. ²³ No “discourse of justice” can adequately sensitize us to this domain of harm. The force of this judgment is evident in his declaration that the receptive attitude animating agonistic respect “is more fundamental than justice.” ²⁴

When respect is thus disengaged from a special attitude to persons, their status becomes submerged thereby into a generalized equality of all appearances, and they take their place as simply one among many manifestations of the flux of becoming. Linguistic capacity no longer constitutes any qualitative distinctiveness in this flux. My role as affirmer of this becoming is to resist the temptation to freeze difference into the role of otherness. This mandate applies to other humans, but just as essentially to nonhuman nature, for example, to my not seeing a rain forest first and foremost as an obstacle to be subdued in order to serve certain patterns of human consumption.

Despite the many admirable qualities of Connolly’s portrait of agonistic respect for the world, there emerges here, as well, an unintended drawback. In my exercising this respect without recognizing the distinctiveness of human speakers, I implicitly accord to myself the exclusive role of sovereign interpreter of how this attitude should unfold. My human counterpart carries no special capacity to contest the legitimacy of my framing of what constitutes an acceptable interpretation of agonistic respect in a given case, any more than a rain forest does. A significant upshot of this is that Connolly’s framing cannot disqualify some undemocratic ways of cashing out agonistic respect. We can imagine a warrior ethic that exalts those who distinguish themselves as superior in ongoing violent conflict, and who are continually willing to engage in it and reprove that superiority. Here my status as successful warrior is not boosted by any petty psychodynamic of freezing my opponents into a denigrated status; it rests simply on subduing them in battle. This is a world that extols a certain kind of continual becoming, and it does not exhibit any tendency to transform difference into otherness. Thus, it technically satisfies the criteria of Connolly’s exemplary scene.

He does not, of course, want to warrant such an interpretation, but the question is: can he preclude it within the terms of agonistic respect as he has conceptualized it? When he declares that agonistic respect is “more fundamental” than justice, he is stating that the specific affirmation of equality that he sees himself defending is not adequately acknowledged within discourses of justice. And yet, it seems now that the only way he can fully support his own affirmation of equality—and disqualify a warrior ethic—is by unexpectedly and tacitly drawing from that discourse. At one point, Connolly suggests that we should understand the relationship between the discourse of agonism and that of justice as one of “dissonant interdependence” between two “valences” of our sensibility. ²⁵ But that portrayal does not seem to acknowledge adequately how deeply what is declared to be “more fundamental” is actually dependent on the supposedly less fundamental.

What Connolly needs from the justice “valence” is an abstract universal, without which the sense of equality that animates his perspective has no traction within agonistic respect. Now agonists generally want to distance themselves from such universals, since they are seen as functioning so as to freeze certain characteristics of humans in ways that deny the persistent significance of the identity/difference dynamic. Through this effect, universalization enacts a “displacement of politics,” a reductive stabilization of meaning that, in Honig’s words, hides the inevitable “remainders.” ²⁶ I want to argue, however, that one universal, the idea of a moral equality of voice, is needed in the sort of political world Connolly imagines, and it is better to affirm that from the start than to have to draw it in awkwardly from a source that has been designated as less fundamental. ²⁷ The richer exemplary scene that I propose both relinquishes such priority claims and foregrounds this quality of speech. The result is a tempered agonism that better embodies equality, while still drawing on the figure of identity/difference and agonistic respect (as I will elucidate below).

Before I sketch this scene further, let me turn more directly to Honig’s agonism and consider how the foregoing concerns might challenge that as well. In Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, she also draws upon Nietzsche and yet does not try to ontologize politics as essentially agonistic. Like Connolly, politics is posited as a bipolar world of two “recurring impulses”: one toward the ordering of justice and one toward the agonistic unsettling of order, highlighting who gets suppressed or marginalized in such orders. And, finally, again like Connolly, Honig affirms that the “substance” of agonism is a “commitment above all to equality.” ²⁸ It emphasizes the condition of those to whom existing political orders accord “‘no right to be counted.’” ²⁹ I want to suggest, however, that she still faces the same type of difficulty with equality as Connolly.

