Radical Democracy: Laclau and Mouffe’s Post-Marxist Critique

Classical Marxism told a simple story: history is a battle between two classes, and once the working class wins, oppression ends. But what happens when the working class does not behave the way the theory predicts? What about struggles over caste, gender, religion, language, or the environment that do not fit neatly into the factory-floor conflict between owners and workers? Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe built their entire project around this puzzle. In their 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, they reworked Marxism so thoroughly that they called their position “post-Marxist” and proposed a fresh alternative: radical democracy.

Why they broke with classical Marxism 🔗

Laclau and Mouffe did not reject Marx outright. They respected the tradition but argued that one of its central assumptions had become a trap. That assumption is economic determinism: the belief that your economic position decides your politics, and that the working class is therefore destined to become a unified revolutionary force.

Laclau’s own experience pushed him toward this conclusion. He came from Argentina, where, during the resistance to military dictatorship, the trade unions were allied with the dictatorship while middle-class and student movements opposed it. The “revolutionary working class” of Marxist theory was, in reality, on the wrong side. This did not lead him to abandon Marxism, but to rebuild it.

The problem with a single, fixed identity 🔗

The bigger issue is that classical Marxism treats class as the master key to all politics. Every other struggle is supposed to be secondary, a distraction until the “real” economic revolution arrives. Laclau and Mouffe argued that this ignores how political identities actually form. People are not just workers. They are also women, members of religious or caste communities, citizens worried about pollution, or activists defending civil liberties. None of these identities can be reduced to economics.

They argued instead that social and political reality is marked by contingency and heterogeneity. “Contingency” simply means there is no fixed historical script. Society could have developed differently, and it can be reshaped through political action. There is no guaranteed endpoint that the laws of history will deliver.

Discourse: how meaning and identity are built 🔗

To replace economic determinism, Laclau and Mouffe turned to discourse theory, drawing on post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida and Wittgenstein. This is the most demanding part of their work, so it is worth slowing down.

For them, a discourse is not just “talk.” It is the whole system of meanings through which we understand the world. Their starting point is that all social objects and phenomena acquire meaning only within a discourse, which is never stable or permanently fixed. A piece of cloth becomes a “national flag” only inside a discourse of nationhood. A group of people becomes “the working class” or “the people” only when a discourse organizes them that way.

Articulation and the chain of equivalence 🔗

The key process here is articulation, which means linking different elements together so they form a shared political identity. Laclau and Mouffe argued that social identities are constructed through articulation and chains of equivalence.

A chain of equivalence connects separate demands by uniting them against a common opponent. Imagine farmers demanding fair prices, students demanding affordable education, and workers demanding job security. On their own, these are distinct concerns. But when they all line up against, say, an unresponsive government, they begin to see each other as allies. Their differences do not vanish, but they become “equivalent” in their shared opposition. This is exactly how broad political movements and coalitions are assembled.

Empty and floating signifiers 🔗

How does such a chain hold together? Through what Laclau called an empty signifier. This is a word or symbol broad enough to represent many different demands at once, precisely because it has been drained of any single, narrow meaning. Words like “justice,” “freedom,” or “the people” work this way. Terms such as “justice” and “equality” function as floating signifiers rather than universal or transcendent truths, which lets diverse movements rally under them.

Laclau’s favourite example was the Solidarity movement in 1980s Poland. It began with the precise demands of shipyard workers in Gdansk, but came to stand for something far broader as countless other grievances attached themselves to it. The name “Solidarity” eventually represented an entire society’s resistance, far beyond its original meaning. That is an empty signifier in action.

Hegemony reimagined 🔗

This brings us to the concept at the heart of their book: hegemony. They borrowed the term from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, but pushed it much further. For Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony is the process by which one particular group or set of demands comes to represent a much wider whole, temporarily fixing meaning across society.

Crucially, hegemony is never permanent. Because all identities are constructed and contingent, every dominant order can be challenged and reorganized. As one analysis puts it, if peoples are discursively constructed and those constructions are always contingently “sutured,” then they can also be unstitched, and no unity is ever final. Politics, in this view, is a constant struggle to build, defend, and dismantle hegemonies.

