Erman - 'What Is Wrong With Agonistic Pluralism'

Eva Erman
What is wrong with agonistic

pluralism?
Reflections on conflict in democratic
theory
Abstract During the last couple of decades, concurrently with an

increased awareness of the complexity of ethical conflicts, political theorists
have directed attention to how constitutional democracy should cope with
a fact of incommensurable doctrines. Poststructuralists such as Chantal
Mouffe claim that ethical conflicts are fundamentally irreconcilable, which
is indeed a view shared by many liberal theorists. The question of whether
ethical conflicts are in principle irreconcilable is an important one since the
answer has implications for what democratic institutions are desirable. In
light of this question the article investigates the notion of conflict in agonistic
pluralism and discourse theory. At first glance, Mouffes agonism seems apt
to accommodate ethical conflict in democratic governance, since it focuses
on conflict as the core of politics, whereas Habermasian deliberative democracy seems inappropriate for this task, as it focuses on consensus. However,
through an inquiry into the conditions of conflict this article will argue the
opposite, namely, that conflict cannot be adequately understood within
Mouffes agonistic framework. The thesis defended is (1) that discourse
theory offers a more accurate account of conflict than agonistic theory
because it embraces the idea that deliberation is constitutive of conflict, and
(2) that some of Habermas assumptions concerning ethical discourse need
to be revised in order for his democratic theory to fully accommodate this
insight.
Key words agonistic pluralism communicative action discourse theory
ethical conflict Jrgen Habermas Chantal Mouffe
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 35 no 9 pp. 10391062

Copyright The Author(s), 2009.
Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
http://psc.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453709343385
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PSC
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (9)
Introduction
During the last few decades, hand in hand with an increased emphasis
on ethical pluralism and the incommensurability of moral and religious
comprehensive doctrines, democratic theorists have devoted more and
more attention to understanding ethical conflict, which previously has
been too little theorized. At the same time, this development has resulted
in a shift of focus from moral questions of, for example, justification,
towards a more pragmatic focus on political agreements or compromises.
The most famous example is perhaps John Rawls political liberalism,
which suggests that the institutions of a constitutional democracy should
cope with a fact of incommensurable religious and moral doctrines.1
Poststructuralists such as Chantal Mouffe take the position that ethical
conflicts are fundamentally irreconcilable, which is indeed a view shared
by many liberal theorists. The claim made by Mouffe is not that prospects
for resolving ethical disagreement are unlikely, but that such conflicts
are not even in principle reconcilable. This is the reason why Mouffe
regards social consensus as a dangerously utopian idea.
As pointed out by Maeve Cooke, the question of whether ethical
conflicts are in principle irreconcilable is an important one, since the
answer has implications for what democratic institutions are desirable.
If ethical conflicts can never be eradicated they must be dealt with
through certain kinds of devised institutional arrangements.2 If they are
not irreconcilable, we should bet on institutions that implement mechanisms and procedures for promoting cross-cultural dialogue and interethical understanding. Indeed, in light of globalization, pluralization and
fragmentization of societies, democratic theory must continue the trend
of investigating the conditions of ethical conflict, since any democratic
theory applicable to pluralist societies or to supranational arrangements
must be able to lodge conflict in one way or another. A starting point
of this article is that a more profound knowledge of conflict is needed
in order to reach a better understanding of how to handle conflicts, and
that such knowledge cannot be reached either through a presupposition
of incompatible comprehensive moral doctrines or a purification of
politics of an explicit normative dimension.
In order to address the question of whether ethical conflicts are in
principle irreconcilable this article investigates the notion of conflict in
democratic theory. More specifically, it will focus on Mouffes agonistic
democracy and Habermasian discourse theory of democracy (deliberative democracy). At first glance, Mouffes agonism seems to be able to
accommodate ethical conflict in democratic governance, as it focuses on
conflict as the core of politics. Indeed, this is probably one reason why
Mouffe is one of the most frequently cited agonist theorists. Discourse
theory, by contrast, seems to be inappropriate for this task, as it focuses
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Erman: What is wrong with agonistic pluralism?
on consensus and is criticized precisely for neglecting the conflictual
dimension of the political process. However, through an inquiry into the
conditions of conflict this article will argue the opposite, namely, that
conflict cannot be adequately understood within Mouffes agonistic
framework. The thesis defended is that discourse theory offers a more
accurate account of conflict than agonistic theory because it embraces
the idea that deliberation is constitutive of conflict, where deliberation is
defined as speech-acts oriented performatively towards validity-claims. If
this is a tenable position then it does not make sense to claim that ethical
conflicts are irreconcilable. However, in order for Habermas democratic theory to fully accommodate this constitutive thesis, some of its basic
assumptions concerning the view of ethical discourse (including ethical
conflicts) need to be modified.
The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I provide a brief sketch
of Mouffes agonistic pluralism, partly through her criticism of Habermasian deliberative theory, and a critical examination of her view of
conflict. My argument draws on previous criticism of agonism but
diverges by focusing on conflict rather than on consensus. Agonists have
been criticized for being dependent on consensus, which is the very notion
they dismiss as impossible. But while Andrew Knops has convincingly
shown that Mouffes notion of agonism is dependent on deliberative presuppositions, it is argued here that such presuppositions are presumed
by Mouffes notion of antagonism as well.3 My criticism of Mouffe is
twofold: one part is directed towards the idea of antagonism, the other
towards the alleged transformation from antagonism to agonism via
Mouffes ethico-political principles. Second, I investigate the conditions
of conflict by elaborating the thesis that deliberation is constitutive of
conflict. In this section I also respond to the objection that this constitutive idea neglects the fundamental distinction between communicative
and strategic action within discourse theory. The final section addresses
some problems that Habermasian democratic theory faces in light of the
proposed view of conflict.
Conflict in Mouffes agonism