Consider one of the illustrations Honig offers regarding an agonistic reading of the history of democratic politics. She writes eloquently and convincingly about how oppressed groups have often gone outside normal institutional procedures of liberal political orders and engaged in democratic “taking”—that is, a “transgressive,” sometimes violent “enacting [of] the redistribution of . . . powers, rights, and privileges.” ³⁰ In effect, they seized what should have rightfully been accorded to them, thereby enacting their equalization. My concern here is whether, embodied in this portrayal, there is actually a figuration of equality that clearly precludes certain undemocratic practices. “Taking” as a conflictual strategy can be enacted by all sorts of actors who perceive themselves to be aggrieved. In 2020, in the United States, heavily armed groups supporting Trump tried to “take” back the streets of some cities from groups engaged in protests over racial injustice. Are the former’s claims distinguishable—on purely agonistic grounds—from the groups Honig admires? Certainly, she intends them to be, but the question again is where the criteria of differentiation emerge from? I would argue that those criteria, just as in Connolly, would necessarily have to emerge from an abrupt recourse to the impulse/discourse of justice. If this is so, then equality remains curiously external to agonism.

Honig never flatly claims, as does Connolly, that the valence of agonism is more fundamental than justice. She repeatedly refers to the need to “negotiate” between the two. ³¹ Thus, what appears to be quite a surprising deus ex machina enactment in Connolly is perhaps a less abrupt shift in Honig, but if it is less abrupt, the precise rationale for when and why it should occur still remains conceptually underdetermined. Might there be an alternative way of better integrating equality into agonism, one that more coherently figures a reciprocal opening of the two impulses into one another?

Before I sketch this alternative, it is useful to ask: why is the equality so central to agonism left so unarticulated? The answer, I think, is that initially both authors sought to articulate their positions as boldly as possible, without entangling them from the start in the discourse of justice, with its tacit demand for order, for a moralized code or command that persistently undermines a deeper respect for difference. Both wanted to maintain distance from what they saw as the compulsion manifested in determinate, comprehensive theories of justice.

In short, both Honig and Connolly present us with a bivalent world, but one of those valences demands our attention more than the other. It is important to emphasize here that this preference for an agonistic orientation is not, however, the same as the categorical, ontological priority assigned to it in the Mouffe-Schmitt position. Even though Honig and Connolly emphasize agonism more than its counterpart, this does not create for their positions the same sort of bind I ascribed to Mouffe-Schmitt, in the sense that the former do not affirm from the start an exclusively one-dimensional ontology of politics that posits an essential struggle of friends and enemies. Such a monological, strong ontology, as I argued earlier, defines a world in which norms of democracy are destined to be continually devolving into mere pawns in a deadly conflict. Honig and Connolly, on the other hand, express something closer to a temporal preference for the agonistic impulse; in short, start your interpretation of any given political situation with insights generated by that impulse. Later you can correct it with a justice orientation.

This kind of preferential ordering clearly made good sense in the early 1990s, when models of agonism first made their appearance. That period was dominated by the justice frameworks of Rawls and Habermas. ³² So, if one portrayed political theory then as too exclusively pursuing themes of justice, that could certainly be affirmed as a rhetorically justifiable strategy aimed at dislodging unexamined commitments with bracing agonistic assaults. But part of my thesis is that we are now in a different era, one in which agonism has become ascendant, and, more disturbingly, one in which a virulent, imperializing version is flourishing. If this is so, then it makes sense to adjust our conceptual strategy toward reconceiving how the value of equality might be more vividly situated within a tempered agonism that no longer tries to prioritize or too sharply separate one impulse in relation to the other.

In what follows, I will argue that we best navigate this problem by sketching an exemplary scene whose figuration of equality both draws on the impulse of justice and yet encompasses what agonists want to see emphasized: a sense of equality attached to disruptive voice rather than to one’s status within a determinate theoretical vision.

Exemplary Scenes and Moral Equality of Voice

I have spoken of Connolly as presenting us with the exemplary scene of an actor confronting other actors and cultivating a resistance to the temptation to transform their difference into otherness, thereby showing respect for a world of becoming. But he does not use this term, nor does he specifically reflect on the status of such a device. I want to suggest that an exemplary scene functions as a weak-ontological substitute for more traditional appeals to transcendental grounds. Such scenes do not provide certainty, rather they can only reflect and tune our best, most reflective intuitions, perceptions, and judgments about ethical and political life. However, they are also not identical to the particular scenes provided by any given image, example, or piece of literary or historical narrative to which I may initially recur in illustrating, explaining, or justifying some normative claim. An exemplary scene in the sense intended here carries an idealizing abstractness in the way it makes my most basic ontological-ethical commitments stand out for me. The adjective “exemplary” is appropriate for my purposes, because it carries two sorts of connotations. One is particularizing, as in the notion of a particular “example”; the other is universalizing, in the sense of a “model” or “pattern” (see the Oxford English Dictionary). As I will show in a moment, the scene I am sketching has a certain universalizing quality, but the specific images it embodies actually highlight the centrality of the appearance of what is different, particular. At this point, let me simply note that the kind and degree of abstraction involved here is not comparable to that of scenes functioning as “thought experiments” that tie into some determinate theory, as is the case with Rawls’s “original position,” or of rational choice scenarios that are supposed to model what would be a rational decision in a given set of circumstances.

