Lefort and the Fate of Radical Democracy

Abstract

One of the influences of Lefort’s theory of democracy has been on the formation of Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of “radical, libertarian and plural democracy.” Beginning with Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,¹ Lefort’s account of democracy was developed in subsequent work written both jointly and separately which elaborated the political logics of what Laclau and Mouffe were happy to affirm as “post-Marxism.” Laclau and Mouffe have not simply applied Lefort’s account of democracy, but, instead, have brought it into a different, but not necessarily contradictory, theoretical problematic derived from the Gramscian notion of hegemony: the balance of coercion and consent through which leadership is exercised. Although their work situates itself in the context of the decline of the Jacobin imaginary, this is not in order to subordinate democracy to the revival of the revolutionary model described by Lefort, but, instead, to trace the possibilities of democracy within the model’s unraveling. In that sense, for Laclau and Mouffe, Lefort’s theory of democracy figures as a framework through which the transformations of democracy through historically changing conditions of existence can be understood, and within which the effects of those changes on the concepts which Lefort formulated can be registered. Thus, Laclau and Mouffe’s relation to Lefort can be characterized in terms of a tension between the theorization of the conditions of democracy and a theo-rization of democracy itself, which is visible through its mediation by a consistent reference to hegemony as the logic of the political.