Agonism implies a deep respect for the other and agonists attempt to
reorient political theory towards the question of how to deal with irreconcilable differences. In contrast to, for example, liberal, deliberative
and multicultural views, which in different ways emphasize social cooperation, agonists are doubtful about the capacity of politics to overcome these differences through democracy. Contemporary society is
better understood as contested and deeply divided, which has important normative implications for how we are to understand democracy.
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A democratic system should be designed to provide arenas where citizens
can express their disagreements and where difference can be confronted.4
In Mouffes view, liberal democratic societies are ill-equipped to
confront the challenges raised by pluralism due to the fact that they do
not grasp its nature. The reason for this inability lies in the presumed
political theoretical framework which is rationalistic, universalistic and
individualistic in character.5 According to Mouffe, deliberative democracy represents the most recent paradigm of liberal democratic theory.
Yet, this theory also fails to give a correct account of the political since
it reformulates the idea of the public sphere by simply moving from an
economic model to a moral one. Mouffe chooses to examine the Habermasian version of deliberative democracy as this is in her view the most
sophisticated one.6
Deliberative legitimacy in Mouffes reading is based on the idea that
democratic decisions are legitimate to the extent that they represent an
impartial standpoint that is equally in the interest of all.7 The problem
with this consensus approach is not only empirical, since deliberative
theorists agree that consensus will only rarely be reached, but ontological. The deliberative universalistic understanding of the political overlooks important ontological aspects; most importantly, that the political
is constituted through power, that antagonism is inevitable, and that
every agreement is an expression of hegemonic power and thus unstable.
These are the reasons why the deliberative notion of consensus must be
rejected.8 Deliberative democracy denies the political by defining it as a
space of (deliberative) freedom rather than a space of power and conflict.9
Habermas assumes that the values articulated through the ideal
speech situation are of guidance here, e.g. equality, openness and impartiality. Mouffe argues that, through the approximate realization of the
conditions of such an ideal discourse, Habermasians presume that discussion will produce legitimate outcomes to the extent that it is orientated
towards the generalizable (impartial) interests of the discourse participants. Through reason-giving from the moral point of view the general
interest will emerge.10
It seems as if the core of the problem, in Mouffes view, lies not only
or even primarily in the notion of consensus but in the deliberative
(mis)understanding of conflict. She argues that no deliberation could
ever take place without impediments to free and unconstrained public
deliberation. Therefore, we have to conclude that the very conditions
of possibility of deliberation constitute at the same time the conditions
of impossibility of the ideal speech situation.11 Deliberative democracy
thus ends up in a paradox since the ideal speech situation demands
conditions from the outset, a shared set of discourse rules, which are
ontologically and conceptually impossible, preventing the possibility of
deliberation.12 According to Mouffe, the agonistic model offers a more
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viable solution to meet the demands of pluralism due to the fact that it
is designed not to optimize the prospects of consensus but to optimize
the prospects for citizens to confront their clashing views.
To understand the agonistic view we have to go to the bottom of the
notion of antagonism and the central role it plays for agonistic democracy. Antagonism on Mouffes account is an ineradicable conflict between
us and them (friend and enemy). It is constitutive of the political
and forms the limits of the social.13 Antagonism does not consist of a
real opposition (A B), which occurs between two objects that have
their own positivity independent of their relation to each other. Thus,
there is nothing antagonistic in a crash between two cars.14 But neither
is antagonism a contradiction (A not-A), which occurs because A
cannot be not-A at the same time. A contradiction too has to do with
full identities (i.e. it is an objective relation in the sense that it is made
intelligible by the fact that the objects already are), although this time
between concepts rather than physical objects.15 Antagonism is different: the presence of the Other prevents me from being totally myself.
The relation arises not from full totalities, but from the impossibility
of their constitution. Insofar as antagonism exists, I cannot be a full
presence for myself.16
Mouffe makes use of Derridas notion of the constitutive outside to
explain the emergence of antagonism. She argues that identity can be
established only through an us/them distinction. Similarly, the democratic logic always necessitates the drawing of a boundary between those
who belong to the demos (us/friends) and those who are outside of it
(them/enemies).17 Strictly speaking, antagonisms are external to society
as they constitute its limits.18 And since antagonism is ineradicable,
pluralism should not be viewed as a mere fact, as liberals such as Rawls
do, but as an axiological principle. Pluralism is constitutive at the conceptual level of the very nature of democracy.19 It implies the permanence
of antagonism and conflict. Conflicts should not be seen as disturbances
that unfortunately cannot be completely eliminated, or as empirical
impediments that prevent the realization of consensus. Against Habermas
she argues that the obstacles to consensus are not empirical.20 Rather,
pluralism makes consensus a conceptual impossibility.21 In fact, the
deliberative attempt to negate the ineradicable character of antagonism
by aiming at rational consensus constitutes the real threat to democracy,22 since it does not take into account that the aim of politics is always
to create an us (unity) by a determination of a them in a context of
conflict.23
Starting out from these ontological assumptions about conflict, Mouffe
draws the conclusion that democratic theory can never get rid of conflict since the overcoming of the us/them opposition is an impossibility.
Without an us and a them, no identity.24 The aim of democratic politics
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should rather be to transform the them from being perceived as enemies
to be destroyed to being recognized as friendly enemies, which means
to transform the conflictual relation from an antagonistic to an agonistic
one. The latter is a relation between adversaries, i.e. between legitimate
enemies who subscribe to the ethico-political principles of agonistic
democracy.25 There is a crucial difference between antagonism and agonism: a relation is antagonistic when A and B have no common symbolic space, while it is agonistic when A and B share a common
symbolic space but wish to organize it in different ways.26 Thus, by
adhering to these principles participants turn to an adversarial mode of
interaction and the hostile antagonistic conflict transforms to an exchange
of views where the disputants respect one anothers beliefs, and so on.27
Through agonistic contestations participants can reach agreement and
common political decisions. But these agreements are both temporary
and constituted by hegemonic power, and should always be looked upon
as temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation.28 On Mouffes
account, deliberative democracy neglects the hegemonic nature of conflict
and thus the antagonistic dimension of democracy. Politics is a contest
for power, and legitimacy is nothing but successful power.29
Problems with the agonistic approach