In one sense the appeal to an exemplary scene always involves a disadvantage; we lose the narrative richness of detail and character carried by particular illustrations. Nevertheless, this abstractness also allows us to frame and order ontological features, values, and affects carried by the portrait that I can then use to roughly orient myself toward everyday ethical-political interaction.

Unlike Connolly, Honig does not appeal to anything like an exemplary scene. She prefers to deploy multiple particular scenes from novels, the Hebrew Bible, classical Greece, and film. Our attachments to positions in political theory, she suggests, will always reflect the force of “fables or fantasy.” ³³ Her deployment of them typically involves agonistic portrayals of the harm of gender and racial inequality and the admirability of acts of resistance to them. ³⁴ Despite the often compelling quality of these scenes, for a reader following the trajectory of her thought, it is hardly unreasonable to wonder whether there is some more basic onto-ethical figuration embodying a sense of equality that is persistently, if tacitly, structuring her selection of one such illustrative scene rather than another. Honig, however, does not pursue reflections in this direction. But there does not seem to be any principled opposition to a more generalized scene on her part. Notably, she appears to affirm the value of Connolly’s exemplary scene of identity/difference. ³⁵ One thus might see the two kinds of scenes not as direct competitors, but rather as mutually supplementary.

The portrait of equality I offer allows one to represent how the impulse to agonism might be persuasively interwoven, at the level of social ontology, with an impulse to justice. Toward that end, I turn in a direction that might seem to be an immediate dead end—namely, Habermas’s thought. He is, after all, a poster child for how to frame the discourse of justice so as to thoroughly preclude access to the discourse of agonism. There is some truth in that judgment, but there is also good reason not to let that insight be the final word. I argue below both that one does indeed have to reject some of the central claims associated with Habermas’s deliberative ideal, but also that there nevertheless remain in the core of his notion of “communicative action” several elements crucial to my project. In what follows I want to draw out how this core can be understood in a way that continually casts suspicion on structures of inequality and domination, thus making it far more sensitive to difference than typically thought.

The qualities I wish to draw out become more easily visible as a result of Habermas’s recent relinquishing of a strong foundationalist view, according to which, as he famously announced, “the telos of language is understanding,” meaning that language, in its essence, orients us toward agreement. Our intuitive understanding of the criteria of a fair agreement is no longer an immovable ontological anchor for him; rather it is now simply the fruit of a deep, but always precarious, “moral-practical learning processes” associated with modernity. ³⁶ With this change, the notion that Habermas’s framework has some foundational orientation that draws all social interaction toward consensus loses its cogency. ³⁷ His deliberative ideal now remains only as a depth hermeneutic, meaning it captures our most basic intuitions about the best way to represent core values that have historically accompanied the rise of democracy—more specifically, the idea that a legitimate politics should be tied to public speech claims about what is in the common interest.

But many would continue to find this chastened frame lacking. Two problems stand out. First, the Habermasian picture still imagines political life as only about clashes between actors who are all essentially the same, except for the fact that they embrace different interests. Managing these through deliberation thus becomes the key task. This makes issues of identity/difference either invisible or matters convertible into interest clashes. But if Connolly is right, as I think he is, then this is a deeply flawed portrait of mortal creatures who are existentially faced with an agonism of identity/difference that continually animates political life. I will come back to this issue in a moment and try to show how it might be accommodated with my radicalized portrait of communicative action.

The second problem with the Habermasian frame is that, even after the foundational claim is dropped, the “ideal speech situation” still seems to be firmly at the center of things. Here I want to make a significant departure from Habermas, but it is one that is actually implicit in some of his work, as well as one that becomes decidedly more prominent once we have left aside his earlier, strong-ontological foundation. My claim is that the ideal speech situation is not the central concept in Habermas’s work. It is indeed significant, but it is not the dominant character in the drama of communication Habermas offers. Rather, the central scene of his account of “communicative action” looks as follows. ³⁸ The baseline concept is linguistically mediated, ongoing social interaction occurring within a normative context; in short, this is the condition of the possibility of social life, within which human life symbolically reproduces itself over time. Within this scene, interaction and thus reproduction proceed apace when actors at least implicitly accept the validity of the regnant norms guiding that interaction. But, against this background, what really interests Habermas in ongoing communicative action is the interruption of it—in short, our capacity and motivation to say “no” to this flow, to stand up in speech and contest norms that are already directing our lives. ³⁹

