Abstract
This article examines the connection between populism and post-foundationalism in the context of contemporary debates about populism as a strategy for the Left. I argue that there is something “populist” about every constitutional order, including liberal democratic ones. I argue so drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s theories of hegemony, agonistic democracy, and left populism. Populism is the quintessential form of post-foundational politics because, rightly understood, populism constructs the object it claims to represent, namely the people. As such, it expresses the fact that, because there is no ultimate foundation, politics consists in the construction of contingent foundations. I develop this argument through readings of Jan-Werner Müller and Chantal Mouffe, showing the differences between their respective post-foundational approaches. I show that Müller cannot uphold the distinction between populism and democracy in the way he seeks to do, but I also argue that this does not mean that we must jettison all normativity, only that it requires that we rethink normativity in hegemonic terms.
Introduction: Post-foundationalism, populism, and liberal democracy
There is something “populist” about every political order. This is so because populism, rightly understood, constructs the object it claims to represent, namely the people. As such, populism is a quintessentially post-foundational form of politics: there is no people, and therefore the people has to be represented into being; or, there is no ultimate foundation, and therefore politics consists of the construction of foundations.
This is how we can understand Ernesto Laclau when he wrote that “populism is the royal road to understanding something about the ontological constitution of the political as such” (Laclau 2005, 67). Laclau wrote this in the context of deconstructing the usual way we think about populism in academia and in political debates, namely as a specific phenomenon that can be distinguished from democracy, above all liberal democracy (e.g. Abts and Rummens 2007; Arato 2013; Chambers 2019; Cohen 2019; Galston 2018; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017; Müller 2017c; 2021a; Rostbøll 2021; Urbinati 2019). Laclau sought to overturn the conceptual and normative hierarchy between democracy and populism, simultaneously generalizing a feature of the hitherto marginalized category (populism) as a general “logic” of democracy and politics. This has led Laclau’s critics to reject what they see as his conflation of populism with politics as such, which renders the concept of populism void as it cannot capture the specificity of populism (Arditi 2010; Müller 2014, 483; Urbinati 2014, 158).
More recently, Laclau’s longtime collaborator, Chantal Mouffe, argued that, in order to properly understand what is at stake, and what are the opportunities for the Left in today’s “populist moment,” one must understand the nature of the political. While seemingly more limited (to “the present conjuncture”), her position is part of a broader critique of political theories and practices that are incapable of acknowledging the nature and centrality of “the political” (Mouffe 2018, 5). To do so, she argues, is to acknowledge “that there is no ultimate foundation,” and that, as a result, any order should be understood as “a particular configuration of power relations” (Errejón and Mouffe 2016, 19–20; also Mouffe 2018, 88). And to acknowledge this requires an anti-essentialist approach, which is the term that she and Laclau have used to describe their post-foundationalism (Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Mouffe 2018, 10). They developed their post-foundationalism against a Marxist class essentialism that took classes and class struggle as ultimate foundations for emancipatory politics. It is against that background that we should understand populism as the royal road to understand the political as the construction of foundations rather than the reflection of an underlying foundation.
What Laclau and Mouffe identify as generalizable about populism is the post-foundational nature of politics. One of the things at stake in contemporary debates about populism is how we think about post-foundationalism, and what consequences we draw from post-foundational premises, for instance, when it comes to liberal democratic institutions. This is particularly evident when we are dealing with debates about populism as a political strategy for the Left. On one side, Laclau and Mouffe and others from the so-called Essex School see populism as a potentially democratizing strategy for the Left (Laclau 2005; Errejón and Mouffe 2016; Mouffe 2018); on the other side, Mudde, Müller, Urbinati, and others warn against populism as a slippery slope towards anti-pluralism and less democracy (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017; Müller 2017c; Urbinati 2019). These debates about the relationship between populism and (liberal) democracy are not debates for or against post-foundationalism; they are the expression of different versions of post-foundationalism with different implications for how to think about populism and democracy and about populism as a strategy for the Left. They share the post-foundationalist starting point that the people only exists as the effect of representations of it; as such, they are part of the constructivist turn in the political theory of representation (Disch, van de Sande, and Urbinati 2019). As Mouffe writes, “the ‘people’ is not an empirical referent but a discursive political construction” (Mouffe 2018, 62). There is nothing natural or necessary about the identity of the people; its identity is contingent. The challenge is that the criteria against which the construction of the people can be judged are internal to the process of construction, as opposed to universal criteria that would transcend any particular articulation of the identity of the people. Put differently, the challenge is to think normatively about the people from post-foundationalist premises, and the debate about populism as a strategy for the Left is (also) a debate about this.
While we can characterize the starting points of all these theorists of populism as post-foundational, we are dealing with different versions of post-foundationalism. For Laclau and Mouffe, it is hegemony all the way down, although Mouffe introduces agonistic democracy as a normative framework for the hegemonic struggles over the representation of the people. Nevertheless, it remains the case that, for Laclau and Mouffe, any order—including an agonistic democracy—is marked by antagonisms (i.e., exclusions) that cannot be justified with reference to a yardstick independent of the hegemonic articulation of that order. This is what they refer to as “the political” constitution of the social (Mouffe 2018, 38). That does not imply that there are no foundations—for instance, the principles of equality and liberty for all, as in Mouffe’s agonistic democracy—but those foundations are themselves political, that is, the result of hegemonic articulations. Foundations are, ultimately, the crystallizations of relations of power.
Müller, Urbinati, and others reject the view that it is hegemony all the way down. Instead, they take liberal democracy as a historical achievement that we can argue is better than the alternatives, for instance, populism and, especially, fascism. The principles of liberal democracy may not be realized in the present, and may never be fully realized, but they contain the promise of inclusion, equality, and freedom. To give up on this promise is to renege on its emancipatory potential; as such, it is not a recommendable strategy for the Left.
