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Home , Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox

CHANTAL MOUFFE’S AGONISTIC

George Crowder

School of Political and International Studies Flinders University

Refereed paper presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association conference University of Newcastle 25-27 September 2006

CHANTAL MOUFFE’S AGONISTIC DEMOCRACY

Chantal Mouffe has proposed an ‘agonistic’ model of democracy in opposition to the dominant ‘aggregative’ model and the leading ‘deliberative’ alternative. Agonistic democracy emphasises the inevitability of conflict in political life, and the impossibility of identifying final, rational and neutral decision procedures, because of the ubiquity of power and the plurality of values. On the other hand, Mouffe distinguishes from mere ‘antagonism’, or destructive conflict. In this paper I analyse Mouffe’s case, and argue that it is deeply flawed – in particular by its Foucauldian reduction of values to power, and by its irrationalist account of choice under value pluralism. I go on to present a more nuanced view of value pluralism, and to show that this implies a case for and rather than ‘agonism’.

The political thought of Chantal Mouffe is an interesting attempt to preserve something of the old program of the radical left and to adapt this to contemporary conditions. In the influential and Socialist Strategy (2001, first published 1985), Mouffe and her co-author present themselves as inaugurating a new generation of left-wing political theory in succession to the faltering voice of . The Marxist or socialist outlook is by no means to be wholly abandoned: the abolition of capitalism and emancipation of the working class remain valid and important ideals. But these goals should now be seen as only part of a broader left- wing vision that must embrace the new social movements, whose various perspectives cannot be reduced to that of traditional . The task of the left must now be to empower this ‘polyphony of voices, each of which constitutes its own irreducible discursive identity’ (2001: 191). The label used by Laclau and Mouffe to summarise this enterprise is ‘’.

Mouffe has gone on to develop her version of this project under the heading of ‘agonistic democracy’. Her broad theme is that the dominant liberal approach to democracy – which includes recent theories of ‘deliberative’ democracy – is too rationalistic, seeking an impossible consensus based on rational argument. In this and related respects, liberalism denies or evades the true nature of ‘the political’, which is characterised by an ineradicable tendency among groups of human beings to mutual ‘antagonism’. Agonistic democracy faces up to this reality, but also channels it in non-destructive ways. Democracy on this view consists of a vigorous but mutually tolerant contest among groups of people united by passionately shared identifications. These groups seek to achieve for their view of things a dominant or ‘hegemonic’

2 status. To support this position, Mouffe draws on an eclectic mix of materials: Marxist anti-capitalism, liberal respect for individual , ’s idea of ‘hegemony’, ’s ‘genealogical’ understanding of ethical norms in terms of power, ’s notions of ‘the political’ and ‘decisionism’, and ’s value pluralism.

I am especially interested in the last item on this list. Much of the contemporary political-theory literature on pluralism, at least in English, is based on either ’s idea of ‘the fact of reasonable pluralism’ or ’s concept of ‘value pluralism’.1 Consequently, much of this literature has a broadly liberal orientation – although the liberal reading of Berlin’s pluralism, for example, has been prominently challenged by writers such as John Gray and John Kekes.2 Mouffe, by contrast, starts with the pluralism of Weber, and argues from this to a position that is, at least in intention, both substantially anti-liberal and different from the pragmatic contextualism of Gray and the of Kekes.

In this paper I examine Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy, especially its foundations (if that word is permissible) in value pluralism. I argue that the picture she presents is deeply flawed. First, Mouffe’s agonism is not as ‘radical’ as it purports to be – indeed it is really just orthodox interest-group politics in post- structuralist clothing. Second, the theory is deeply incoherent when it comes to justification, since its humanist and relativist components continually undermine one another. Third, it depends on grossly misleading accounts of the liberal and deliberative views it takes issue with. Fourth, it rests ultimately on a superficial notion of value pluralism as implying an irrationalist decisionism when it comes to value judgement. I go on to show how a more nuanced understanding of value pluralism can actually provide foundations for liberalism and .