Habermas’s portrait of communicative action understands itself as a critical theory with an ethical core. ⁴⁰ If we strip away the foundationalist claim, what does that look like? Animating the scene of no-saying is the idea of what I am calling the moral equality of voice: a shared intuition that each person possesses the standing to challenge the regnant norms that govern their lives, to demand justification from those for whom the norms are unproblematic. So, the scene develops from ongoing, unproblematic interaction to a given actor’s “turning” on a normative context that is now experienced as oppressive in some way, and demanding justification. The force of moral equality here means that the other actors involved, explicitly or implicitly, are challenged to answer with persuasive arguments. Their obligation to respond is rooted in the fact that they are mutually implicated in this shared normative context. ⁴¹

This is the heart of a radicalized deliberative ideal. The concepts and values embedded in this scene present a set of core interactions that focuses our attention and out of which further questions—of a distinct character—arise for participants. Prominent here are ones related to the suspicions that precede or accompany challenges to a given norm; for example, does this norm simply embody domination of some sort? The Habermasian account of communicative action and deliberation has often been thought of as failing to perceive many of the ways that power structures social life. ⁴² Although I would argue that it offers a good understanding of some forms of power, the key question is not so much whether it offers a specific, sufficient account of power, but rather whether it broadly casts a light of suspicion and thus persistently invites hypotheses regarding possible power relations. If so, then there is no reason to see it as somehow deflecting attention from inconspicuous structures and forms of power; rather, it welcomes all hypotheses about possible ways in which normative contexts might embed domination and inequality. ⁴³

Another, related line of questions emerges here regarding the possible positive direction from that challenge toward a more defensible normative context. Here is where serious misunderstanding of the ISS comes in. It was never meant as the sketch of an ideal form of social life, a blueprint that either could be brought to life now or in the future. Rather, it is better understood as a cluster of intuitions about what persuasion in speech should look like, if it were to reflect the moral equality of voice (remaining, of course, always alert to ways in which power may inconspicuously occlude such initial intuitions). It would actually make sense to simply drop the term ISS in favor of something like “intuitions about fair deliberation.” When rethought in this fashion, and in the light of the exemplary scene of communicative action, it becomes clear that the most immediate role of these positive intuitions is how they cast light on the failures of existing social and political structures. The intuitions continually function as the basis for counter-institutional critique and activity. ⁴⁴

This radicalized deliberative component of my exemplary scene, embodying the moral equality of each voice, has greater contestation and disruption than more familiar accounts of deliberation. But, as I noted earlier, it still operates in a world where conflicts unfold only at the level of interests and their possible accommodation with one another, either through consensus or “fair compromises.” ⁴⁵ There is thus some agonism, but it is clearly not as essentially constitutive of this scene as agonists would legitimately expect. In sum, at this point my deliberative figure does not embody an adequate enough understanding of the dynamics of human identity to provide the basis for comprehending agonism in its full sense.

What is needed is an exemplary scene that assigns comparably significant roles to both the dynamic of identity/difference and the radicalized deliberative ideal. As I have suggested, each is insufficient on its own, and yet neither is constitutively closed to being interwoven and exerting a mutually chastening influence. For agonism to be tempered, actors must extend to one another a sense of agonistic respect, but that can only be adequately motivated when one already affirms the sense of equality provided by the idea of moral equality of voice. And for the deliberative ideal to be adequately radicalized, it needs to accommodate the insights that agonists have generated about identity/difference. ⁴⁶ This mutual insufficiency, because it constitutes the basis for imagining a more complex, but still coherent, exemplary scene opens up an illuminating way of conceiving the interdependence of agonism and the radicalized deliberative ideal.

It is crucial here to highlight the sharp contrast between the defensibility of this composite arrangement and indefensibility of the one Mouffe proffers. As demonstrated earlier, she begins with a Schmittean ontology that essentially defines politics as a monological dynamic of immanent conflict between friends and enemies, but then tries to insert into that fully self-sufficient world a pluralist democratic logic that is constitutively alien to it.