Criticism has been raised against the agonistic approach for relying on
several of the ideas embraced by the deliberative theory it attempts to
distance itself from. The main target has been the agonistic notion of
consensus, which is criticized for being implied but not spelled out.
Obviously, with the purpose of elaborating a democratic theory, Mouffe
does not wish to accept antagonism between enemies as it is, which is
the reason why she pleads to some ethico-political principles that all
disputants must accept in order to transform this antagonism into democratic agonism. As has been pointed out time and again, Mouffe is vague
on the contents of these normative principles, although she specifies
equality and liberty as important ingredients.30 In addition, in order to
adhere to these principles some kind of consensus is needed, although
Mouffe is not clear about what kind of consensus this is supposed to be.
The aim of this section is to show that the connection between conflict
and deliberation not only concerns agonism, as pointed out by Knops,31
but cuts deeper into the agonistic theory, all the way to the notion of
antagonism.
At the core of Mouffes agonistic pluralism, inspired by poststructuralism, lies the acknowledgement and profound respect for difference
in terms of the concrete Other. It is in the meeting between the I and
the Other (or between the us and the them) that antagonism arises.
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To the extent that Mouffe were to equate antagonism with difference,
I cannot see any problems with her argument that identity presupposes
difference (i.e. antagonism) and that difference is the condition of the
possibility of constituting unity and totality.32 Similarly, it would be a
conceptual impossibility to imagine similarity or sameness without difference. Within such an interpretive framework, Mouffes criticism of consensus would in fact make sense; in so far as antagonism equals difference
one could coherently draw the conclusion that consensus is a conceptual
and metaphysical impossibility. Every action requires choice, which necessitates discrimination and thus exclusion. In this sense no consensus will
ever be a fully inclusive we.33
But Mouffe clearly does not want to make a semantic and conceptual point. Without doubt antagonism is supposed to do some normative work. For Mouffe, antagonism is not difference per se, but concrete
difference between us and them or me and the Other as real persons, as
enemies. And this has political implications.34 On the one hand, Mouffe
does not want to relativize difference by reducing it to a purely descriptive notion.35 On the other, although antagonistic relations are not simply
there but construed in the meeting between subjects, she insists that
antagonism is solely about ontology, i.e. before the ought.36 Consequently, antagonism is ascribed a dual role. The problem is that this
duality hides the fact that, while difference is descriptive, antagonism
is normative.37 One reason why this is difficult to detect in Mouffes
writing is that she often slides from using difference in the abstract and
descriptive sense, to a normative use of difference as conflict/antagonism. On the very same pages where she argues that unity presupposes
difference and that a complete reabsorption of alterity into oneness is
impossible, she draws the conclusion that the aim of democracy should
be to bring the excluded to the fore so that they can enter the terrain
of contestation.38 This dual role thereby confuses particularity (which
is implied by difference in general) with individuality (a difference such
as antagonism) and neglects Hegels insight that the latter requires
specific attitudes among the subjects involved.39
It is argued here that conflict cannot be adequately understood within
an agonistic framework. Mouffes notion of antagonism fails because it
does not embrace the idea that deliberation is constitutive of conflict.
This has two implications: on the one hand, the notion of antagonism
becomes untenable, and on the other, it becomes impossible to explain
how antagonism can transform into agonism. Let us start with the first
problem. While Knops argues that agonists take no notice of the fact that
discussants (adversaries) become aware of difference in discourse,40 I wish
to take the argument one step further and claim that becoming aware
presupposes that a conflict is there to be aware of. But which conflict
could this be? An immanent feature of conflict is that it presupposes an
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element of X against Y, e.g. someone against someone else if the conflict
is interpersonal. That is, although concrete differences are supposed to
be expressed and confronted on Mouffes political arena, two adversaries
cannot conceive of their differences as incommensurable or ineradicable
and still compare (and thus confront) them. Neither could they draw
the conclusion that they are ineradicable without comparing them. Any
comparison must start out from common presumptions. Some kind of
consensus is thus needed to even understand this against. For as soon
as the two adversaries interact, they immediately presuppose a nave
realism and thus take for granted that they speak about one and the same
world.41 As emphasized by Habermas, the moment they stop taking this
for granted their communication would lead to complete breakdown.42
Indeed, Mouffe might reply that, even if this is true regarding the
meeting between adversaries, it is not true of antagonists. But this
argument does not hold. To begin with, agonism and antagonism are
not two kinds of conflicts. Rather, in Mouffes own words, agonism is
a different mode of manifestation of antagonism.43 This makes sense,
since a manifestation always presupposes something behind, so to speak,
something to become manifested. Mouffe makes a point of emphasizing
that, while adversaries are not enemies to be destroyed, they are still
enemies. So while antagonism can take two different forms, what Mouffe
calls antagonism proper is its original form. Antagonists can only become adversaries under certain conditions (i.e. by accepting some ethicopolitical principles). If we leave agonistic conflict aside for a moment,
how is it possible for antagonism proper to be a conflict between us and
them (or me and the Other) without any common symbolic space, to
use Mouffes words? A shared symbolic space presupposes a common
understanding and would not make sense outside of an intersubjective
linguistic context. In fact, the description of antagonists as not sharing
any symbolic space is quite surprising against the background of Mouffes
earlier work, where she goes against the Foucaultian distinction between
the discursive and the non-discursive and argues that every subject position is located within a discursive structure.44 So perhaps Mouffe uses
the expression no common symbolic space to portray the difference
between antagonism and agonism within a thinner yet implicitly presupposed discursive (intersubjective) space. However, even on this more
charitable reading the notion of antagonism is flawed. The distinction
between subject and object (and between particular and general) can
only be meaningfully understood within an available conceptual and
thus symbolic space, which presupposes a common understanding. This
means that the actors involved can only identify an antagonistic conflict
as such through some common presumptions about each other as subjects.
Unfortunately, following Schmitt, Mouffe would never attribute to antagonism such a dimension of common understanding, since the point with
1047
the distinction between friend and enemy is precisely that there is no
common understanding at all.
What is suggested here is thus that there could be no conflict without
deliberation, i.e. without speech-acts oriented performatively towards
validity-claims. Conflict is dependent on some shared idea of what is at
stake. A possible objection to this view of conflict is that the presupposed
common understanding of what is at stake at the most contributes a
minimally shared empirical background knowledge of the situation, not
a minimally shared normative consensus. But here we must ask: how
could the parties involved conceive of the situation as conflictual solely
on the basis of empirical knowledge about the outside world? Indeed,
they must also value several aspects of it in specific ways for the conflict
to emerge. In fact, as persuasively argued by Quine, settling ones meanings is a process that cannot be separated from settling ones beliefs.45
So even if people are likely to disagree (and in a conflict they most
certainly will) on which value is the most important and which reason
should be decisive for who is right and who is wrong, by sharing a
normative understanding of a conflictual situation as conflictual, they
have already entered into the Sellarsian space of reasons.46 This is a
normative space which cannot be reduced to an empirical description
of causal relations. Agents are not solely caused to act by their strongest
desire in a Humean sense. Rather, they take up a desire (or some other
pro-attitude) as a reason for action. And this endorsement of motivation requires a capacity for (self-)reflection through which their desires
are coupled together with some conception they have of themselves.
Moreover, the space of reasons is a social space, since this capacity for
reflectivity takes place in a social setting reasons are essentially public.
As emphasized by Kenneth Baynes, the normativity of reasons is dependent on the attitudes of mutual expectation that agents who ascribe one
another the capacity to take a yes/no stand on validity-claims raise in