Mouffe’s agonistic democracy Mouffe’s starting point is a critique of liberalism, towards which she is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand she is at pains to insist that the left should no longer be opposed to liberalism root and branch. ‘Liberal democracy is not the enemy to be

1 See in particular Rawls 1993; Berlin 1990, 2000, 2002. 2 Gray 1993, 1995a, 1995b, 2000; Kekes 1993, 1997, 1998.

3 destroyed’ (2005: 32). Indeed, the liberal ethical principle, ‘ and equality for all’, is indispensable: ‘it is not possible to find more radical principles for organizing ’ (1992: 1). The problem is not the basic ideals of liberalism but rather their implementation. Consequently, the goal of the left should not be the rejection of liberal democracy but rather its ‘radicalization’ – that is, the more consistent and thorough expression of its professed norms. Presumably no current form of liberal democracy is wholly satisfactory in this regard, but Mouffe clearly sees some forms of liberalism as more objectionable than others – she frequently singles out the ‘neoliberal’ emphasis on the unfettered market. Still, even a radicalized liberal democracy remains a liberal democracy. Mouffe appears to be proposing reforms within the liberal-democratic framework.

Yet at the same time she seems to want to retain a wholesale Marxist opposition to capitalism, which one would have thought was an institution that is hard to separate, at least in some form, from liberalism. Anticipating the objection that ‘capitalist relations constitute an insuperable obstacle to the realization of democracy’, she says only that the identification of liberalism with capitalism ‘is not a necessary one’ (1992: 2). To a degree this is refreshing, since writers with Marxist backgrounds so often tend to see liberalism, one-dimensionally, as merely a political expression of capitalism, ignoring the extent to which liberal principles have frequently, and rightly, acted as a brake on capitalism. However, it is one thing to see that the relation between liberalism and capitalism is complex, another to imagine that the two can be separated altogether. Surely it is hard to conceive of a form of liberalism that would, in Nozick’s phrase, prohibit capitalist acts between consenting adults. In what sense, then, does Mouffe imagine that a liberal framework can be retained while capitalism is rejected?

Furthermore, Mouffe’s acceptance of a liberal framework or starting point seems at odds with her extensive list of complaints about features that she ascribes to ‘liberalism’ without qualification. ‘’ falls into this category, although it is unclear what Mouffe means by this. One possible sense is ‘ethical’ individualism, meaning a special concern for the human individual – basically Kant’s ‘respect for persons’ – but Mouffe endorses this when she approves of the liberal commitment to ‘liberty and equality for all’. Her chief target is apparently a ‘methodological

4 individualism’ that denies the reality of group identities (2005: 11). But although she seems to attribute this view to liberalism as such, it clearly applies to some liberalisms rather than others, as she partly acknowledges (2005: 10). Similar points could be made about Mouffe’s tendency to describe liberalism as ‘rationalist’, meaning that it is committed to a uniform reason that excludes legitimate passion and plurality, and as denying the permanent reality of conflict. I shall return to these exaggerated claims later. For the present I note that to the extent that these criticisms of liberalism succeed, they seem to be at odds with Mouffe’s claims to accept a liberal-democratic framework. In fact they do not succeed (as I show later), but that is in spite of Mouffe’s best efforts.

Mouffe’s attitude to liberalism in general is therefore equivocal to say the least. She goes on to examine ‘two main liberal paradigms’ in the field of democratic theory: the ‘aggregative’ and ‘deliberative’ models.

The ‘aggregative’ model is basically the dominant theoretical description of the standard form taken by democracy in most contemporary liberal . Democracy, on the view made famous by Schumpeter (1943), is a process by which political representatives compete for the votes of citizens at periodic elections. There is little pretence on this view that a democratic society is one in which a united popular will seeks the common good. Rather, it is accepted that any modern society is irreducibly fragmented into a series of competing interests, and that one or other constellation of interests will win out at any one time.

Mouffe actually spends little time attacking the aggregative model, although it is clear that she is dissatisfied with it. Her basic objection is that this model discourages popular participation, leaving people alienated from mainstream political processes and tempted by more aggressive and destructive forms of expression (2000: 80). This much she has in common with proponents of the ‘deliberative’ model. Significantly, however, she departs from them when they go on to criticise the aggregative model on moral grounds, as encouraging decision-making on the basis of interests rather than right and wrong. For the deliberative democrats, the aggregative model, with its acceptance of self-interest as the universal currency of politics, is morally bankrupt. Mouffe, however, follows Foucault and Gramsci in regarding moral judgements as

5 themselves masked expressions of interests or power.3 Indeed, for Mouffe, the ‘moralistic’ tendency in democratic theory is especially dangerous, because it descends so easily into violent ‘antagonism’ (2005: 5). The Foucauldian reduction of ethics to power, and Mouffe’s own equation of ethical argument with intransigent ‘moralism’ are further dubious assumptions I shall have to come back to.

