Encyclopedia of Political Theory

Radical Democracy

Contributors: Lasse Thomassen

Edited by: Mark Bevir
Book Title: Encyclopedia of Political Theory
Chapter Title: "Radical Democracy"
Pub. Date: 2010
Access Date: December 11, 2018
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781412958653
Online ISBN: 9781412958660
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412958660.n375
Print pages: 1142-1145
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Political theorists have used the term radical democracy in different ways. In general, the
“radical” of radical democracy refers to a wish to address, and change, the fundamentals of
democracy. This should come as no surprise, given the etymological origin of the word
“radical,” namely the Latin radix, meaning root. Thus, radical democrats challenge what is at
the root of democracy as we know it. Among radical democrats there are different views of
what the basis of democracy should be; indeed, contemporary radical democrats suggest that
we should not think of democracy as being rooted in any ground.

Past Radical Democracy

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was an early radical democrat. He criticized

representative democracy and argued for direct and participatory democracy, something that
was later taken up by participatory democrats in the late twentieth century. For Rousseau, the
ideal is a political community without divisions and where the will of the people is reflected in
the laws in an unmediated fashion. This ideal is summed up in the concept of the General
Will, which is also why critics have pointed to the potential totalitarian consequences of
Rousseauian democracy.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is another philosopher who has been labeled a radical democrat. Marx
thought liberal democracy was superficial because it did not address the root of the ills in
capitalist society, namely the exploitation of one class by another. The alternative communist
society was, for Marx, a harmonious society without division. Paradoxically, the outcome of this
sort of radical democracy is that there is no need for democratic institutions in the sense that
we know them.

Radical Democracy Today

Today, the term radical democracy is associated with theorists such as William Connolly,
Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau. These theorists are all
inspired by poststructuralism, broadly conceived, and the focus is on these contemporary
theories of radical democracy in the following.

Poststructuralism and Radical Democracy

The poststructuralist conception of language, identity, and meaning leads radical democrats
to emphasize the contestation of existing norms, institutions, and identities. They reject all
forms of essentialism where things—for instance, democracy—have a universal and
ahistorical essence. Thus, they are skeptical of Marx's notion of “species being,” for instance.
Likewise they are critical of Marx's teleological conception of history; instead, they argue,
history is contingent and does not proceed according to a necessary logic. Next, radical
democrats believe that it is impossible to transcend alienation and inequality, for instance
through a revolution. This is not to say that they do not believe that a better world is possible,
only that they reject the possibility of a harmonious society, whether Rousseau's society ruled
by the General Will or Marx's communist society. Instead, poststructuralist radical democrats
argue that there is always conflict. They add that this is not something to regret because it
means that norms, institutions, and identities do not become fixed, and this is what
distinguishes democracy from totalitarianism. In this context, Claude Lefort's argument about
the difference between democracy and totalitarianism has been influential, among other
things in the work of Laclau and Mouffe.

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Finally, if Rousseau and Marx tried to get rid of alienation by refounding democracy,
poststructuralist radical democrats reject foundations. To use Jean-François Lyotard's phrase,
contemporary radical democrats are skeptical of grand narratives. For instance, they are
skeptical of the Marxist grand narrative of emancipation and its links to essentialism and
teleology; and they are skeptical of the Enlightenment's grand narrative of man, for instance,
the way it is expressed in the notion of human rights based on human nature. Instead, they
propose that we think of democracy without foundations. Thus, to go back to the etymological
meaning of radical (radix, root), post-structuralist radical democrats aim at the root, or
foundation, of democracy. However, they do so not in order to substitute it with an alternative
root, as Rousseau and Marx did in their different ways. Rather, radical democrats aim at the
root of democracy in order to do away with the attempt to root democracy, for instance in
human essence.

Historical Context

Rousseau and Marx put forward their theories of radical democracy against the background of
the upheavals of the modern age. Poststructuralist radical democracy is a thing of the late
twentieth century. Poststructuralism is often seen as part of “postmodernism,” with the latter's
emphasis on antiessentialism and the pluralism and relative fluidity of identities.