The two onto-ethical scripts I am seeking to bring into engagement can, on the contrary, be compatibly entwined. An actor in my exemplary scene is aware of the intractability of political life in relation to consensual hopes, an awareness rooted at least partially in an acceptance of the fundamental dynamic of identity/difference in a world of becoming. ⁴⁷ Agreements will now be expected to be more elusive, temporary, and subject to suspicion about agendas tied to systematically negative perceptions of others that go beyond simple clashes of interest. ⁴⁸ But, in their ongoing exchange of speech act claims, agents struggling with the identity/difference dynamic are imagined as experiencing, as well, the subtle pull of intuitions about the moral equality of voice. In any given setting, there may be many sources that pull against this one, but actors in the modern world know that this sense of fairness cannot simply be ignored, even if it can temporarily be avoided or silenced by deception and oppression.

How might Honig react to this conception of equality embedded in my exemplary scene? She speaks of not wanting the two impulses of agonism and justice to be posited simply in mute opposition; rather we must “negotiate” between them. She gestures accordingly toward a politics of “self-overcoming,” in which the necessary “closures represented by law, . . . state, community” are continually open to a contestation regarding the “remainders” that resist those closures. ⁴⁹ I would argue that my exemplary scene embodies this sort of tensional congruence in the specific way it portrays equality. My approach to equal voice prioritizes two senses of equality. Drawing from the familiar connotation of “voice” in political contexts, it emphasizes a quality of contestation we might call “resistant voice,” as the subject “turns” on the extant normative context and says “no,” demanding justification. Second, drawing from the deliberative tradition, this equal status of all no-sayers is posited against an intersubjective background that both carries the weight of extant normativity and yet remains continually liable to calls for rejustification through the assent of all speakers who are subject to that norm. The first sense highlights resistance in political life, and the second highlights social-political order—but now conceived as perpetually leavened by the need for fair justification. Neither has priority. The moral equality of voice is an abstract universal that sits in the seam between the theorization of justice, on the one hand, and the experience of injustice and resistance to it, on the other. With this sense of equality embodied in an exemplary scene, agonistic respect becomes intimately and explicitly aligned with a core sense of fairness.

The world imagined in my exemplary scene is one in which the resilience of conflict can be affirmed and yet in such a way that the emergent voices are always already constrained by the intersubjective context of deliberative justification. But, importantly, this context is not just the closed one of an existing, power-structured community, but also the potential ones composed of all those affected by contested norms. This idealizing force keeps the questioning perpetually open. Here we can grasp the significance of Habermas’s remark that the communicative power imagined in such a scene “is exercised in the manner of a siege” of established institutions. ⁵⁰ The universalizing force of reason and justification intimately entwines itself from the start with the disruptive, particularizing force of contestation and resistance. Thus, this universalizing portrayal of moral equality possesses a porosity in the sense of an unpredictable upwelling of resistant voice that can challenge the appropriateness of any actor’s or group’s efforts to encompass that voice within some interpretive frame, whether that reflects an account of what a just order demands or agonistic respect implies.

Of course, this scene, like any other, constitutes a certain constraining of the imagination and hence enacts its own closures. But these closures have to be weighed comparatively against the drawbacks of Honig’s and Connolly’s alternative formulations, in which keeping “the agon open” or fair depends on implicit deus ex machina gestures to give conceptual shape to what otherwise remains only a tacit sense of an equal openness to all voices. ⁵¹ When weighing the dangers associated with my proposed scene, two points are worth reemphasizing. First, regarding the abstract universal of moral equality of voice, I would stress that the affirmation of this particular sense of equality and its embeddedness in an exemplary scene, rather than in a determinate theory of justice, helps minimize the dangers agonists have typically associated with universals. Some will continue to worry that any such ethical universals will unacceptably occlude difference, as Adorno vividly warned us. ⁵² That worry, with its gesture toward more purely aesthetic ways of encountering difference, should always be allowed to resonate. But my wager is that the dangers of the conception of equality I am promoting are relatively minimal, and the stance gestures continually toward at least some of those dangers. When that is weighed against alternatives that want to draw predominately on aesthetically oriented modes of engaging difference, it seems to me that the dangers of my option are not excessive.