The allegation of moralism is only one of several criticisms that Mouffe launches against the deliberative model of democracy, which is her principal critical target. The case for deliberation starts from dissatisfaction with the aggregative status quo – with its amoral, interest-driven character and its discouraging of participation, as already mentioned, and also with its irrationalism. Under the aggregative system, ordinary people are not required to give reasons for the way they vote, so there is nothing to stop them voting on the basis of prejudice or ignorance. That prejudice and ignorance are in part the result of manipulation by political elites, who are in turn increasingly guided by public opinion studies that merely identify the prejudices to which they need to appeal in order to maintain popular support (Ackerman and Fishkin 2003: 9-10).

Against the amorality, irrationality and non-participatory tendency of the aggregative model, deliberative democrats seek, in Mouffe’s words, ‘rational consensus through free discussion’ (2005: 13). They seek, that is, not merely a modus vivendi settlement of competing interests, but an ethically-based agreement on the common good. They seek not merely a shouting-match of prejudices but a decision based on sound and mutually acceptable reasons. And they seek greater participation not in the form of direct engagement in law-making (which they accept is impossible given the scale and complexity of modern ) but widespread dialogue with fellow-citizens in order to try to understand one another before making judgements.

Crucially, the deliberative dialogue must take place in public and under fair conditions. Different deliberative theorists give somewhat different accounts of what these fair conditions are, the principal versions being those of Habermas’s ‘ideal

3 For an account of Mouffe as a follower of Foucault, see McNay 1998.

6 speech situation’ and Rawls’s idea of ‘public reason’.4 What these rival views have in common is a basic commitment to including in the discussion as great a range of voices as possible, to requiring that all participants give one another a respectful and even generous hearing, and to insisting that the participants be prepared not only to assert but also to justify their views, and to justify them in terms accessible to the other participants.

Mouffe rejects the deliberative picture of democracy because it denies what she calls ‘the political’. While the deliberators ‘envisage the political as a space of freedom and public deliberation’, Mouffe sees it as ‘a space of power, conflict and antagonism’ (2005: 9). There are thus several dimensions to the reality that Mouffe claims is being denied here. The first is the fundamental role of power, already mentioned in connection with Foucault and with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony.

Second, there is the idea of antagonism, which Mouffe takes from Carl Schmitt (1996). For Schmitt, there is a deep-seated natural human tendency to ‘antagonism’, or the urge to separate into mutually opposed camps of ‘friend versus enemy’, ‘us versus them’. The tendency to antagonism is ‘the essence of “the political”’(2005: 8). But the political is denied by liberal rationalism, which seeks agreement and harmony against the grain of human antagonism, and by liberal individualism, which prevents us from understanding the primacy of collective identity.

Third, there is behind the notion of antagonism the still deeper idea of ‘value pluralism’, which Mouffe takes from Max Weber (1948). For Weber, the modern ‘disenchantment’ of the world means the abandonment of the premodern notion of an objective and harmonious moral order. Instead, we see ourselves as creating our own values and as choosing among them without objective guidance when they conflict. Consequently our moral choices are fundamentally subjective, non-rational.

Something like the idea of value pluralism lies behind Schmitt’s doctrine of ‘decisionism’, according to which political conflicts cannot strictly be resolved, but only decided by an act of arbitrary will. Schmitt goes on to use this doctrine to defend

4 Habermas 1996, 1998; Rawls 1993, 1999.

7 the principle of dictatorship in general and the Nazi führerprinzip in particular. Mouffe, however, sees decisionism, and the value pluralism she associates with it, as a basis for democratic theory. Her first step in this direction is to deploy these ideas against deliberative democracy and liberalism, agreeing with Schmitt that liberal deliberation is too ‘rationalistic’, and too oriented to consensus, to accommodate the deep plurality of values. If values are plural in Weber’s sense, then they will always conflict and there can be no final, correct answer to the question of how the conflict ought to be resolved: such conflicts will be ‘undecidable’ (2000: 103), people will always disagree about them. Moreover, people will disagree not just as a matter of rational argumentation but passionately. Here is another failing of liberal rationalism, according to Mouffe: it ignores ‘the affective dimension’ of the political (2005: 6).