their speech-acts.47 To claim that A acts for a reason is to claim that A
is responsible or accountable for the action under (at least) that description. And to claim that A is accountable is to claim that she is held to
be accountable by others.48 To act for a reason is to act under a norm,
and norms are created in intersubjectivity, between subjects.49 Against
Mouffe, it is argued that the reason why antagonists must share a symbolic space in order to become antagonists is that both the empirical
and normative parts of the conflict emerge in it.
There is another route to take in order to try to save the antagonistic
notion of conflict. One could claim that antagonists share no symbolic
space because antagonism is pure violence. In fact, it is sometimes hard
to discern if Mouffe means to say that antagonism is violence, or if antagonism is the possibility of violence.50 I think the latter reading is what
Mouffe intends, because if antagonism would mean merely violence it
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would both be superfluous and hard to discern what normative work
it would do for a democratic theory (of any kind). By antagonism Mouffe
wants to accentuate the possibility of violence in the meeting between
the I and the Other in every temporary agreement or consensus. To view
the Other as an enemy to be destroyed does not mean that she actually
is destroyed. So while violence is not a necessary condition for antagonism, the possibility of violence is. At the same time, to claim that every
meeting between two subjects involves a possibility of violence seems uncontroversial. However, this goes for all relations, not only antagonistic
ones. Unless it is further qualified, a possibility always implies other
possibilities as well. To the extent that Mouffe wishes to distinguish
antagonistic relations from, say, agonistic relations, this would take us
back to the problem of how agents could have access to this antagonism if they do not share any symbolic space. How could they know that
the Other is an enemy to be destroyed rather than a friend?
To argue that deliberation is constitutive of conflict might seem
provocative when considering horrifying events, such as genocide, which
are the outcomes of conflicts where there is seemingly no common understanding or consensus whatsoever. But when persons are treated exclusively as objects, this would more appropriately go under the heading
of violence. Of course, this view would not entail that there could be no
such thing as political or social violence. However, when we distinguish
political violence from other kinds of violence through the epithet political, we do not usually refer to some essentialist element in the violent
acts as such, but to the political causes of them. There are simply different causes for violent acts. Moreover, if we took a closer look at an empirical case of genocide, we would probably discern a conflict between
political leaders and at the same time find it more appropriate to assign
to the actual genocide of civilians the label of violence.
Now let us take a closer look at the second problem for agonistic
theory, namely, that it cannot explain how antagonism can transform
into agonism.51 As was stated before, according to Mouffe agonism is a
certain mode of manifestation of antagonism.52 However, even if antagonism and agonism were to constitute two kinds of antagonisms (rather
than two forms of one and the same), we would not know when, let
alone how, we had succeeded in transforming from one (where we do
not share any symbolic space) to the other (where we do share a symbolic space) without some common understanding, i.e. a shared symbolic
space. Since the subjects involved do not share any symbolic space until
they have accepted the ethico-political principles and become adversaries,
how can they accept some common principles before this moment? Thus,
it seems as if we have to share a symbolic space not only as adversaries,
as Mouffe claims, but as antagonists as well not only in order to identify
antagonism as such, as argued before, but also to be able to become
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adversaries (i.e. legitimate enemies) and to know what it means to comply
with some ethico-political principles.
What Mouffe seems to suggest then is that the transformation from
antagonism to agonism is a moral choice that can be neither explained
nor grounded. Let us follow this line of thought for a moment and assume
that some ethico-political principles simply exist and that we somehow
have access to them through introspection. Since antagonists make this
moral choice without sharing any intersubjective space, it must be a
kind of solipsistic exercise. In fact, the only way to make sense of the
idea that antagonists are able to accept some common ethico-political
principles is that each and every subject subscribes to them within his
or her own subjective world. But this leads to a subjectivism which
seems to go against Mouffes anti-subjectivist pretensions.53 Moreover, it
presumes that conflicts are interpersonal (or inter-group) while the intrapersonal structure is already there, so to speak, ready to use to make
moral choices. Although, admittedly, Mouffe advocates a dynamic view
of antagonism where subjects are situated at a range of subject positions,
making antagonism emerge, transform and disappear, the question is
how this dynamics is possible within an agonistic theoretical framework.
For Mouffe, antagonism is always a conflictual relationship between the
I and the concrete Other (or between us and them), i.e. antagonistic
relations are inter-dimensional. Her irreducibility thesis in fact prohibits
any other inference since antagonistic conflicts are there as soon as the
I meets the Other and could at the most be manifested in a different way
(by transforming to agonistic conflicts). To the extent that inescapable
antagonistic conflict is an ontological starting-point of the analysis
placing the interpersonal (or intergroup) dimension in the limelight and
defining pluralism as an axiological principle Mouffe has to presume
that the identity of the subjects involved is a premise of their agency.
That is, she has to presume that an intrapersonal structure of some sort
is already at the subjects disposal to make the exercise of agency
possible and thus the coming to the moral decision to transform from
antagonism to agonism.54
Once again similar to liberals, Mouffes moral choice echoes a
Kantian idea of autonomy, i.e. that one is bound only by norms/rules
(in this case the ethico-political principles) one has laid down for oneself.
The question arises: If whatever I acknowledge as correct is correct, in
what sense is it meaningful to speak about what I did as binding for
me? As Robert Brandom argues, while the authority of the self-binder
governs the force that attaches to a certain rule, that authority cannot
extend also to the content of this rule. Because if it did, she has not by
her endorsement really bound herself by a rule at all.55 The determinacy
of the content of what you have committed yourself to is dependent on
the attitudes of others, which means that for me to be committed to a
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rule, I have to have acknowledged a commitment that others attribute
to me.56
Winding up, if we find it plausible that human interaction involves
both an interpersonal and intrapersonal dimension, identity (and an intrapersonal structure) cannot be a premise of agency which is the unfortunate consequence of Mouffes ontological statements but must be a
product of it. It is something that must be achieved through deliberation.57
Agency is not only an exercise of (interpersonal) self-determination, but at
the same time a cognitive exercise of (intrapersonal) self-interpretation.58
We cannot exercise one without the other since they are interdependent.
Consequently, conflicts do not only occur between persons (or groups)
but also within them, and neither can emerge before or without deliberation. Instead of viewing antagonism as an experience of the limit of
the social within the social itself and the Other as preventing me from
being totally myself,59 I find it more plausible that the way to become
totally oneself to the extent this is possible is through the recognition by others, not through their absence. This would lead to the conclusion that antagonism is not the experience of the limit of the social but
rather an experience of the social, or, more simply put, a social experience. When antagonists motivate themselves to make the moral choice
of becoming adversaries they are not solely caused to act. Rather, they
decide to act by reflecting on whether this choice fits with their conception of themselves. And the assessment that it would be morally right
to accept the ethico-principles depends neither on the predictable consequences of the action nor on any property in the action itself, but on
the fact that such action could be justified to others in a moral discourse.
Since reasons are inherently public, as acknowledged by Baynes, acting
for a reason requires a conception of ourselves as standing under the
expectation that we can justify the reasons for our action to others.60
So even if we accepted Mouffes idea that the transformation from antagonism to agonism involves a moral choice that is impossible to explain
or ground, it would be hard to see what this choice would consist of at
all. While something similar to good reasons for acting could be identified on the basis of insight in the sense that we can be convinced that
our considerations are good ones, they gain their status as good reasons
in the possible agreement of others.61
Some further notes on a discourse theoretical view of conflict