We may ask why these theorists and others insist on the differences between their positions. After all, is treating liberal democratic institutions and principles as historical achievements not the same as treating them as crystallizations of struggles? And do Laclau and Mouffe not articulate their ideas of radical democracy, agonistic democracy and populism as a strategy for the Left against the background of the modern democratic imaginary and as ways of expanding equality and liberty for all? I suggest that the differences are real (see also Gürsözlü 2009), and that they come down to different versions of post-foundational thought. Roughly speaking we are dealing with a poststructuralist and a Habermasian version of post-foundationalism. Both versions reject the foundationalist view that politics can be “grounded on principles that are (1) undeniable and immune to revision and (2) located outside society and politics” and we may add, outside history (Herzog 1985, 20). Foundations are therefore contingent, plural, temporal, and reversible (Marchart 2018, 14–15).
The poststructuralist version found in Laclau and Mouffe is what Oliver Marchart also identifies as post-Heideggerian (Marchart 2007; 2018). 1 This version holds that there is no ultimate foundation, or ground, and so foundations must be constructed because no such thing as society is possible in what would otherwise be a vacuum of meaning. Laclau and Mouffe then conceive of the construction of foundations in terms of hegemonic articulation, and populism reveals this “political” foundation of politics. The Habermasian version of post-foundationalism, which grew out of the Critical Theory tradition, also holds that there is no ultimate, metaphysical foundation. This version of post-foundationalism starts from a historicized conception of modernity as constituted around universals that, although not necessarily realized or even realizable, nonetheless contain a critical potential against which we can judge present institutions and practices. To give up on this critical potential is to give up on the emancipatory potential of modernity. 2 If populist discourse reveals itself as antagonism and hegemony, we must resist it as an attempt to re-found politics in a metaphysical conception of the people.
In this paper, I will show that the debates about populism as a strategy for the Left, and about the relationship between populism and liberal democracy, can be clarified in terms of different versions of post-foundationalism. I do so through close readings of, first, Jan-Werner Müller (Müller 2014; 2016a; 2017c; 2017a; 2017b; Boel, Jensen, and Sonnichsen 2017; Müller 2021a; 2021b) and, second, Chantal Mouffe (Errejón and Mouffe 2016; Mouffe 2018). Both have been influential inside and outside academia, and they share a political and philosophical space that we may call the democratic Left. This distinguishes them from status quo liberalism because they insist that fundamental changes are necessary to contemporary capitalist societies; they both argue that there is too little democracy today and identify a depoliticized neoliberal technocracy as the source of the problem. It also distinguishes them from the contemporary revolutionary Left in the form of, for instance, neo-Marxism and Slavoj Žižek’s Leninism, because they take the liberal democratic order as a horizon, particularly as this is the only way to guarantee pluralism. What is at stake is the status of this horizon and populism’s relationship to it. It is not just a question of this or that constitutional right, but of how we think about the very nature of the foundations of liberal democracy: its principles and its institutions, that is to say, liberal democracy as a constitutional order. Through a deconstructive reading of Müller, and pushing his post-foundationalism to its logical conclusions, I will show that he cannot uphold the distinction between populism and democracy in the way he seeks to do. Drawing on Mouffe, but also noting the ambiguities of her position, I shall argue that the foundations of liberal democracy are “populist” in the sense that they are the crystallizations of relations of power, and that they are articulated in combination with a representation of the people that functions as an extra-constitutional source of legitimacy. As I shall also argue, this does not mean that we must jettison all normativity, but it does require that we rethink normativity in hegemonic terms.
The close readings allow me to treat their respective writings as discourses in their own right. The close readings also allow me to show the ambiguities in their discourses. This is particularly important as careful consideration of these ambiguities show the differences between different versions of post-foundationalism as well as the challenges faced by those of us working from post-foundational premises.
Populism as foundationalism
Jan-Werner Müller’s work is representative of a more general view of democracy and populism that we can characterize as liberal democratic (Abts and Rummens 2007; Chambers 2019; Galston 2018; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017; Rostbøll 2021; Urbinati 2014; 2019). Müller seeks to recuperate the normative content of liberal democracy through immanent critique. He does so against the backdrop of the European experience with fascism and Nazism (Müller 2003), and the key question for him is how the rule of the people is possible while guaranteeing pluralism. In his earlier work, Müller’s answer was a form of constitutional patriotism (Müller 2007); in his later work, he turns his attention to populism, which he opposes to democracy, specifically liberal democracy understood as representative democracy mediated by a liberal constitutional order. His examples of populism tend to be right-wing, such as Hungary under Orbán and Turkey under Erdogan, but he also includes left-wing examples, most prominently Venezuela under Chávez and Maduro. 3 At the same time, some movements that might otherwise be characterized as populist are not so, according to Müller, because they are simply trying to reinvent social democracy and accept the legitimacy of their opponents. They include the late-19th century People’s Party and Bernie Sanders in the US, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in the UK, Syriza in Greece, and the indignados and Podemos in Spain (Müller 2017c, 85–91, 93, 98).
While Müller is sometimes referred to as a liberal (e.g. Chambers 2019), it is important to note that he does not want to reduce liberal democracy to constitutional rights, and that he emphasizes the value of democratic participation beyond formal institutions. He expresses this with the term “popular constitutionalism,” and it takes him closer to deliberative approaches that take popular sovereignty, or democracy, and constitutional rights to be co-original (Chambers 2019; Cohen 2019; Habermas 2001; similarly Urbinati 2019). Indeed, his most recent work is a repudiation of liberal responses to populism (Müller 2021a, especially chapter 1). The keys to understand Müller’s critique of populism are his understandings of, respectively, the subject of democracy and populism (i.e. the people) and the liberal constitutional order, and of the relationship between the two. He understands the people in terms of representations of the people by political agents, and he understands the constitutional order in terms of a notion of emptiness that he takes from Claude Lefort. The people qua representations of the people and the constitutional order qua emptiness are the ways in which Müller reconstructs the post-foundational nature of liberal democracy.