To sum up, according to Mouffe, the trouble with deliberative democracy, and with liberalism more generally, is that they try to evade ‘the political’. Their moralism invites intransigence, their rationalism denigrates the passions, their quest for consensus denies the tendency to antagonism, and their search for final answers flies in the face of value pluralism. Mouffe adds to this list the pretense of ‘neutrality’ offered by many contemporary liberalisms and deliberative theories, according to which key claims are said to be neutral among rival conceptions of the good – that is, independent of any particular view of how life should be lived, and consequently acceptable to people from any way of life. For Mouffe, the realities of antagonism and value pluralism show that there can be no such neutral territory. ‘The domain of politics – even when fundamental issues like or basic principles are concerned – is not a neutral terrain that could be insulated from the pluralism of values and where rational, universal solutions could be formulated’ (2000: 92). To attempt to evade this truth is both unrealistic and dangerous – dangerous because political conflict is likely to manifest itself with greater violence if it is not allowed proper outlets.

What does Mouffe propose instead? Clearly, her preferred democratic model must give due recognition to the tendency to antagonism and the value pluralism underlying it. This is her ‘agonistic’ model of democracy. Its central feature is the centrality and permanence of conflict in political life. Against the consensus and harmony that Mouffe associates with the liberals and deliberators, agonism regards

8 political struggle as ‘ineradicable’ (2000: 105). Moreover, struggle is also a positive value, since it is a ‘condition’ for real democracy – it is only where partisan political combat is allowed to express itself that ‘the political’ sphere is alive and healthy.

Mouffe also stresses the ‘hegemonic’ nature of political conflict. Such conflict is fundamentally a contest for the power to determine what counts as ‘legitimate’: legitimacy on this view is simply ‘successful power’ (2000: 100). Unlike the liberal and deliberative ideal, agonism does not try to eliminate or diminish power, since power is inescapable and ‘consitutive’ of one’s very identity. Rather, the goal of agonistic politics is to ‘constitute’ or ‘mobilise’ power in a democratic way – that is, to empower a multiplicity of democratic voices to enter the struggle for hegemony. The same principle applies to the passions: these must be mobilised rather than subordinated to reason, as on the liberal-deliberative view. Another contrast with that view is that the hegemony that is the goal of agonism cannot be a truth that is ‘fixed once and for all’ (2000: 93), but rather a ‘provisional’ settlement that is always contested, and that holds only as long as people are prepared to maintain their allegiance to it.

At this stage one might suspect that Mouffe is offering a recipe for ‘might-is-right’ anarchy. To this she would reply that she is not advocating ‘a total pluralism’, and that ‘some limits need to be put to the kind of confrontation which is going to be seen as legitimate in the public sphere’ (2000: 93). These limits are, of course, ‘political’ in nature rather than moral or rational.

The key limit is recognition that ‘the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism’ (2000: 103). Schmittian antagonism is conflict between enemies who seek each other’s destruction. But ‘agonism’ is conflict between ‘adversaries’ who oppose one another but who also regard each other as holding ‘legitimate’ views. An adversary is ‘somebody whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question’, a ‘legitimate enemy’ with whom ‘we have a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy: liberty and equality’ (2000: 102). ‘This is the real meaning of liberal- democratic tolerance.’ Nevertheless, the relation between agonistic adversaries is not the same as that between liberal ‘competitors’. While competitors are rivals for

9 dominance within the existing hegemonic system, adversaries ‘put into question the dominant hegemony’ itself (2005: 21).