In contrast to agonistic theory, a discourse theoretical view sustains that
we cannot ontologically presume that certain conflicts are ineradicable,
because we would not know which conflicts these are. Conflict originates
from the Latin word conflictus, where the prefix con- means together
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or jointly. Thus, conflict not only presupposes difference but also
something in common, a common understanding. When deliberation is
at work, through an interplay between an interpersonal and intrapersonal dimension, conflicts (within and between people) both emerge
and transform. The meeting with the other affects the search for coherence among my own conflicting values (intrapersonal dimension) at the
same time as the (potentially contested) relationship between me and the
other (interpersonal dimension) is shaped by this inner undertaking.62
To fully grasp these discourse theoretical assumptions about conflict
we must take a look at what kind of rationality is built into deliberation. But before we do so, a clarification concerning the notion of rational
consensus needs to be made. Mouffe is wrong to presume that rational
agreements of democratic procedures for Habermas must reflect a
generalizable interest and be justified by impartial moral reasons. This
only concerns moral norms within his moral theory (discourse ethics),
which should not be conflated with his democratic theory. Although both
theories draw on the same language-philosophical basis, there are crucial
differences. Habermas discourse principle (D-principle) states that action
norms are valid to the extent that all possibly affected persons could
agree as participants in rational discourses. Rational discourse includes
any attempt to reach an understanding over problematic validity-claims
under communicative conditions that enable all topics and contributions
to be freely processed.63 Concerning discourse ethics and the justification
of moral norms, however, the D-principle takes the form of a universalization principle (U-principle).64 It is this principle which privileges the
generalizable interest, to use Mouffes words, and differentiates impartial moral reasons (i.e. agent-neutral reasons) from agent-relative ones.
Moral norms are agent-neutral (impartial) all the way down to the reasons
that justify them and moral reasons are reasons that cast off their agentrelative meaning.65
If we move to the domain of democratic theory, Habermas formulates a notion of legitimacy and establishes a procedure of legitimate
decision-making (e.g. law) through a principle of democracy, which is
a specification of the D-principle. What the U-principle and the democratic principle have in common is that they express the underlying
moral idea of the D-principle to give the interests of each person equal
consideration in discourse, e.g. by including as many voices as possible,
by giving one another a respectful hearing, and by requiring everyone
to justify their views upon request (and, as we have seen, equality and
tolerance are ingredients built into Mouffes ethico-political principles as
well). This moral idea reflects the mutual relations of recognition built
into communicatively structured life-forms in general and is by Habermas
referred to as the moral point of view. But the moral point of view
should not be conflated with the point of view from which moral norms
1052
are justified.66 What is overlooked by Mouffe is that the democratic principle allows room for the validation of all kinds of norms (not only moral
ones) which supply outcomes (decisions/law) with their legitimacy.67
Mouffes own way of avoiding the notion of consensus is to speak
about a thin so-called conflictual consensus.68 In order to distinguish
this thin conflictual consensus from Habermas thicker one, Mouffe calls
the latter rational consensus and, as we have seen, connects it to the
justification of moral norms and to impartial generalizable interests. But
this is not the basic meaning given to rational on the Habermasian
account. Habermas does not view communication as the telos of language, but rather follows Humboldt and emphasizes understanding as
its core. Speech-acts oriented towards understanding are indispensable
for the hermeneutic access to the world. Habermas argues, first, that
we cannot understand an utterance without being acquainted with the
reasons given for its validity, and, second, that we cannot understand
such reasons without at least implicitly evaluating their validity. It
is in this sense that communicative action demands interpretations that
are rational.69 Thus, rationality is ascribed a pragmatic meaning.
It is important to elucidate this pragmatic meaning in order to
respond to one seemingly obvious objection against the defended thesis,
namely, that the idea that deliberation is constitutive of conflict neglects
the fundamental distinction between communicative and strategic action
within discourse theory. For not any kind of social interaction counts
as communicative. And, the argument goes, the only requirement that
is needed for antagonism to appear is to form the idea that another
persons interest is an obstacle, and to decide to act in order to remove
or reduce that obstacle. That is, the only thing that is required is As
instrumental understanding of Bs interests as being in conflict with As.
If this is true, it would imply that deliberative presuppositions are only
necessary for conflict as agonism, where the respect for others beliefs
implies a shared moral framework, a point already made by Knops. In
order to defend my thesis against this criticism, and show how antagonism too relies on such presuppositions, I will elaborate the relationship
between communicative and strategic action in relation to meaning,
validity and contestability.
One of the basic presumptions of Habermas social theory is that
linguistic interactions such as strategic, figurative or symbolic action are
parasitic on communicative action. Strategic actions alone cannot form
a stable system of social interaction but would lead to pathological misunderstandings and instantaneous breakdown. To show that a conflict
cannot consist of strategic action alone, but has to include the practice
of reason-giving (communicative action), we have to analyze this parasitic feature on two levels: in connection to understanding and in connection to contestability. It is only if both levels are fulfilled that we can
discern a conflict.
1053
The distinction between communicative and strategic action elucidates a difference between illocutions and perlocutions. Communicative
action involves the illocutionary aim of reaching understanding, and,
following Wittgenstein, Habermas sees the telos of reaching understanding as inherent in the linguistic medium itself. A communicative speechact is not only supposed to be understood by the hearer, but also, as far
as possible, to be accepted by her or him. The illocutionary success thus
depends on whether the act is sufficiently comprehensible and acceptable, i.e. it is proportionate to the intersubjective recognition accorded
to the validity claim raised with it. By contrast, perlocutionary effects
of speech-acts are effects that can be brought about causally by nonlinguistic actions. For even if strategic actions are social actions and as
such are linguistically mediated, language is not used communicatively
in the sense elucidated, but with an orientation toward consequences,
i.e. perlocutions.70 While the illocutionary aims still dominate the perlocutionary effects in actions that are teleologically oriented toward success
what Habermas calls weak communicative action, which is intertwined
with purposive (teleological) rationality and whose validity-claims are
supported by agent-relative reasons this dominance disappears in
strategic action. This, however, does not mean that strategic actions can
do without illocutionary force. Rather, they derive their nourishment
from communicative action since perlocutions too require successful
illocutionary acts as their vehicle, i.e. they ride on the backs of illocutionary acts and hence require indirect mutual understanding.71
If we were to apply this to the example above, A could only recognize Bs interests through speech-acts oriented performatively towards
validity-claims. Thus, the recognition on a pragmatic account must be
understood as a communicative achievement. This means that there could
be no purely instrumental understanding of someones interests. Strategic action is only possible if the participants understand one another,
i.e. if they feed parasitically on a common linguistic knowledge and on
a communicative competence. The difference is that in strategic action
this competence is used indirectly in order to make each other understand what they want or believe.72 To this it might be responded that
