a PREFACE, planning will be necessarily absent: planning will not be carried out for the benefit of a supposed ‘universal community’ — a non-existent entity — but for the particular constellation of forces exercising control of the state (ranging from a bureaucratic class, as in Eastern Europe, to 2 poli- tical party in alliance with the trade unions, as in the case of British Labour governments). ‘The conclusion to be drawn from this is not negative, however. If che ‘word of God can no longer be heard, we can start giving our own voices a new dignity. If our actions no longer have to be justified before a tri ‘unal external to ourselves — History, Doctrine, the Party — we can begin. to come to terms with the limitations from which we think and act, and even respect our own mistakes. Tolerance is not a marginal virme: as the point at which recognition of our human condition can begin, it has an ‘ontological function. This has chree crucial implications for the left. The first is that if there is no ‘objective’ historical tendency for the social to ‘emerge as a homogeneous subject that would coincide with the empty ‘universality of the opposite to the ‘individual’, then any ‘social’ manage~ ment will be by historically limited social actors. As a result, the radi- ality of a politics will not resule from the emergence of a subject that can embody the universal, but from the expansion and multiplication of fragmentary, partial and limited subjects who enter the collective deci~ sion-making process. It is in this sense that Chantal Mouffe and I have attempted to redefine the project of che left as the construction of a radical and plural democracy. Secondly, the deconstruction of the ‘social" in the market/social regulation dichotomy does not mean that its other pole becomes automatically valid, since itis the dichotomy itself rather than either of the two poles in isolation, that has been deconstructed. In terms of che social pole, this involves a dispersion and dislocation of power. It is worth recalling in this respect that certain, apparently liber~ tarian, forms of alternative to bureaucratic planning — like ‘management by direct producers — continue an authoritarian course in an inverted fashion; for unless society is homogenized in such a way that every member is a direct producer, such management can only mean a dictatorship over consumers and other strata of the population affected by the consequences of the production process. A radical and plural democracy involves the multiplication of those constituencies by which the social management of production is determined, The various ident ities arising from che fragmentation of the labour process, the different categories of workers, social and racial differences — as well as chose produced by the effects of environmental exploitation on the whole of PREFACE ~ the population — all have a stake, and muse therefore participate, in the global management of society. Social regulation is thus linked to an essential instability and incompletion of the consticuencies defining it, and cannot be reduced to the ‘statism’ peculiar to both communism and social democracy. Ic is important to point out, however, that the notion of ‘regulation through the marker’ does not remain unaffected by this deconstruction either. The free play of market forces is just as incapable as bureaucratic planning of producing a ‘society effect. In practice this ‘means that social regulation will be a complex and pragmatic process in which state intervention and market mechanisms will combine according to forms that are irreducible to any aprioristic principle. As a result, just as the element of conscious state intervention does not find a teleological principle of explanation in a supposed immanent tendency to establish total state control over economic life, likewise there is no essential teleological link between the presence of market mechanisms and their total subordination to the goal of individual profit. In that case, however — and this is che third consequence — the degree to which a radical democracy is being reached cannot be measured in terms of the level of state intervention in economic life. Socialism is no longer a blueprint for society, and comes to be part of a radical demo- cratization of social organization. And this principle of democratization is of course compatible with a wide variety of concrete social arrange- ‘ments chat depend on circumstances, problems and traditions Its in the ‘multiplication of ‘public spaces’ and their constituencies beyond chose accepted by classical liberalism that the base for the construction of a radical democratic alternative lies. There is nothing utopian in che proposition of these alternatives, given the growing fragmentation of Social sectors and the proliferation of new identities and antagonisms in the societies in which we live. m Rethinking a radical democratic alternative for the twenty-first century requires countless discursive interventions, ranging from polities — in the current sense of the cerm — to economics, and from aesthetics to philosophy. This ean only be the work of a whole generation, carried out ‘Over a number of years. A preliminary task, however, consists of exploring the intellectual assumptions of the prejudices thar must be questioned, effecting a displacement that would allow a new viewpoint