The second point also ties into these concerns. My framework clearly rests on the elevation of human becoming in speech over becoming in general, and there are of course grounds to worry that it will reenforce familiar modern orientations toward the domination of humans over nonhuman nature. ⁵³ But perhaps in the future we can learn to affirm such elevation while increasingly interpreting this perspective on human dignity not in terms of a license to dominate, but rather in terms of a distinctive and increasingly heavy obligation of stewardship of the world. ⁵⁴

Conclusion

When the idea of agonism emerged around 1990, proponents were worried that theories of justice and rationality dominating the intellectual landscape subtly drew attention away from the realities of persistent and multifaceted injustices. Agonists were admirably successful in disrupting this situation. But the political world has changed since then. The injustices are not gone. In fact, in the new world of white nationalism, espoused by leaders like Trump, they are rather boldly denied. Claims of injustice by those who are not part of my “concrete” identity order of “friends” are now interpreted as merely the hostile cries of my political “enemies.” This turn of events should encourage a careful reexamination of exactly how we frame our affirmation of agonism.

Mouffe’s original, high-profile embrace of Schmitt as an effective battering ram against Rawls and Habermas may have had a salutary, performative effect initially in shifting theoretical attention. But achieving a full reconfiguration of the conceptual space of democratic norms, while continuing to adhere to Schmitt’s ontology, is a more difficult task, and she simply fails to adequately acknowledge the challenges involved. As I noted earlier, the embrace of an ontology may not have to determine everything in how political life is subsequently imagined, but the affirmation of a normative political world that is fundamentally incongruent with one’s ontology does not provide coherent orientation.

Connolly and Honig offer admirable attempts to think toward an ontology that prefigures a more democratic agonism. Unlike Schmitt’s monological account, they seek ontological pictures that retain a bidimensionality: in short, ones that have space for both conflict and justice. With this stance, they offer openings to a tempered agonism, in which an ontology cogently structures an admirable normative orientation. But I have also argued that these openings remain insufficiently developed, because they do not portray the concept of equality in an adequate fashion. The difficulty resides in persuasively figuring two sides of that value: as a touchstone for highlighting injustice and initiating resistance and disruption, on the one hand, and as a frame for highlighting a universal moral status, on the other.

My approach draws upon a deeply revised account of the idea of communicative action in Habermas. Within this revision, the core of interaction—as it relates to ethical-political life—is envisioned as a context of normative structures that are continually being symbolically reproduced in the exchange of speech acts. It is a scene of self, others, and a background that partially guides and is continually rewoven in ongoing linguistic interaction. The core value embodied in the scene is the moral equality of voice, expressed, first, in the capacity attributed to each to say “no” to the orientation that the background proffers to them, and, second, in the soft intuition that expects those implicated in that normative structure (especially those who benefit the most from it) to feel obliged to justify why the resistant actor ought to continue to conform to it. ⁵⁵ Each shares a rough, minimal sense of fairness as to what constitutes acceptable trains of contestation and attempts to respond to the voice of interlocutors. This self is also suspicious of ways in which backgrounds and initial intuitions about equality can be distorted by power, as well as by the propensity to succumb to the temptation to shore up one’s identity in ways that transform “difference” into “otherness.” Moreover, this is a self who acknowledges the need to cultivate repeated back and forth movements between different modes of reflection and affective orientation. There is no defining moment of sovereign clarity regarding a cleavage of friend–enemy. But this certainly does not mean, after an initial interval of reluctance to frame the different voice as hostile, that one cannot subsequently judge it to be just that—a judgment legitimately followed by determined resistance, violent if necessary. The more one’s interlocutor violates the intuition of the moral equality of voice, the more one’s grounds for a decision in favor of vehement opposition solidify. ⁵⁶

This framing offers internal criteria for a tempered agonism that provides a better account of Honig’s useful idea of democratic “taking.” As I argued above, from within her frame of agonism, she cannot generate a clear distinction between antiracist activists “taking” down a Confederate statue and armed, white nationalists violently “taking” back the streets from those activists. Within my version of tempering, the difference is better accounted for, because the antiracist actions occur within a context where the protestors’ claims have been repeatedly denied a fair hearing over many decades, whereas the white nationalists simply issue a strategic call to their “friends” to subdue their clear “enemies.”

In these fraught times in the United States and other democracies, whatever contribution political theory can make to conceptually clarifying this distinction would seem to have some value. Perhaps this may help encourage in a small way what is perhaps an incipient learning process among at least a segment of white citizens, as measured by recent public opinion polls. In the wake of the killings of George Floyd and other African Americans, increasing numbers of these citizens have refused to embrace Trump’s deployment of the venerable appeal to a law-and-order bastardization of the democratic rule of law, something that worked so well for President Nixon. ⁵⁷ Maybe some of these citizens have begun to interpret their world in a tempered agonistic way that resonates with the exemplary scene I have presented, in which one can hold in the imagination a continually reciprocating affirmation of reason and justice, on the one hand, and robust democratic resistance, on the other.