antagonism on Mouffes account is not about a specific form of action
at all, but about a way of seeing the other. But on the pragmatic account
defended here this would not make sense, since there could be no such
seeing without linguistic mediation of some sort between the parties
involved.
It is thus argued that meaning and validity are internally connected
in the sense that a person understands a speech-act only when he or she
knows the conditions under which it may be accepted as valid. So the
orientation towards the possible validity of utterances is not only part
of the pragmatic conditions of reaching understanding but of linguistic
understanding itself.73 Still, while the presumption that strategic action
1054
cannot occur without action oriented toward understanding says something about the interconnection between social action and communicative action broadly speaking, it does not (yet) say anything about conflict
specifically. Indeed, we might act strategically toward others without
there being a conflict at all. For example, the slave-owner might treat
her slaves strategically in a non-conflictual way, i.e. coordinating her
actions by exerting influence over them. In this case we might speak of
oppression but not (necessarily) of an antagonistic relation, i.e. of two
parties regarding each other as enemies to be destroyed. For such a
conflict to emerge something must be contested. And, according to the
view defended here, contestability is best understood as inseparable from
validity.
As was stated before, strategic actions are social actions even if communicative rationality is not directly at work. However, there are linguistically structured actions that are non-social (i.e. non-communicative);
for example, for the epistemic purposes of pure representation of knowledge or for purposes of mentally planning an action. Such actions are
monological in the sense that their meaning content is independent of
the illocutionary acts in which they might be embedded (monological
here meaning that they can be expressed intelligibly without reference
to a second person). Even if language in every case has to be acquired
communicatively, illocutionary acts do not play a fundamental role in
the epistemic use of language or in the calculation of action effects.74
However, as soon as a speaker wishes to be taken seriously, or if what
she or he says is questioned, an illocutionary force is immediately at
work. For then the speaker is required to justify to others what he or
she before considered monologically (by the raising of validity-claims in
an argumentative practice). As soon as values are transformed into claims
of validity, social interaction has a built-in orientation toward intersubjective recognition. In fact, in these non-communicative situations, the
illocutionary force was never really absent, but merely abstracted away
by a temporary suspension of the reference to a second person.75
The main point made here is this: for something to be contestable,
thus for a conflict to emerge, it must involve an illocutionary force, for
only illocutionary acts that can be valid or invalid may be contested. For
example, in a conflictual situation imperatives or announcements are
often expressed, such as we will not give up this fight, you are wrong,
this is our land, and leave my property now. Of course, neither imperatives nor announcements aim at agreement in the strong sense what
Habermas calls strong communicative action, in which validity-claims
are supported by agent-independent reasons but they move within the
horizon of a mutual understanding based on validity-claims and thus
still within the domain of communicative rationality.76
1055
Some challenges for Habermasian democratic theory
The aim so far has been to elaborate the first part of the thesis, that
discourse theory offers a more accurate account of conflict than Mouffes
agonistic theory because it harbours the idea that deliberation is constitutive of conflict. Against Mouffe, I have tried to show that it does not
make sense to presume that ethical conflicts are irreconcilable in principle. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this is not a prognosis of the possibility of reconciling ethical conflicts. Indeed, most
probably ethical conflicts will continue to be a part of any modern
pluralist democracy. But the reason why ethical discussions fail, I would
argue, is not due to the ontological essence of ethical conflict, but could
instead be explained by analyzing the impediments that prevent their
getting started, most commonly unequal power relations. Apart from
being wrongly construed, it is in fact hard to see the attractiveness of
Mouffes notion of conflict. Participants in intersubjective communication have the tools to recognize these impediments and perhaps try to
do something about them in order to improve the possibility of reaching
understanding or a reason-based substantive compromise of some sort.
If, however, we exclusively attribute the explanatory force of ethical
conflicts to the ontological fact of irreconcilability, this might have the
effect of preserving unequal power relations rather than trying to identify
and remedy them. It thus seems as if Mouffe draws too hasty conclusions from her premises. Just because we know for a fact that every
actual agreement is impregnated with power, it does not follow (at least
not without further argumentation on Mouffes part) that all agreements
are equally impregnated with power, i.e. are equally bad or unjustified.77
In fact, in order even to be able to draw the latter conclusion it seems
likely that participants must engage in the game of giving and asking
for reasons in an open-ended critical public deliberation.
We will now move to the second part of the thesis, namely, that some
modifications are needed in order for Habermas democratic theory to
fully accommodate the idea that deliberation is constitutive of conflict.
More specifically, one important issue is in need of further elaboration:
Habermas definition of ethical discourse.78 Although I agree with much
of the criticism raised against Habermas sharp distinctions between
moral, ethical and pragmatic discourses, my focus here is primarily
directed to the narrower question of how ethical discourse as such is
construed and the kind of validity claim Habermas connects to it. For
Habermas, discussions of ethical matters go under the heading of ethical
(or ethical-existential/ethical-political) discourses. In contrast to moral
discourses, which are universal and concern the equal respect of all
human beings and what is equally good for all, ethical discourses are
particularistic and concern what is best for me or for us from our point
1056
of view.79 Thus, ethical deliberation is foremost a hermeneutic explication of individual or collective self-understandings or value-orientations.
Interlocutors of ethical discourses are participants in processes of selfclarification and self-realization, guided by the validity-claim of authenticity.80
As we have seen, the constitutive thesis defended here makes the
presumption that human interaction embraces an interpersonal and an
intrapersonal dimension. Since agency is simultaneously an exercise of
self-determination (inter-dimensional) and a cognitive exercise of selfinterpretation (intra-dimensional), conflicts both emerge and transform
between and within persons through deliberation. This dynamic cannot
be accounted for by Habermas narrow definition of ethical discourse.
In his view, ethical discourse is guided by the validity-claim of authenticity and thus concerns an intra-dimension, i.e. about who I or we
want to be, while moral discourse is exclusively connected to the interdimension, i.e. about what I or we ought to do. If the constitutive thesis
is plausible, however, questions about who I (or we) want to be and
questions about what we ought to do are interdependent and cannot be
separated. Even if Habermas acknowledges that all three validity-claims
can be criticized in moral discourses, the opposite is not the case.81 And
it is exactly the exclusion of an ought to do dimension that makes
Habermas characterization of ethical discourses too narrow. As emphasized by Cooke, Habermas does not sufficiently acknowledge the dimensions of struggle against and challenge to established (often officially
legitimated) perceptions of goals and self-understandings.82 So rather
than dismissing ethical matters to the private sphere where they can
be protected against the critical scrutiny of public deliberation ethical
discourses are better viewed as a kind of political discourse. Like any
other validity-claims, ethical claims have a cognitive and thus universalist dimension,83 they rest on the presupposition that, if valid, everyone