Appropriating Claude Lefort, Müller argues that we should think of democracy as a process where different representations of the people—put forward by competing political parties— vie to occupy the empty place of power (Müller 2017c, 71; Lefort 1986). This democratic competition among representations of the people takes place within the constitutional order and within the institutions of that order: “all we have is a shared political stage (as specified in a constitution) on which various actors can launch representative claims; and these claims always have to be understood as provisional, fallible, and self-limiting” (Müller 2017a, 603). The gap between the empty place of power as instituted in liberal democratic institutions and the particular occupations of those institutions must remain open. This can only happen if the occupations of the institutions are partial and temporary; otherwise, pluralism is threatened, and without pluralism there can be no ongoing competition for power (Müller 2017c, 77). At stake is the relationship between the liberal democratic order and the particular representations of the people. The problem with populism is, according to Müller, that it collapses the gap between the constitutional order and a particular representation of the people. Populists do so because they claim to represent the “true” people and claim that they are the only true representatives of the people (Müller 2017c, 3, 20). This also applies to left-wing populists, at least in so far as they can be characterized as “genuine left-wing populists” (Müller 2021a, 36).
Populist representations of the people are “symbolic” as opposed to “empirical.” Müller equates “symbolic” with “fictional” and “illusional” (Müller 2014, 485, 487, 491; 2017c, 20, 27, 28, 34, 39; 2021a, 21). 4 “Empirical” representations of the people refer to “the people in its empirical entirety” and “the actual input and continuous influence by citizens divided amongst themselves;” this is “a people of individuals,” as opposed to the representation of the people as a homogenous unity (Müller 2014, 485, 487; 2017c, 77). In the case of symbolic representations, the people are spoken for by a populist leader or movement; in the case of empirical representations, the people speak for themselves through liberal democratic institutions, most importantly elections (Müller 2017c, 39). Representations of the people are empirical in so far as their legitimacy can be tested within liberal democratic institutions, specifically elections through which the people’s voice can be heard as a temporary majority. The populist symbolic people is a “real” people independent of the institutions, but it is just that: a symbolic claim to represent what is really a fictional people. Populists appeal to a people “out there,” for instance in the form of a silent majority (Müller 2016a, 179). In contrast, Müller assumes that, in a liberal democracy, the people qua individuals can all have a voice. When they appeal to an extra-constitutional people, populists refuse to accept the stage—the constitutional order—as a shared space within which they are just one part among others vying for power. The symbolic people cannot be tested within the liberal democratic institutions, and this challenges the legitimacy of the constitutional order by positing an extra-constitutional source of legitimacy.
When Müller writes that “democratic politicians … make representative claims in the form of something like hypotheses that can be empirically disproven on the basis of the actual results of regular procedures and institutions like elections,” this cannot be interpreted as a return to some positivist objectivity (Müller 2017c, 39; 2021a, 37). The “empirical” testing of hypothesis is framed by a “theoretical” frame. That frame is the liberal democratic order with its principles and institutions. Müller’s conception of liberal democracy is post-foundational in this sense: there is no people, only competing representations of it (Müller 2021b, 272–74); and liberal democratic institutions, which form the “ground” for this competition, is a historical achievement. As such, the constitutional order is artificial, and it is the crystallization of power relations: “Constitutions are, for the most part, settlements that emerged from interest-based bargains, they are the ‘autobiography of power’” (Müller 2007, 1). The challenge is to make sure that a constitutional order is not only “a sort of particularism in universalist disguise” (Müller 2007, 6), which would happen if the order was reduced to a particular image of the “true” people, which is exactly what populists do, according to Müller. That is why Müller qualifies his statement with “for the most part”: there must be some normativity beyond what a genealogy of power can uncover (Müller 2007, 5–6, 147). From this post-foundationalist perspective, populism is foundationalist because populists claim that there is a true people, and that this people should be the foundation of the constitutional order. Populists posit a metaphysical people outside the liberal democratic order, which—in Müller’s view—is the expression of a post-foundational perspective. Note that, because Müller thinks that the populist people is a metaphysical illusion, populism reduces politics to rhetoric and power (this is more developed in Urbinati 2019, 5, 33–34).
Conflict, power and the liberal democratic order
When in power, “[p]opulists will seek to perpetuate what they regard as the proper image of the morally pure people (the proper constitutional identity, if you will) and then constitutionalize policies that supposedly conform to their image of the people” (Müller 2017c, 63). This is the other side of the claim to direct and privileged access to the true people, and the result is that populists use the state to propagate anti-pluralism: “populists create the homogeneous people in whose name they had been speaking all along: populism becomes something like a self-fulfilling prophecy” (Müller 2017b, 80).
Populist movements “colonize,” “occupy,” and “usurp” the state, thus closing the gap between the place of power and a particular image of the people (Müller 2017b, 71, 78, 80). This is the source of populist constitutions: “Those populists who have enough power will seek to establish a new populist constitution – in both the sense of a new sociopolitical settlement and a new set of rules for the political game” (Müller 2017c, 62). This is what we have seen in Hungary, Venezuela and Egypt (Müller’s examples). Although they have since moved away from this, this is also what Podemos proposed to do in Spain in order to substitute the 1978 constitution of the transition from fascism to democracy with a new constitution that should not be the constitution of the establishment (la casta) but of the Spanish people (Errejón and Mouffe 2016; Franzé 2018; Iglesias 2015).
