Chantal Mouffe

Much of democratic thought, especially liberal and deliberative forms of democracy, is dependent upon, and emphasizes, consensus and majority rules. But according to Mouffe, consensus oppresses differences--in race, opinions, class, gender, etc.--by forcing conformity according to similarities with, most often, the privileged groups in any society. Because of the ubiquity of power—the tendency for the majority to rule the minority—and the plurality of values in any given society, decisions are never neutral or purely democratic; they are always excluding, privileging, and determining according to certain criteria. It is therefore impossible to achieve the proposed aim of liberal and deliberative democracies: fully inclusive rational consensus.
In concert with Laclau, Mouffe instead argues for radical democracy: a democracy that champions freedom and equality alongside, not instead of, difference. She focuses on the centrality and inevitability of antagonism, disagreement, and irreducible difference within politics, even suggesting that they required for real democracy. Mouffe argues for a model of democracy called “agonistic pluralism.” Agonistic democracy emphasizes the inevitability of conflict in political life, and the impossibility of identifying any final, rational, and neutral decision procedures. Formulated like this, agonism is an essential part of the democratic process because it continues to reveal the opinions, populations, and processes that have been excluded in order for “consensus” to be achieved. According to Mouffe, what is at stake in contemporary iterations of democracy is the legitimization of conflict and dissensus as such.

In dialogue with and opposition to Jurgen Habermas, who suggests the postmodern critique of essentialism jeopardizes the democratic ideal of a universal, free human, Mouffe claims that only through a critique of essentialism is it possible to formulate a radical democracy that actually makes room for the spectrum and plurality of freedoms, opinions, demands, and political spaces necessarily produced by these “free” people. Differences are not an afterthought, or an outcome of democracy, but the very condition for thinking about a radical democratic project that enjoys pluralism, rather than rejecting or being threatened by it. For Mouffe, democracy is not designed to produce homogeneity through consensus, but to question and even undermine the political desire for homogeneity by allowing an agonism that underscores the violent way homogeneity forces. 

Yet in contrast with thinkers like Lyotard, with Mouffe is critical of a definition of democracy that is purely pluralist—where all differences are treated equally. For Mouffe, it is also important to recognize that some differences are constructed through relationships of subordination and should be challenged by radical democratic politics. One of the tasks of democratic politics is to distinguish between differences that do exist but shouldn't  and differences that don’t exist but should. However, radical democracy itself does not provide a means of arranging these differences hierarchically.  Democracy is perpetuated and bettered only as its social agents (democrats) become more democratic—that is, as they accept the particularity and limits of their own claims. - Rebekah Sinclair

References: 

• The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2000.
• “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community. Edited by Chantal Mouffe. London – New York: Verso, 1992.
• The Return of the Political. London – New York: Verso, 1993.