To summarise, Mouffe’s agonistic model of democracy seeks ‘a vibrant clash of democratic political positions’ (2000: 104). It emphasises permanent conflict rather than consensus, the primacy of power over morality, hegemony rather than consent, and the passions rather than reason. At the same time it seeks to ‘defuse’ or ‘tame’ antagonism (2000:101, 2005: 19, 20), converting it into agonism, which involves respect for the freedom and equality of persons and toleration for the expression of their views even if we oppose them. The tendency to antagonism must be acknowledged as permanent, but it can and should be channelled into a less destructive but still vigorous form of struggle that is characteristic of ‘the political’.

Problems with agonism Mouffe’s picture of agonistic democracy may seem attractive to some people, but there are serious problems with it. In this section I shall discuss three sources of difficulty with Mouffe’s view – her supposed radicalism, the extent to which her position can be justified, and her critical account of liberalism and deliberation – reserving a fourth, her understanding of value pluralism, for the final section

How radical is Mouffe? Mouffe presents her model of democracy as ‘radical’, but in what sense is this so? One possibility is that it opposes the dominant liberal-deliberative paradigm. But we have already seen that in this respect Mouffe’s position is highly ambivalent. Although she criticises various aspects of liberalism and deliberative democracy (as she presents these), at the same time she denies that liberalism is the enemy and claims to be working within a liberal-democratic framework. This stance is confirmed by her insistence that agonism, as opposed to antagonism, involves acceptance of political opponents as holding ‘legitimate’ views that they are entitled to express – an explicit endorsement of ‘liberal-democratic tolerance’. So far, agonistic democracy seems indistinguishable from liberal-democratic orthodoxy.

Perhaps the difference lies in the agonistic insistence on the primacy of power as against the liberal-deliberative commitment to the restraint of power? In this

10 connection, Mouffe speaks of agonism as involving the constitution or mobilising of power rather than its elimination. One problem with this formulation is with its assumption that liberals are committed to ‘eliminating’ power (in favour of a total ‘neutrality’), but I shall have to return to this. One may also ask what kind of power is being constituted or mobilised here: is it any form of power, such as that of anti- democratic groups like neo-Nazis? It turns out that Mouffe has in mind only certain, approved kinds of empowerment. What she wants is summed up in her phrase, ‘a vibrant clash of democratic positions’ (my emphasis) – that is, a contest between views that are all committed to a shared set of democratic principles, including respect of persons, toleration of others’ right to speak, and so forth. This would be a ‘vibrant clash’ of the right-thinking: actually more restrictive than liberal-democratic orthodoxy, which permits the expression of anti-democratic positions at least in the form of speech.

The same point emerges when we consider Mouffe’s use of the idea of ‘hegemony’. She presents this as another radical feature of her position, asserting that while liberal ‘competitors’ are merely rivals for power within the existing structures of liberal democracy, agonistic ‘adversaries’ seek ‘hegemony’, or the dominance of their preferred world-view. But ‘adversaries’ are also defined by Mouffe as ‘legitimate’ opponents, and ‘legitimate’ is in turn understood in hegemonic terms as expressing whatever outlook is dominant de facto: ‘successful power’. If achieved ideological dominance, then presumably it would be fascist values that were legitimate. Since the current hegemony is liberal, it seems that liberal values are ‘legitimate’, for us now.5 If adversaries are ‘legitimate enemies’, then only those willing to accept liberal values can count as adversaries. And since ‘the political’ is a sphere of struggle between adversaries, ‘the political’ must now be a sphere of struggle within liberalism rather than between liberalism and alternatives to liberalism.

Indeed, Mouffe’s emphasis on hegemony suggests that the net practical effect of agonism will be not so much liberal as conservative. If our values are no more than expressions of dominant power formations, then even the most radical normative

5 Whether Mouffe would accept that liberal hegemony extends globally, so that liberal values are ‘legitimate’ for all human beings now, is a question I shall leave aside.

11 alternatives we could imagine must be in some way complicit with existing structures. On this reading, the hegemonic approach, far from enabling a more radical questioning of the status quo, actually imprisons us within it. In this respect Mouffe is open to a familiar criticism of structuralist and post-structuralist theory. The point is well made by Habermas, for example, who aptly describes this kind of theory (associated with Foucault and Derrida) as, despite its typically radical pretensions, fundamentally ‘neoconservative’ in its political implications (1981: 13). Once ethics has been reduced to a function of power, the net result is to play into the hands of those who possess power already, and to rob the powerless of their best weapons: appeals to reason and justice. The upshot of Mouffe’s supposedly radical form of democracy is that it’s likely to resemble nothing so much as the aggregative or ‘interest-group’ form of liberal democracy that is currently dominant – that is, the pursuit of economic and sectarian interests within a framework of basic liberal- democratic values.