would have to accept their validity. Therefore, a privatization of ethical
commitments restricts the recognition of their validity to those who share
the relevant substantive ideas of the good life and frustrates a vital
aspect of the subjectification process, namely, the strive towards universal recognition of the validity of deeply held ethical beliefs.84 Consider,
for example, discourses in which particular group needs or collective
self-understandings are articulated and critically examined. It is doubtful
whether such political discourses on ethical matters are guided even
primarily by the norm of authenticity.85 So while Habermas, like Mouffe,
recognizes that any consensus is ethically patterned, he draws the
wrong inference from it, ending up mistrusting the notion of rational
consensus on ethical matters.
1057
Conclusion
The aim of this article has been to examine the notion of conflict in democratic theory against the background of the larger question of whether
ethical conflicts are irreconcilable in principle. The last couple of years,
concurrently with an increased awareness of conflict and pluralism having
to be taken into account more seriously when theorizing about the conditions of democracy, Mouffes agonistic pluralism has gained support from
democratic theorists and attracted a broad spectrum of social scientists
and activists. Although the agonist idea to place conflict at the heart
of politics is appealing, this article has argued that conflict cannot be
adequately understood within Mouffes agonistic framework. An inquiry
into the conditions of conflict exposes that, due to the fact that Mouffe
does not embrace the idea that deliberation is constitutive of conflict,
the notion of antagonism is flawed. I have tried to show that it is impossible both to make sense of the notion of antagonism and to demonstrate
how antagonism on Mouffes account can transform into agonism. The
article has defended the thesis that discourse theory offers a more plausible ontological understanding of conflict than agonism because it can
accommodate precisely this insight about the relationship between conflict and speech-acts oriented performatively towards validity-claims.
It would be unfortunate to follow agonists and define antagonistic
conflicts as irreducible, because which conflicts would we have in mind?
In fact, I see a possible danger in the tendency within contemporary political theory to start out from the ideas of incommensurable conflict and
fact of pluralism. If these ideas are not carefully elaborated, they might
prohibit a deeper understanding of conflicts, both concerning how they
emerge and what they consist of. This is related to another tendency,
namely that of mystifying the other. Carried to an extreme, the other
is treated like an extraterrestrial being who is always violated by being
misunderstood, suggesting that understanding comes from within the
subject itself rather than from the understanding between the I and the
other. Against this I have argued that understanding and mutual understanding must be seen as inextricably connected and, in the words of
Brandom, that Nothing is absolutely other.86
Stockholm University, Sweden
PSC
Notes
I am much indebted to Arash Abizadeh, Stefan Rummens, Andrew Knops, Sofia
Nsstrm, Ulf Mrkenstam and Niklas Mller for their constructive comments
1058
on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also go to the participants of the NOPSA
conference in Troms, Norway (August 58, 2008), in particular, Johan Hyrn,
as well as to the Swedish Research Council for financing my research project
on human rights, deliberative democracy and conflict resolution.
1 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993). Rawls assumes that it is a human condition that people disagree with
one another about matters of deep moral and religious concern. However,
in contrast to Mouffes scepticism, he remains open to the question of truth
concerning moral matters. See John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
2 Maeve Cooke, Are Ethical Conflicts Irreconcilable?, Philosophy & Social
Criticism 23(2) (2007): 119.
3 Andrew Knops, Debate: Agonism as Deliberation On Mouffes Theory
of Democracy, The Journal of Political Philosophy 15(1) (2007): 11526.
4 See, for example, the works by Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, William
Connolly, and Bonnie Honig.
5 Chantal Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?, Social
Research 66 (3) (1999): p. 745.
6 ibid., p. 746.
7 ibid., p. 747. In fact, this reading is common of theorists sympathetic to
agonism. Andrew Schaap, for example, states that citizens in a deliberative
setting are not just supposed to assert their own particular interests but
should be able to articulate them in terms of general moral principles that
all can accept. Andrew Schaap, Agonism in Divided Societies, Philosophy
& Social Criticism 32(2) (2006): p. 257.
8 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000),
pp. 99100.
9 Mouffe, On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 9.
10 Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy, p. 748.
11 ibid., pp. 7512.
12 ibid., p. 752.
13 In most writings, Mouffe describes antagonism as being inherent in all
human relations, emerging in the meeting between the I and the Other.
Thus, the opposition between us and them is necessarily an antagonistic
one. Antagonism is ineradicable and constitutive of the political. However,
it is possible to discern a different view, where the us/them is seen as a plain
difference that could be transformed into an antagonistic friend/enemy. For
example, Mouffe writes that identities are established on the mode of an
us/them perceived as simple difference, which under certain circumstances
are transformed into antagonistic relations. From that moment it becomes
political. This is why antagonism constitutes an ever-present possibility in
politics (The Democratic Paradox, p. 13).
14 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 2001),
p. 122.
15 ibid., p. 124.
16 ibid., p. 125.
17 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 4.
1059
18 It is not clear what Mouffe means by external to society. She argues that
antagonism is the experience of the limit of the social, but not a limit as
a boundary separating two territories, since this would imply something
on the other side, so to speak. Rather, [t]he limit of the social must be
given within the social itself as something subverting it (Laclau and
Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 127). Mouffe writes that the
impossibility of closure is the impossibility of society (ibid., p. 122). But at
the same time she argues that [i]f society is not totally possible, neither is
it totally impossible (ibid., p. 129). It is not easy to understand Mouffes
distinction between external and internally external and between impossible and totally impossible.
20 ibid., p. 88.
21 ibid., p. 33.
22 ibid., p. 22.
23 ibid., p. 101.
24 ibid., p. 12.
25 ibid., pp. 1012.
26 ibid., p. 13.
27 ibid., p. 102.
28 Mouffe, Deliberative democracy, p. 755.
29 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, pp. 1003.
30 ibid.
31 Knops, Debate: Agonism as Deliberation, pp. 11526.
33 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. xvii.
34 For a clarifying account of Mouffes misuse of Derridas ideas of the constitutive outside and difference for understanding collective identity, see Arash
Abizadeh, Does Collective Identity Presuppose an Other? On the Alleged
Incoherence of Global Solidarity, American Political Science Review 99
(1) (2005): 4560.
35 Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New
Concept of Democracy, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1988), p. 98.
36 For the sake of clarity, I do not raise any general objections to the drawing
out of normative implications of a described or established ontological
feature of human existence. This is being done by political philosophers all
the time. But in order to succeed in such an endeavour, Mouffe would have
to draw on empirical evidence to make plausible that human beings start
out by viewing each other as enemies to be destroyed, e.g., similar to how
philosophers use psychological data to make the case that humans strive
for recognition. However, as Mouffe is well aware, if she were to do so,
she would soon discover that this is not how human beings predominantly
perceive of each other.
37 Of course, the concept of difference can be used normatively in a specific
context. But it is primarily a descriptive concept standing by itself, similar
to water and blue. Antagonism, by contrast, is an evaluative concept,
similar to happy and courage. It is important to notice that such an
1060
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
analytical descriptive/normative distinction is separate from the larger

