On Democracy, Power and the Political

In general, address the question of how the author thinks about the challenges of difference (in terms of race, gender, etc.) to democratic theory and practice. 

Hande Lara Sever

In her article Democracy, Power and the Political Mouffe states that conflict and division should be accepted within a society and equal liberty for everyone should be ensured. She states that within a democratic society social objectivity is constituted through acts of power, hence to ensure equality for everyone we should concentrate not on “how to eliminate power but how to contitute forms of power that are compatible for democratic values.” Mouffe believes that we can not completely free ourselves from power and defends pluralist democracy. Before deconstructing what pluralist democracy is she critiques the ideology of John Rawls’ political liberalism and his approach to pluralism. Rawl concentrates on the question of “how to establish peaceful coexistence among individuals with different conceptions of the good.” Rawls’ main objective is creating a concensus on political fundamentals which defines “a core morality that specifies the terms under which people with different conceptions of the good can live together in political association.” Rawls thinks that this core morality should be established through “overlapping concensus”.  He also links reason to overlapping concensus as he states that reasonable people are those who accept to live according to this overlapping concensus. Mouffe is against this concensus as she thinks that “the distinction between ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’ helps to draw a frontier between those who accept the liberal principles and those who oppose them”.  As a result Mouffe thinks that Rawl’s ‘well ordered’ society is restrictive and problematic as it dismisses the oppostion to the ‘overlapping concensus’ as unreasonable and irrational. She says “Every pretension to occupy the place of universal(overlapping concensus for Rawls), to fix its final meaning through rationality must be rejected since the recognition of undecidability is the condition of existance of democratic politics.” Mouffe states that pluralism creates conflict and undecidability. According to Mouffe  this dynamic should be embraced rather than dismissing it for the sake of a well ordered society. “We have therefore to abandon the very idea of a complete reabsorption of alterity into oneness and harmony. It (plurality) is an alterity that can not be domesticated.”

As a result Mouffe argues that we should concentrate on freedom and pluralism for everyone rather than solely concentrating on the creation of a well ordered society. I found this article very interestig as Mouffe critiques the foundations of American society through Rawls’ argument according to her country’s own values. Belgium is a country whose politics are formed by Flaman versus Wallon tensions and Belgium recently survived a 20month governmental shut down which I think is good example for Mouffe’s approach to pluralism and acceptence of conflict and undecidability.