Can agonism be justified? Perhaps someone might reply that, whether one calls Mouffe’s position ‘radical’ or not, it is well-founded and persuasive. This response appeals to a notion of justification, which raises a further set of difficulties. On the ‘hegemonic’ view she accepts, normative justifications are nothing more than disguised expressions of interests or power relations. While this kind of view may seem to give the critic a strong weapon, since any critical target can be exhibited as expressing norms that are merely contingent and interest-serving, the weapon is obviously double-edged, since it can be turned against the critic’s own position. In this connection Mouffe’s position begs two obvious questions. First, why should Schmittian anatagonism be defused into Mouffian agonism? Second, why should we choose democracy at all? If all normative commitments are merely expressions of interests, then why should we prefer democratic interests to anti-democratic interests?

Mouffe’s reply would probably be that answering these questions is both impossible and unnecessary. It’s impossible, because ultimate, reasoned justifications or ‘foundations’ for normative commitments are not to be had – in the end because of value pluralism. I shall return to this later. It’s also unnecessary, because we generally sustain these commitments not on the basis of rational argument but through

12 emotional identification. ‘Allegiance to democracy and belief in the value of its institutions do not depend on giving them an intellectual foundation. It is more in the nature of what Wittgenstein likens to “a passionate commitment to a system of reference”’ (2000: 97). Perhaps Mouffe is not constructing a reasoned case at all but merely motivating a passionate commitment to a democratic system of reference in general and to agonistic democracy in particular?

If this were all that Mouffe was doing the results would be patchy. No doubt some people may like her vision of politics as a struggle for power between ‘us’ and ‘them’, like a football match, but others will find this unappealing. In any case, this is clearly not all that Mouffe is doing. Despite the rhetoric of ‘passionate commitment’, she is offering arguments. At most Mouffe might claim that her arguments are intended only for fellow-democrats, treating non-democrats as beyond the pale of debate, and simply assuming acceptance of fundamental democratic values: equality, liberty, toleration. Even that is not really true, because part of Mouffe’s argument is with Schmitt, who is no democrat. But supposing that we accept that Mouffe’s point is not to argue for democracy in general, she is surely attempting to argue – i.e. to provide a reasoned case – for agonistic democracy. The case has to be made against two opponents. On one side, the democratic values listed above are common to deliberative as well as agonistic democracy, and Mouffe is trying to persuade us to reject the former and accept the latter. On the other side she wants us to endorse Schmitt’s notion of natural antagonism but also to oppose his dismissal of democracy and to accept the possibility and desirability of agonism. Antagonism may be natural and inevitable but agonism is not: a case has to be made for it.

What is Mouffe’s case for agonism against Schmitt’s acceptance of antagonism? She seems to give two answers, one prudential, the other moral. First, part of her answer seems to be that a society based on antagonism would be self-destructive. But Schmitt argues that antagonism within a society can be managed through dictatorship rather than democracy, and the decade-long success of the Nazi regime before it was overcome by external force is evidence for his view. In more general terms, a society obviously does not have to be democratic in order to survive. Mouffe’s stronger reason for defusing antagonism and affirming democracy is her starting point in liberal respect for persons and toleration. But then, the force of that assumption is

13 undermined by her own insistence that such principles are merely hegemonic, or expressive of dominant interests within liberal democracies. The question remains, why should those interests be privileged over the interests preferred by Schmitt?

There is in short a massive contradiction in Mouffe’s argument between, on the one hand, the ethical commitments she needs to sustain her case for agonistic democracy, and on the other hand her insistence that ethical claims are merely expressions of power relations. In the face of this one may ask why Mouffe is so keen to insist on the ultimate reality of ‘hegemony’. There seem to be several answers, but none is much help to her case overall.