Writing about Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, Müller concludes that “the nuevo constitucionalismo used constitutions to set up conditions for the perpetuation of populist power, all in the name of the idea that they and only they represented la voluntad constituyente – the single constitutionalizing will” (Müller 2017c, 66–67). Populists posit a constituent power external to the constitutional order, and that power is a unitary will; it is unitary at the level of the people (with its homogeneous identity) and at the level of the populist leader. It is only a small step from this to the Schmittian celebration of the dictatorship of the decision, and for Müller, the debate about populism is also a re-run of the Kelsen–Schmitt debate (Müller 2003, 233-241; 2016a, 179–80). That said, Müller also notes: “Such a strategy to consolidate or even perpetuate power is not exclusive to populists, of course” (Müller 2016c). Populists, it would seem, are not the only ones who do not mind the gap.
In so far as populists close the gap between the constitutional order and their particular representation of the people, the populist constitution is “partisan” (Müller 2017c, 65, 68, 74), giving rise to “conflict” and “confrontation” (Müller 2017c, 67, 74). Conflict itself is not a problem, and, for Müller, it is part of democracy: politicians and political parties put forward “visions” of the people as “fallible hypotheses,” and the electorate vote in elections on the basis of their identifications with these (Müller 2017b, 82; 2021a, 37). Conflict is part of a healthy democracy, also when it is conflict over who the people are, and what democracy is: “The concept of the people is always up for grabs, and democracy is also about a permanent contestation of what democracy is”; and “of course, any of us can criticize our democratic institutions; they are not sacrosanct” (in Boel, Jensen, and Sonnichsen 2017, 75; see also Müller 2021a, 183–84). However, conflicts must be mediated by the liberal democratic constitutional order; this is “legitimately contained conflict” (in Boel, Jensen, and Sonnichsen 2017, 84). The problem with populism is that, rather than having political conflicts—democratic competition—within the constitutional framework, we have political conflicts over the constitutional framework; rather than merely facilitating the competition between different parties, the populist constitution is itself partisan.
At stake is the partisanship of the liberal democratic order as a framework. It is this partisanship that would make the order populist in Müller’s view. Consider Müller’s alternative to populism and neoliberal technocracy: “a new social contract for the people as a whole.” He immediately transforms the “whole” people into “broad-based support” (Müller 2014, 491). 5 However, broad-based it is, if it is short of universal, it is partisan. Müller’s examples of positive experiences of this are Iceland and Ireland, and his negative example is Hungary (Müller 2017c, 99; 2014, 491). The problem that Müller encounters is that there cannot be a contract without a definition—and, therefore, a delimitation—of the people who will contract. Before the people can contract, we must define who belongs to the people, and what it means to belong to the people (Näsström 2007; Ochoa Espejo, 2017). Is the definition based on being affected by a decision? On formal citizenship? (And how is citizenship defined?) On being present, in a given moment, within a given territory? and so on. The people must be defined, and to define a people is to delimit it too—to draw a line between who is included, and who is excluded. Once the people has been defined and delimited, we also need an account of how the contract is contracted: are we dealing with a universal consensus? If not, what is the relationship between the people and the majority speaking for the people? and so on.
Müller’s response to the boundary problem of who belongs to the people does not work to resolve the problem. While he is right to argue that the definition of the people should be seen as an ongoing process, this merely raises the question of who belongs to that process, and how the process is shaped (Müller 2017c, 80–81). The process cannot take place simply within the confines of the constitutional order, but is also a struggle over that order to establish who belongs legitimately to the people. The process of establishing the identity and legitimate limits of the people cannot be contained wholly within the constitutional order, and so the distinction between populist symbolic representations and democratic empirical representations of the people is blurred. The constitutional order is partisan in Müller’s sense because it is always also the crystallization of a particular people; at the end of the day, a particular image of the people is always written into the constitutional order.
Consider also the distinction Müller makes between “democratic” or “revolutionary” and “populist” claims. He writes: “In nondemocracies, ‘We are the People’ is a justified revolutionary claim: it is precisely not a populist one,” and he gives as examples Tahrir Square and Gezi Park/Taksim Square (Müller 2017c, 73). On the contrary, in democracies, any claim that “We are the People” must be false because it can only be a particular masquerading as the universal—a part masquerading as the whole people. Democratic claims about the people instead take the form of “we are also part of the people,” an empirical people already there to be included among (Müller 2017a, 601).
What emerges is a liberal democratic order that is at once the framework for the claims about the people and the result of those claims; the constitutional framework at once takes a certain people as given and provides the opportunity to represent, and thereby constitute, the people in new ways. Müller himself notes that “whether a particular claim is democratic or populist will not always be a clear-cut, obvious matter,” and he gives as an example the time between Tahrir Square and the consolidation of the new Egyptian regime based on “a populist, partisan constitution” of the Muslim Brotherhood (Müller 2017c, 74). A (legitimate) claim about the whole people in opposition to the old undemocratic regime slides into a (illegitimate) claim by a part to represent the whole people.
In the final analysis, the gap between the liberal democratic constitutional order and the particular occupations of it is not absolute because the liberal democratic order is not independent of particular representations of the people, even if the former cannot be reduced to the latter. In Müller’s own terms, populists as well as democrats consolidate or even perpetuate their power in this way. We can read Müller as embarking on a post-foundational path whereby every constitutional order is “populist” in the sense that it is articulated in conjunction with a particular, extra-constitutional image of the people, and that it is contingent and the crystallization of power relations. This would take him close to Laclau and Mouffe’s version of post-foundationalism as hegemony. However, Müller limits the implications of his post-foundationalism by insisting on the distinction between populism and democracy, and by resisting the view that there is something about populism that can be generalized to include democratic forms of politics. This introduces a basic ambiguity into his texts, which he cannot resolve. I turn to Chantal Mouffe’s work on agonistic democracy and populism to argue that we can find in her work a post-foundationalism that avoids this kind of ambiguity. It involves thinking about liberal democracy, constitutional orders, and normativity in terms of hegemony.