philosophical question of whether all concepts are normative. The latter
position which I find very plausible concerns a different or at least a
thinner notion of normativity. It says that semantic content or meaning is
normative in the sense that it must be related to a practical ability (a know
how), which invokes rules and procedures that could be applied in the right
(or the wrong) way. See, for example, Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein,
Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1982); John McDowell, Wittgenstein on following a rule, in Meaning and
Reference, ed. A. W. Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Philip
Pettit, The Reality of Rule-Following, Mind 99(393) (1990).
Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, pp. 334.
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. Miller (New York: Humanities Press International, [1831] 1969).
Knops, Debate: Agonism as Deliberation, p. 125.
Eva Erman, Conflict and Universal Moral Theory: From Reasonableness
to Reason-Giving, Political Theory 35 (5) (2007): p. 607.
Jrgen Habermas, Truth and Justification, trans. B. Fultner (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2003).
Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 13.
The relationship between antagonism and the social is thus unclear. On the
one hand, antagonists share no symbolic space, on the other, when speaking
about subjects, Mouffe refers to subject positions and argues that every
subject position is a discursive position (Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, p. 115). At any rate, to the extent that conflict
(antagonism) is understood as a social phenomenon, it is argued here that
it is social in the wrong way.
Indeed, it is a common presumption of Quine and Hegel that instituting
conceptual norms and applying them are two aspects of the same process.
See, for example, Robert Brandom, Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegels
Idealism, European Journal of Philosophy 7(2) (1999): p. 186, note 29.
Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, [1956] 1997); In the Space of Reasons,
ed. K. Scharp and R. Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007).
Kenneth Baynes, Practical Reason, the Space of Reasons, and Public
Reason, in Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of
Critical Theory, ed. J. Bohman and W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2001), pp. 5386.
ibid., p. 64.
See Robert Brandom, Review: Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the
Space of Reasons, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 55(4) (1995):
895908; Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive
Commitment (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), chapter 1.
Jacques Derrida directs a similar critique towards Schmitt one of Mouffes
major sources of inspiration. He argues that Schmitt implicitly slides from
possibility to eventuality, and from eventuality to effectivity, cited in
Abizadeh, Does Collective Identity Presuppose an Other?, p. 53.
1061
51 One could reasonably argue that it is not necessary to address this problem
once one has dismissed Mouffes notion of antagonism. However, I wish
to show that, by not embracing the thesis that human interaction is constitutive of conflict, Mouffe faces some further challenges.
53 One of the main criticisms agonists raise against the liberal tradition is its
presupposition of an individualistic subjectivist framework. Even though
Mouffe thinks that Habermas deliberative theory does a better job than
most traditional liberal theories since it attempts to reformulate classical
notions of democratic theory in communicative terms she claims that he
is still caught up in the same individualism in his move from an economic
view to a moral one (Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy, pp. 7456).
54 A similar argument against liberal impartiality theory is discussed in Erman,
Conflict and Universal Moral Theory, pp. 6057.
55 Brandom, Some Pragmatist Themes, pp. 1701.
56 ibid., p. 172.
57 Susan Hurley, Natural Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989),
pp. 31617, 2623.
58 In fact, as Robert Goodin has shown, the intrapersonal dimension is often
overlooked by deliberative democratic theorists as well, for whom the interpersonal dimension always takes precedence. According to Goodin, the
appropriate deliberative answer to the complexity of modern mass societies
where face-to-face interaction becomes increasingly problematic, is that we
focus less on external-collective deliberation (interpersonal) and more on
internal-reflective deliberation (intrapersonal). On the view taken here,
however, this is a problematic suggestion, since intrapersonal and interpersonal deliberation have different normative status. While something similar
to good reasons could be reached through introspection, they gain their
status as good reasons interpersonally by being accepted by others. See
Goodin, Reflective Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),
pp. 16994 (chapter 9).
59 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 125 and 127.
60 Baynes, Practical Reason, p. 61.
61 ibid., p. 66.
62 See Hurley, Natural Reasons.
63 Jrgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse
Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996), pp. 1078.
64 ibid., p. 109.
65 Jrgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1998), p. 42.
66 The moral point of view expresses the intuition that valid norms require
wide agreement. But Mouffe does not take into account that this point of
view is elucidated through the D-principle, not justified by it. Rather, the
justification of the D-principle weighs heavily upon a theory of argumentation (Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, pp. 1089).
67 ibid., p. 110. Unless, of course, the question concerns constitutional matters,
that is, the establishing of the equivalence to Mouffes ethico-political principles, in which case moral norms are privileged.
1062
68 Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy, p. 756.
69 Jrgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. M. Cooke
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 198200.
70 ibid., pp. 3269.
71 ibid., p. 330.
72 ibid., p. 332.
73 ibid., p. 339.
74 ibid., p. 318.
75 ibid., p. 319.
76 ibid., p. 323.
77 Also Habermas acknowledges this fact. Even when democratic policies and
laws satisfy the principle of legitimacy, they reflect some ethical beliefs
while excluding others and are thus ethically biased. He refers to this as
ethical patterning and sees it as unavoidable. Indeed, one of the central
tasks of a democracy is precisely to constantly challenge these biases. See
Jrgen Habermas, Struggles for Recognition in Constitutional States,
European Journal of Philosophy 1 (2) (1993): 12855.
78 I cannot go into this here but another challenge facing Habermas, which
might turn out to be of relevance for an analysis of conflict, concerns the
ideal speech situation. As we have seen, Mouffe (along with numerous
others) interprets the role of the ideal speech situation as an ideal that is
supposed to be approximately realized. But this is a misunderstanding. The
ideal speech situation is a methodological fiction, a thought experiment.
Through a hypothetical speech situation Habermas aim is to reconstruct
the necessary conditions for enabling communicative action. It is supposed
to elucidate what makes communicative sociation possible. However, it is
precisely as a regulative idea it has been challenged by Honig and Derrida,
who instead defend the normative force of a permanent possibility of critique. Still, it is doubtful whether the ideal speech situation is a regulative
idea in the Kantian sense, as they suggest, since it is both regulative and
constitutive on Habermas account and as such does not fit the classical
opposition between the two. I thank Maeve Cooke for pointing this out to
me. See Bonnie Honig, Dead Rights, Live Futures: A Reply to Habermass
Constitutional Democracy, Political Theory 29 (6) (2001): 792805;
Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,
Cardozo Law Review 11 (1989/1990): 9191045.
79 Jrgen Habermas, Reply to Symposium Participants, Cardozo Law Review
17 (1996): p. 1490.
80 Jrgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse
Ethics, trans. C. Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 12.
81 Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, p. 326.
82 Cooke, Are Ethical Conflicts Irreconcilable?, p. 11.
83 Of course, in contrast to moral claims, ethical claims are universal in a
singular sense, claiming to be valid for specific individuals in particular situations, rather than for everyone. See Maeve Cooke, Realizing the PostConventional Self, Philosophy & Social Criticism 20 (12) (1994): 87101.
84 Cooke, Are Ethical Conflicts Irreconcilable?, p. 4.
85 ibid., pp. 1112.
86 Brandom, Some Pragmatist Themes, p. 185, note 22.

Erman - 'What Is Wrong With Agonistic Pluralism'

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Erman - 'What Is Wrong With Agonistic Pluralism'

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Eva Erman

What is wrong with agonistic

Abstract During the last couple of decades, concurrently with an

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 35 no 9 pp. 10391062

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Conflict in Mouffes agonism

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Problems with the agonistic approach

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Some further notes on a discourse theoretical view of conflict

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analytical descriptive/normative distinction is separate from the larger

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