Mouffe

Caleb Parsons

In Chantal Mouffe's work, "Democracy, Power and the 'Political'" the challenges of organizing a pluralistic democracy remain a crucial matter. American political society derives a great deal of authority by making claims to universal values founded upon rationality. While these claims and values may make it easier to organize a larger populace, Mouffe recognizes that they also hide power relations and unequal distributions of political voice. What Mouffe calls on the reader to do is to critique calls to rationalism and essentialism in the public sphere. Mouffe is sure to draw distinctions between the ancient notions of democracy and the modern notions of democracy in their varied natures, rather than sizes. This nature is founded upon notions of plurality, which seeks to bring an end to any substantive claims to a good life. With this brings and end to certainty, and a more open definition of what constitutes citizenship and legitimate private space. The radical and plural democracy must take it upon itself to celebrate plurality, while simultaneously recognizing the power dimensions that form certain social groups in the first place. Mouffe disagrees with Rawl's call to a "rational" form of liberal democracy. Rawl's theory constructs an dangerously utopian idea of liberal democracy which would effectively suppress any dissent, thereby relating dissenting individuals as irrational. The radical and plural democracy Mouffe calls for the recognition and transformation of power structures, at the same time respecting the identities that have formed from them.