Agonistic democracy as post-foundational politics
Mouffe came to populism via a study of European right-wing populism as a reaction to the depoliticizing hegemony of neoliberal technocracy (Mouffe 2005b). With her theory of agonistic democracy, she wants to stress the conflictual aspect of democracy that is otherwise neglected by the consensus politics of liberalism, deliberative democracy, the Third Way, and the current neoliberal hegemony. Turning to populism, she takes this as a fruitful strategy for the Left today. She finds left populism in a concrete form in, among other places, the political projects of Podemos in Spain and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, both of which she has been involved with.
Before examining Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy and populism, it is useful to take a step back to her theory of hegemony, developed together with Ernesto Laclau, which she refers to as the theoretical starting point for her approach to democracy and populism. Laclau and Mouffe formulated the post-foundationalism of the theory of hegemony in terms of anti-essentialism (Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Mouffe 2018, 10). It is anti-essentialist because it is hegemony all the way down, where hegemony refers to the contingent and performative articulation of identities (and meaning, practices, institutions, structures, and so on). This is also what Laclau and Mouffe refer to as “the political” understood not as a regional category (which would be “politics”), but as the moments of institution of the social. Since there is no pure performative, we are dealing with re-articulation of existing identities. And since hegemonic articulations are contingent, things could always be otherwise, and there will always be exclusion, which Laclau and Mouffe express with the term antagonism.
Note that, Laclau and Mouffe associate post-foundationalism with power (hegemony) and exclusion (antagonism). Anti-essentialism, the political, contingency, and antagonism are all markers of the post-foundationalism of their approach. Populism expresses this in a purer form than other forms of politics in two ways: first, populist discourse is performative in that it constructs a people; and, second, populism is articulated around an antagonism that divides society in two. Populist discourse is the hegemonic articulation of a foundation (the people) that is contingent and is entangled with relations of power and exclusion.
Consider now Laclau’s and Mouffe’s appropriation of Claude Lefort’s thesis about the empty place of power in modern democracy (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 187; Mouffe 2018, 42). 6 Modern democracy’s empty place of power provides a peculiar form of unity that sits somewhere “[b]etween the logic of complete identity and that of pure difference” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 188). “Complete identity” would correspond to Lefort’s totalitarianism and to Müller’s anti-pluralist populism, and “pure difference” would correspond to the absence of any order (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 188). The democratic unity—which, for Laclau and Mouffe, is a hegemonic unity—is a way to think about society beyond what they see as a false choice between totalitarianism and no unity at all. Seen in this light, the relationship between identity and exclusion on one side and pluralism on the other side is not a simple zero-sum game because the condition of possibility of pluralism is also its limit. Without some closure and exclusion—without some hegemonic articulation—we cannot have a pluralist political space and, so, no democracy. The emptiness of the democratic place of power is not a natural fact, and therefore it must be hegemonically articulated (Laclau 2005, 170; 2014, 172–73). Power (hegemony) and exclusion (antagonism) are constitutive of any order, pluralist or not, democratic or not. This is so for Laclau and Mouffe because we have started from post-foundationalist premises, and although populism brings this out in a purer form than other forms of politics, it is a trait of any political order.
Radical and plural democracy is Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemonic project, but it is also one hegemonic project among others. A radical and plural democratic project uses the state to extend liberty and equality to ever more areas of society, but as a hegemonic project it also involves closure and exclusion (e.g. Mouffe 2018, 47). Left populism implies “the creation of a popular majority to come to power and establish a progressive hegemony” (Mouffe 2018, 50, also 45). Whether a radical and plural democracy or a left populist hegemony, “any political order is the expression of a hegemony, of a specific pattern of power relations” (Mouffe 2000, 99; see also 104; 2018, 46). The same applies to Mouffe’s agonistic democracy, which she conceives as a space for conflicts among political adversaries who share a commitment to the values of liberal democracy, namely liberty and equality for all. As such, it can function as “a terrain of struggle,” but this space also relies on some exclusion, and I would add that it is a striated space. To paraphrase Mouffe, the task is not to eliminate power and exclusion but to constitute forms of power and exclusion more compatible with democratic values (Mouffe 2000, 100).
I do not mean to suggest that Müller and liberals and deliberative democrats would argue that nothing is excluded from the liberal democratic order. They are open about that, and Müller’s distinction between democracy and populism is an example of that. The difference lies in the fact that, for Mouffe, it is hegemony all the way down, and, as a result, any justification of the principles of liberty and equality for all will be at least partly self-referential because there is no principle independent of particular interpretations of it. There is no universal or rational ground on which to draw the limits of the liberal democratic constitutional order, or on which to base the distinction between democracy and populism. As we have seen, Müller would also reject the existence of such an ultimate ground, and this means that he cannot draw the distinction between democracy and populism in the way that he tries to do.