Poststructuralist radical democracy must also be seen against the background of changes on
the (Marxist) left. From the 1960s onward, new social movements and struggles over identity
gained increasing importance within mainstream politics. These movements—for instance, the
women's movement—all challenged the Marxist emphasis on class as the organizing principle
of society and emancipation. Class gradually lost its empirical importance, as well as its
theoretical centrality to the diagnosis of, and solution to, the problems of contemporary
capitalism. Contemporary society is not a class society in a strict Marxist sense, and it seems
unlikely that the working class will be a revolutionary agent. Thus, the question became how
to think emancipation without tying it to class. Another problem faced by Marxists at the end
of the twentieth century was the absence of the revolution despite the developed character of
capitalism in the West. In fact, since the late 1970s, neoliberalism and liberal democracy have
become increasingly hegemonic. Given that the predictions of Marx proved wrong, radical
democrats are faced with the question “what is to be done?” without being able to fall back on
Marx's analysis of capitalism. On the whole, poststructuralist theories of radical democracy
emerged as one response to the question of strategy in the face of neoliberal hegemony and
the inadequacy of Marxist analyses and strategies.

Radical Democracy and Contemporary Political Theory

Radical democrats often distinguish their positions through a critique of contemporary

alternatives.

Liberalism

Radical democrats criticize liberalism on a number of accounts. They are, first of all, critical of
the liberal notion of the subject as an atomistic and rational individual. They criticize this
disembedded and disembodied individual, a kind of abstract individual outside historical and
socioeconomic context and without a (gendered, racial, etc.) body. And radical democrats
argue that the liberal subject is not universal and is only one particular kind of subject, one
that is associated with a particular kind of society, namely bourgeois society. The radical

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democratic critique of the liberal subject is mirrored in a critique of liberal citizenship and
democracy. Radical democrats argue that democracy is more than rights and procedures, and
that it must contain a democratic ethos too. This is not to say that radical democrats reject
liberal rights and institutions, only that they want to extend and deepen these. As a
consequence, they challenge the current forms of rights, citizenship, and so on. In short, they
politicize them.

Communitarianism

Although radical democrats share the communitarian critique of the disembedded liberal
subject, they disagree with communitarians on the nature of communities. For radical
democrats, no community is harmonious. There is always conflict and disagreement, and
identities are fluid and overlapping, a fact that radical democrats do not lament.

Deliberative Democracy

Finally, radical democrats share some things with deliberative democrats such as Jürgen
Habermas. Both are critical of the liberal atomistic individual, and both see the identity and
interests of the individual as formed through the political process rather than given prior to it.
However, radical democrats disagree with deliberative democrats on a fundamental point,
namely, the rationality of deliberative procedures. For radical democrats, no deliberation is
completely devoid of power, inequality, or distortion, and it is the task of the theorist to
highlight these things. Likewise, radical democrats are skeptical of the deliberative notion of a
rational subject. Radical democrats argue that this view of the subject is biased against affect
in politics, and that it comes at the expense of silencing certain voices within the deliberative
procedures and within the public sphere more generally. Finally, radical democrats are critical
of the deliberative emphasis on consensus. Given that conflict and disagreement are
permanent, consensus is only possible by suppressing and excluding dissent.

Thus, in different ways, poststructuralist radical democrats seek to politicize rights and
institutions, the identities of communities, procedures, and consensus. This goes to the heart
of the radical democratic notion of politics as associated with contestation.

Divisions within Radical Democracy

Having considered contemporary theories of radical democracy as a whole, we now look at

two ways of mapping out the differences among radical democrats.

Immanence/Transcendence

Radical democrats can be divided according to whether they believe that a radical democratic
alternative must emerge through immanence or through transcendence. Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri (drawing on Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze) represent the immanence
side, and Laclau (drawing on Jacques Lacan) would represent the transcendence side.

The disagreement between Hardt and Negri and Laclau concerns whether an alternative to
the present liberal-capitalist order will emerge immanently or require a moment of
transcendence. For Laclau, we need a moment of transcendence (albeit a “failed”
transcendence) understood as hegemony. A particular element within society (a group, a
party, etc.) comes to stand in for the whole (say, the emancipation of society as a whole). In

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this way, a hegemonic consensus is formed, a hegemonic consensus that can oppose and
dissolve the current hegemony. Hardt and Negri, on the other hand, believe that countering
one hegemony with another reproduces a form of politics historically associated with Lenin
and the vanguard (the Communist Party, taking over—but ultimately leaving intact—the state,
etc.). For them, change must arise from below, from what they call the multitude, and they
find hope in, among other things, the alter globalization movement. Thus, the
immanence/transcendence distinction is not merely philosophical, but has important
implications for political strategy.

Abundance/Lack

The immanence/transcendence distinction is not unrelated to another division within radical

democratic thought, one between abundance and lack. Hardt, Negri, and Connolly are
representatives of abundance, while Laclau and Mouffe represent lack.

Inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis, Laclau and Mouffe argue that any communal identity is
marked by a lack, which it may try to project onto an external enemy (e.g., the figure of the
Jew or the Islamic terrorist). More generally, any identity is marked by a lack, which sets in
motion identifications with objects—a football club, a national symbol, and so on—that are
supposed to fill the lack. Yet, although my identity is constituted through these identifications,
the latter always fail. It follows that any identity is precarious and constantly renegotiated. This
is also how Laclau thinks about hegemony. There is no natural or essential political
community; instead, a particular sector of society takes up the task of forming a hegemonic
consensus around certain key signifiers such as “freedom” or “solidarity.”

For Laclau and Mouffe, radical democracy is one hegemonic project among others. In her
work, Mouffe has focused on how a democratic “we” is established. For her, the democratic
“we” is established hegemonically, for instance, as a radical democratic “we,” but importantly
the “we” is not a closed whole because it is marked by internal division and differences. It is,
thus, a “we” that is always unstable and in the process of being renegotiated, even if it is also
constituted through an antagonistic exclusion of “them.”

Connolly, too, is interested in how the democratic “we” is constituted, but he has a different
take on it. For Connolly, what is central is whether, and how, existing norms and institutions
can be contested and thereby opened up. His focus is on excluded and marginalized
constituencies and on how we can relate to these in new ways, thereby including them within
the political space. In the process, our own identities and understandings are challenged. In
other words, it is a matter of pluralization: contesting communal and individual selves and
creating new selves. This is what Connolly has in mind when he talks about “agonistic
respect,” “critical responsiveness,” and a “generous ethos of engagement”: An agonistic
relation to the other that engages with the identity of the other as well as one's own identity.
Hence, for Connolly, we should avoid creating others as antagonistic others (as threats,
enemies, etc.).

For Connolly, then, Laclau and Mouffe too readily accept that exclusion is constitutive. The
risk is that they take particular exclusions as given and take the hegemonic way of organizing
politics as given. Connolly's radical democracy is organized as a rhizome, as a network that
connects and reconnects in new ways all the time. He gets this image from Deleuze, and he
opposes it to a politics that takes the trunk as its model, for instance, a hegemonic politics
where a “we” is established in the center. For Connolly, we should not think of identity in
terms of lack, but in terms of abundance: flows of energy, networks of materiality, processes

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of becoming, and so forth.

Criticisms

Poststructuralist radical democrats have criticized earlier radical democrats like Rousseau and
Marx for their essentialism as well as the potential totalitarian consequences of their ideas of
society and emancipation.

The main criticism of poststructuralist radical democratic theory is that it does not make a
difference. This criticism is leveled at radical democrats from different perspectives. First, at a
general level, radical democratic theory is faulted for being just that: theory. That is, theorists
of radical democracy have been criticized for not spelling out the practical and institutional
consequences of their theories. Second, some deliberative democrats have charged that
radical democracy is not that different from deliberative democracy, first because deliberative
democracy is more radical than radical democrats allow, and second because radical
democracy is only a radicalization of liberal and deliberative principles.

From a different perspective, theorists such as Slavoj Žižek have made a similar charge
against radical democracy. Žižek, who is himself sometimes labeled a radical democrat,
argues that radical democracy is not really radical. He believes that radical democrats such as
Laclau stay within the liberal democratic imaginary and that they do not confront the
fundamentals of contemporary justices. The latter are rooted in capitalism and, hence, in the
economic sphere about which radical democrats are often silent. Laclau, on the other hand,
retorts that Žižek remains trapped in essentialist and foundationalist categories such as class.
Thus, we are back at the question of what it means to be radical, that is, what it means to go
to the root of democracy.

radical democracy
democracy
poststructuralism
immanence
democracy theories
emancipation
deliberative democracy

Lasse Thomassen
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412958660.n375
See also

Marx, Karl
Participatory Democracy
Postmodernism
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

Further Readings
Butler, J., Laclau, E., & Žižek, S. (2000). Contingency, hegemony, universality: Contemporary
dialogues on the left. London: Verso.
Connolly, W. E. (1995). The ethos of pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical
democratic politics. London: Verso.
Mouffe, C. (Ed.). (1992). Dimensions of radical democracy: Pluralism and citizenship. London:
Verso.
Tønder, L., & Thomassen, L. (Eds.). (2005). Radical democracy: Politics between abundance
and lack. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Trend, D. (Ed.). (1996). Radical democracy: Identity, citizenship and the state. London:
Routledge.

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