Radical democracy as the goal 🔗

So what should the left actually do with all this? Laclau and Mouffe’s answer is radical and plural democracy. The idea is not to overthrow liberal democracy but to deepen and extend it, taking its founding promises of liberty and equality seriously and applying them to every sphere of life.

Their starting point is the “democratic revolution” launched by the modern egalitarian imaginary, the powerful idea that humans are equal. Radical democracy aims to spread this principle into areas where inequality and domination still operate: the workplace, the household, relations between communities, and our relationship with the environment.

Linking struggles without erasing them 🔗

This is where the new hegemony comes in. Rather than insisting that one struggle (class) outranks all others, radical democracy seeks to build a chain of equivalence among many democratic struggles. Mouffe argued that the task is to deepen the democratic revolution and link diverse democratic struggles by creating new political identities, rather than just stacking up separate alliances. Feminist, anti-caste, ecological, and labour movements can be connected by a shared commitment to democratic values, while each keeps its own distinct character.

Pluralism with limits 🔗

One common misunderstanding is that radical democracy means “anything goes.” Mouffe explicitly rejected this. She clarified that a democratic pluralist politics should not treat every demand in a society as legitimate, and a democratic society cannot accept as a legitimate adversary those who attack its basic institutions. Pluralism is wide, but it has a boundary: you have to accept the democratic framework itself.

Antagonism, agonism, and “the political” 🔗

Mouffe added a distinctive twist that separates her vision from cosy ideas of consensus. She insisted that conflict can never be fully removed from politics. Drawing on the controversial thinker Carl Schmitt, she argued that human collectivities always define themselves through a “we” versus “them” distinction. This ineradicable conflict is what she called “the political.”

The danger is that “we versus them” can turn enemies into people to be destroyed. Mouffe’s solution is to transform antagonism (enemies in mortal conflict) into agonism (legitimate adversaries who disagree fiercely but respect each other’s right to exist). The goal of democratic politics, she wrote, is precisely to transform an “antagonism” into an “agonism,” taming hostility without pretending it can be eliminated.

This is her critique of consensus-based models like deliberative democracy. She argued that pretending we can all reach rational agreement actually hides power and pushes conflict underground, where it can erupt in dangerous forms. Agonistic pluralism instead gives passion and disagreement a legitimate, channelled outlet within democratic institutions.

Criticisms of the theory 🔗

Their work has been influential but heavily contested. The most persistent objection targets their focus on discourse and identity at the expense of the economy. Critics argue that focusing too much on cultural and ideological struggle can divert attention from material conditions like poverty and unemployment.

A second criticism is philosophical. Because they reject any objective foundation or fixed historical direction, some argue their theory cannot say why one political project is better than another. As one survey of the debate notes, critics hold that their poststructuralist argument about the political nature of social reality has relativistic implications and offers no specific normative orientation. If everything is constructed and contingent, what stops radical democracy from sliding into “anything goes” despite Mouffe’s protests?

A third concern is strategic. Some thinkers argue that by demystifying the foundations of liberal democracy while leaving its institutions in place, their approach can leave everything able to change even as liberal institutions remain the same. In other words, the theory may be better at criticism than at producing concrete transformation.

Why it still matters 🔗

Despite the debates, Laclau and Mouffe reshaped how we think about politics. Their concepts of hegemony, discourse, and radical democracy became reference points well beyond Marxist theory and influenced movements such as Podemos in Spain and La France Insoumise. Their ideas help explain how diverse coalitions form, how slogans like “the people” gain power, and how identity-based movements can work together without dissolving into one another. For anyone trying to understand contemporary politics, where struggles over rights, recognition, and the environment sit alongside economic demands, their framework remains a sharp analytical tool.

What do you think? If political identities are constructed rather than fixed, can a movement build a lasting coalition without one group’s interests quietly dominating the rest? And is Mouffe right that turning enemies into respected adversaries is the best a democracy can hope for, or should we still aim for genuine consensus?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony_and_Socialist_Strategy
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6. https://literariness.org/2018/08/14/the-political-theory-of-ernesto-laclau-and-chantal-mouffe/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier
8. https://jacobin.com/2023/07/left-populism-laclau-mouffe-post-structuralism-politics-class
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12. https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/15769/THOMASSEN_Laclau%20y%20Mouffe%20AFV.pdf?sequence=1