Mouffe’s agonistic democracy is defined by the irresolvable tension between liberalism and democracy (and between liberty and equality), what she also refers to as the democratic paradox (Mouffe 2000). This is her way of theorizing liberal democracy post-foundationally. Liberalism and democracy are contingently articulated together, as opposed to the Habermasian co-originality thesis (Habermas 2001; Abts and Rummens 2007; Chambers 2019; Müller 2017c; Urbinati 2019, 11–12; compare Müller 2021a, 47). Against that background, Mouffe identifies neoliberalism as not sufficiently democratic so that the market, possessive individualism, and so on, are taken as second nature. At the same time, without liberalism, we would face the danger of totalitarianism (Mouffe 1993, 105). In both cases, we are dealing with closure around an ultimate truth. The tension between liberalism and democracy is, then, the key to the post-foundational status of agonistic democracy. The tension means that there is always a place from which to challenge the existing articulation of liberalism and democracy, by putting into question the existing rights regime, for instance, or by challenging the dominant representation of the people (Mouffe 2000, 44–45). Any particular rights regime and any particular articulation of the people can be challenged “through reference to ‘humanity’ and the polemical use of ‘human rights’” (Mouffe 2000, 44–45). Placing “humanity” and “human rights” within quotation marks signals that, although they exceed the identity of any particular people, they are not bedrock foundations. As polemical placeholders they work to institutionalize the empty place of power, but they are also the results of hegemonic articulations. 7 The mutual articulation of liberalism and democracy thus creates a problem (the liberal democratic space is always limited by a particular demos), but also provides a solution to the problem (the limits of the demos can always be contested in the name of the liberal logic).
The problem remains, however, from Müller’s perspective, namely the partial closure between the empty place of power and a particular articulation of the people. Since we are dealing with the articulation of the principles of liberal democracy, and since democracy necessarily involves “[t]he democratic logic of constituting the people, and inscribing rights and equality into practices” (Mouffe 2000, 44), the interpretation of the liberal-democratic principles cannot be dissociated from the construction of a people, and this is even more so in the case of populism. Even if the people are not the true or authentic people that Müller accuses populists of peddling, we still need to address the limitations that populism places on pluralism. This is not a challenge limited to left populism, but also for agonistic democracy.
Post-foundational normativity
Several of Mouffe’s critics have identified a contradiction in her work between her post-foundational commitments and her normative commitments (e.g. Knops 2007; Michelsen 2019; Rummens 2009; see also Gürsözlü 2009). The critique usually comes from a position in normative political theory, especially deliberative democratic theory (but see Fish 2001, 235–37). From such a perspective, Mouffe’s position is contradictory because she insists on making the principles of liberal democracy a normative reference point while simultaneously holding that those principles are the result of hegemonic struggles.
Mouffe lends herself to this criticism when she distinguishes between the principles of liberal democracy (i.e. liberty and equality for all) and interpretations of those principles. The principles define an agonistic space within which adversaries compete for their interpretations of the principles to become hegemonic. There is an antagonistic frontier between the agonistic space and those enemies that reject liberty and equality for all. In the latest formulation of this, Mouffe makes a “methodological” distinction “between two levels of analysis: the ethico-political principles of the liberal-democratic politeia and their different hegemonic forms of inscription” (Mouffe 2018, 44). The distinction between principles and interpretations goes hand in hand with two other distinctions: that between antagonism and agonism, and that between enemies and adversaries. Mouffe draws on Carl Schmitt: there is no democracy without a people (a “we”), and so there is no democracy without exclusion (a “they”). For Müller, that leads to a populism in the form of a Schmittian decisionism expressing the homogeneous unity of an extra-constitutional people (Müller 2003, 233–41; 2016a, 179–80). But Mouffe departs from Schmitt in that she wants to combine democracy with pluralism—“the ethical principle of liberalism” (Mouffe 1993, 104). Her agonistic democracy is an answer to the question of how a pluralist unity is possible; agonistic democracy is a “conflictual consensus” (Mouffe 2000, 55). So, neither Schmittian exclusion of pluralism nor consensus politics. That is a normative argument: it is a good thing, Mouffe believes, that antagonism is tamed so that we can have conflict that does not undermine a liberal-democratic politeia.
Mouffe’s distinction between the principles of liberal democracy and interpretations of those principles fluctuates with her rejection of “revolutionary rupture” in favor of “hegemonic transformation” (Mouffe 2018, 44). In the first case, the liberal democratic order and the principles of liberty and equality are at stake; in the second case, “those principles remain in force, but they are interpreted and institutionalized in a different way” (Mouffe 2018, 45). She rejects the revolutionary politics of what she refers to as the extreme Left (e.g. Slavoj Žižek) in favor of hegemonic transformation “within the constitutional liberal-democratic framework” and “through democratic procedures” (Mouffe 2018, 45; see also 48). Hegemonic transformation consists of the gradual re-articulation of elements in a combination of a Gramscian “war of position” and “war of movement,” where the success of the latter depends on the work of the former (Mouffe 1979, 196–98). Although hegemonic articulation is performative, it is always limited by existing structures of meaning; we should therefore think of articulation as dis- and re-articulation of existing significations of the people, institutions, principles, and so on (Mouffe 1979, 193, 197).
The distinction between principles and interpretations suggests that the hegemonic struggle among different interpretations take the principles as a framework that is given. Consider, for example, Mouffe’s treatment of Occupy Wall Street. In an argument that mirrors her critique of revolutionary politics, she writes that, in Occupy, the moral antagonism between the 99% and “the ‘bad’ 1%” who have to be “eliminated” took the place of “political analysis of the complex configuration of power forces that need to be challenged to create a more just and democratic society” (Mouffe 2013, 117). The moralistic antagonism between the 99% and the 1% turns into a revolutionary politics of either/or rather than an agonistic war of position that seeks to rearticulate existing institutions in a more democratic way. Occupy is both inefficient and dangerous when placed antagonistically against the liberal democratic institutions and not agonistically within those institutions. Extra-institutional movements such as Occupy still have a role to play in an agonistic democracy, according to Mouffe: they are “valuable for enriching democracy. Not only can they raise important questions and bring to the fore issues that are neglected, they can also lead to the emergence of new subjectivities and provide a terrain for the cultivation of different social relations” (Mouffe 2013, 126). 8 However, a hierarchy emerges between institutional politics and extra-institutional politics, with the latter reduced to the role of inspiration for the former. It is through institutional politics that we can really change things, ironically because we have limited ourselves to liberal democratic institutions.
Consider also the way Mouffe draws a line between what should be excluded and what may be included within the agonistic space. She distinguishes “between demands which are to be accepted as part of the agonistic debate and those which are to be excluded.” The latter are “those who put [a democratic society’s] basic institutions into question” (Mouffe 2005a, 120). 9 Such a distinction would stop the agonistic struggle at the border of the liberal democratic constitutional order. But Mouffe adds that “the very nature of those institutions is also part of the agonistic debate,” and she concludes that “the drawing of the frontier between the legitimate and the illegitimate is always a political decision, and … it should therefore always remain open to contestation” (Mouffe 2005a, 121). On the one hand, the liberal democratic constitutional order defines the limits of agonistic struggles (Müller’s “shared political stage”); on the other hand, that very same constitutional order is at stake in the agonistic struggles.
Where does that leave us? Has Mouffe rowed back to the liberal-democratic shore to join Müller? Is she contradicting herself when she wants to have both her version of post-foundationalism as hegemony and a normative commitment to the principles and institutions of liberal democracy? Is she guilty of the same ambiguity as Müller? I suggest that, if we think of normative foundations in post-foundational terms, there is no contradiction in Mouffe’s approach.
For Mouffe, liberty and equality “only exist inscribed in different hegemonic formations” (Mouffe 2018, 43). This means that her “agonistic perspective takes account of the fact that every social order is politically instituted and that the ground on which hegemonic interventions occur is never neutral, for it is always the product of previous hegemonic practices” (Mouffe 2018, 92–93). It is hegemony all the way down, and there is no ultimate foundation—that is how we should understand Mouffe’s post-foundationalism. It means that there is no essential distinction between principles and interpretations; perhaps that is why she qualifies the distinction as “methodological.” The hegemonic struggle between different interpretations is folded into the results of previous hegemonic struggles between different interpretations, some of which have sedimented and come to be taken as given. The interpretations of the principles of liberal democracy at once take the principles as their starting point and performatively constitute them. The interpretations only “work” as interpretations in so far as they take the principles as given (citing them for their legitimacy as merely interpretations of the same principles), and in so far as they can take the principles in different directions (because they would otherwise not be interpretations in the plural, but only a mechanical reproduction). 10 That is why I described hegemonic articulation as dis- and re-articulation.
When it comes to normatively justified exclusions of antagonistic enemies from the agonistic space, the antagonistic enemy is defined from the basis of the principles of liberty and equality for all. Those principles only exist as particular interpretations; what does the legitimizing—“founding”—work is not the principles “themselves” (as if such a thing existed), but particular interpretations of them. This is also the point where the agonistic space itself is at stake, the point at which the principles-qua-interpretations cannot offer us a foundation for the distinction between adversary and enemy. This is the point where all that is left is a political decision, a decision that cannot be based on any non-contingent foundational principles. It is the point at which it becomes clear that the legitimacy of the antagonistic exclusion is based on a contingent foundation, that is, a hegemonic articulation of the principles of liberty and equality for all. This is what Mouffe refers to as “the political.”
The left populism that Mouffe argues for is an agonistic populism where the populist antagonism between the people and the elite has been transformed into an agonistic relationship between adversaries (Errejón and Mouffe 2016, 132). “Populist” here becomes a redescription of “agonistic”: it is a conflict within a shared political space defined by a common acceptance of liberty and equality for all. Something similar is going on when Laclau proposed Mouffe’s agonistic democracy as a way to articulate a normative populism because it articulates the identitarian logic—Müller’s populist identity politics—together with a logic of difference that undermines totalitarian attempts at closure (Laclau 2005, 166–71). 11 There may seem to be a contradiction between the antagonism that Laclau and Mouffe identify as defining of populism and the agonistic relationship between adversaries. We may also ask what has happened to the understanding of “populism” as a way to try to capture the way in which any constitutional order is defined by power (hegemony) and exclusion (antagonism). The reason why Mouffe is able to combine a post-foundational approach (where every constitutional order is “populist”) with a normative commitment to an agonistic interpretation of liberal democracy is that the shared agonistic space acts as a polemical placeholder. The agonistic space acts as a foundation, but as a contingent, hegemonically articulated foundation. Antagonism does not disappear, and it may reappear at any moment, but it has been provisionally bracketed.
At certain points, Mouffe limits some of the more radical effects of her post-foundational approach by introducing distinctions that, as a minimum, appear to be supported in a foundation that is taken as given. One example is her analysis of multiculturalism. Mouffe distinguishes multiculturalist demands “which concern the recognition of strictly cultural mores and customs and those with a directly political nature,” while recognizing that this can only be “a rough distinction” (Mouffe 2005a, 122). Cultural demands are not problematic as they can be met “without jeopardizing the basic liberal democratic framework”; the problem lies with political demands, “which would lead to its destruction,” because they would require “the implementation of different legal systems” and thus, “the coexistence of conflicting principles of legitimacy” (Mouffe 2005a, 122). 12 Some multiculturalists may respond that this is precisely the point: multiculturalism challenges the view that there is a single people, and at least some multiculturalists argue that there will be an unstable relationship between partly overlapping, but competing, constitutional orders and partly overlapping, but competing, peoples as sources of legitimacy, thus pluralizing the agonistic spaces (Connolly 1995; Tully 1995). The result may be messy, but it is hard to see how it could be otherwise if we push Mouffe’s post-foundationalism to its logical conclusion. If we have said hegemony all the way down, we have also said pluralism all the way down, even if this pluralism will be limited by provisional constitutional orders.
Conclusion: Left politics in a post-foundational terrain
Müller and Mouffe both start from post-foundational premises, but the similarities should not lead us to overlook the differences between their respective approaches (Gürsözlü 2009). While she may not always be consistent, Mouffe generally holds to the view that any constitutional order is the result of hegemonic articulations, and, so, there is no constitutional order that is not also the result of power and exclusion. Put differently, there is something “populist” about every constitutional order. 13 Whereas Mouffe connects her post-foundationalism to populism, Müller connects his post-foundationalism to liberal democracy. For him, there is nothing “populist” about liberal democracy, although we also saw that, at certain points, he equivocates.
One might think that Mouffe’s version of post-foundationalism would lead her to be more inclusive of populists than Müller, and that her agonistic democracy would be more “permissive” than Müller’s liberal democracy. While we might think that we should find a correspondence between the way in which an author theorizes post-foundationalist premises and his/her political positions, such a thesis overlooks the ways in which a post-foundationalist starting point can be articulated in a variety of ways, and the ways in which different post-foundationalist starting points may, therefore, be articulated in the same direction on specific issues. Take, for example, the question of how to respond to right-wing populism, where there seems to be little difference between Müller and Mouffe. Müller talks about “hard borders,” but he is also open to treat those borders as open to interpretation (Müller 2021a, 39, 101). In one place, and following his opposition between democracy and populism, Müller treats this as a question of either/or: to be included within a liberal democracy, populists must cease to be populists (in Boel, Jensen, and Sonnichsen 2017, 77). In other places, he treats it as a matter of degree and argues that democrats should engage populists (Müller 2017c, 84). He thinks of this engagement as a version of militant democracy, whereby democrats should talk with populists but not talk like them (Müller 2007, 112–19; 2017c, 82–85, 111-114; 2016b). For her part, Mouffe writes that we should not legally ban right-wing populists, only “a declared Nazi party … or an extreme Muslim party, which wants to abolish the liberal system and establish a theocracy. This is very clear, they are enemies. But most right-wing parties are borderline cases.” Even in the case of banning parties, they should still have freedom of expression, for instance to Holocaust denial (in Dreyer Hansen and Sonnichsen 2014, 269; see also Mouffe 2005b). This is not to say that Müller and Mouffe would not reach different conclusions if we sat them down and asked them to consider a concrete case, but we cannot assume so as a matter of fact.
With that caveat in mind, I want nonetheless to end by considering two cases of what a post-foundationalist approach á la Mouffe implies: post-truth politics and green politics.
Today, populism and post-truth are often associated, and it is a common critique of Mouffe’s approach that it leads to relativism. In a recent contribution to this critique of the theory of hegemony, Ugur Aytac brings two distinctions into play as a bulwark against what he calls “vulgar politicization” (Aytac 2020, 6). He distinguishes between, first, hegemony and an extra-hegemonic objectivity, and second, politics and science. The first distinction is meant to avoid the relativism of an approach that “does not offer any specific normative orientation” (Aytac 2020, 5; referencing Geras 1988, 50). While this is not Aytac’s primary concern, we have seen that this does not apply to Mouffe’s post-foundationalism and agonistic democracy: the absence of an ultimate foundation—or objectivity—does not preclude the absence of foundations. Indeed, Aytac is quick to add that Mouffe’s position is not “an entirely relativistic position” (Aytac 2020, 5), even if he does not account for the source of the non-hegemonic objectivity that remains.
Aytac uses the second distinction between politics and science in order to provide “principled limits on what should be politicized” (Aytac 2020, 5). He makes this argument in the context of science denialism, which we have also seen during the COVID-19 crisis, and one could add the current attacks on Critical Race Theory as another example. Science and academic research are clearly under attack from political groups, populist as well as non-populist. Aytac is also quick to qualify this distinction between science and politics; for instance, he accepts that the norms of science may be the sedimentations of hegemonic struggles. Therefore, “proper politicization” of science “should primarily take place within the scientific community itself” (Aytac 2020, 6). We must ask, however, for the foundation of the distinction between “proper” and “vulgar.” If that foundation lies in the norms of science understood as the sedimentations of hegemonic struggles, then we are back to a post-foundationalism á la the theory of hegemony. If the foundation is to be found in a non-hegemonic objectivity, we would need an account of that ultimate foundation.
Another response to the politicization of science would be to reject any idea of an a-political science and to articulate scientific norms together with a radical democratic imaginary based on the extension of equality to ever more social fields. The point would not be to politicize science, but to insist that it is already political, and that any attempt to depoliticize science is itself political. This in no way precludes us from criticizing attempts to politicize science in ways that we think are wrong; such a critique will be based in criteria, but we do not need to posit any ultimate objectivity for those criteria. 14
Given the post-foundationalist starting point, might there nonetheless be something left for the Left on which build a progressive and inclusive political project? In her most recent work, Mouffe has turned to the environment and green politics, and she has argued that the populist Left should work for a “Green Democratic Transition” (Mouffe 2018, 61; 2020). At first sight, one might think of this as a contradiction: while a populist discourse articulates a people and divides society in two, green politics tend to rely on some version of “we are all in the same boat.” However, Mouffe thinks about her green politics in terms of the articulation between an environmental politics, democracy, and equality, and this involves articulating antagonisms between the many and the few. As such, her Green Democratic Transition is a populist, hegemonic project. It really is hegemony all the way down.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I presented earlier versions of the paper to the political theory research group in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen; the Power, Identity and Critique Research Group at Roskilde University; the POLCOM research group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra; the Democracy: Genealogies, Concepts and Practice conference, University of the Western Cape; the Democracy & Pluralism conference at CAPPE, University of Brighton; the 2nd Helsinki Conference on Emotions, Populism and Polarization; and the XVth AECPA Congress. I would like to thank Pedro Abellán Artacho, Andro Kitus, Odin Lysaker, Christian Rostbøll, Xavier Ruiz Collantes, and Clare Woodford for their comments on earlier drafts.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this paper has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 794037.