One explanation is that she thinks that only struggle at the level of hegemony is sufficiently radical to challenge existing relations of power and inequality (2005: 21). That brings us back to the issue of Mouffe’s tangled and dubious claims to radicalism, already discussed. Another answer is that she sees ‘moralism’ as leading to antagonism rather than agonism, because it turns ‘the we/they confrontation’ into ‘one between good and evil’ in which ‘the opponent can be perceived only as an enemy to be destroyed’ (2005: 5). But why should framing the debate in terms of power and interests be any less antagonistic in potential than framing the debate in moral terms? The history of class and ethnic warfare is not encouraging in this respect. Conversely, must moral debate be seen as antagonistic? It’s true that moral debate is sometimes understood by the participants in terms of ‘good vs evil’, but that needn’t be the case. Argument on ethical grounds is compatible with seeing one’s opponent as simply mistaken, or as not appreciating the whole picture – either of which is, in turn, compatible with Mouffe’s notion of the adversary, and therefore with ‘the political’.

Mouffe would no doubt reply that appeals to reason and ethics are ultimately disguised expressions of power. Whatever the limitations of hegemonic political action, the alternative ‘rationalistic’ and ‘moralistic’ view is unacceptable because it rests on an untenable ‘essentialist’ understanding of values. Notions of a universal rationality and morality presuppose conceptions of a universal human nature and human good. But ‘all identities … are necessarily precarious and unstable’ (1992: 10), ‘they can never be completely fixed’ (2005: 18). Therefore, ‘radical and plural democracy … requires a non-essentialist framework’ (1992: 10). Liberal ideals of

14 consensus and consent violate such a framework by proposing a permanent model of what counts as ‘reasonable’ and ‘justifiable’ for all human beings.

However, all political positions rely on essentialist claims, because all propose norms that imply conceptions of human nature and the human good. Mouffe’s own position is no exception. First, her whole preference for democracy depends, as we have seen, on her accepting the liberal principle of respect for persons as fundamentally free and equal (1992: 12, 2000: 81, 2005: 32). Without this, why should she not follow Schmitt and embrace antagonism? Second, the emphasis on antagonism as a permanent potentiality in human experience is also an essentialist claim. According to Mouffe, the task of political theory is to inquire into ‘the essence of “the political”’ (2005: 8). That essence is the tendency to antagonism, which ‘as Schmitt says, is an ever present possibility; the political belongs to our ontological condition’ (2005: 16). Antagonism is ‘inherent in human ends’ (2005: 11), an inescapable feature of ‘our human form of life’ (2000: 98). The ‘crowd’ phenomenon described by Elias Canetti, and endorsed by Mouffe, is ‘part and parcel of the psychological make-up of human beings’, as is ‘the aggressive instinct’ noted by Freud (2005: 24, 26).

So, the antagonistic dimension of the political is, for Mouffe as for Schmitt, an essential element of human nature. It is less likely that she regards antagonism as an element of the human good, since she apparently sees the actual flourishing of antagonism as undesirable. On the other hand, she comes close to presenting agonism as a universal value, since she describes its denial as ‘fraught with political dangers’ (2005: 2, 30) and its presence as necessary for a political system to be ‘well- functioning’ (2000: 104). One gets the general impression that she has in mind something like the classical image of the healthy ‘body politic’. Indeed, there is a distant echo of this in her reference, in connection with the idea of the ineradicable nature of collective identification and antagonism, to Lacan’s notion of the human body’s tendency to seek ‘enjoyment’ (jouissance) (2005: 26-7).

The reality is that, despite her claims to be championing an open-ended and open- minded outlook emphasising contingency and non-essentialism, Mouffe is working with quite specific background conceptions of human nature and the human good. Her Schmittian picture of human nature is basically a collectivised version of Hobbes,

15 emphasising the natural tendency of groups of human beings to enter into violent competition with other groups.6 Her conception of the human good is partly liberal, stressing the human potential for freedom and equality, partly republican, placing active political participation at the centre of a healthy collective life, and partly Schmittian, regarding the tendency to conflict as not only a fact of human nature but a cause for celebration.

At the same time, Mouffe’s substantial descriptive and value commitments are sharply contradicted by her professed acceptance of hegemony. Once she has said that ‘all identities’ are contingent, and all values and beliefs hegemonic, how can she then propose respect for persons as a necessary political starting point, or insist that the tendency to antagonism is ‘ontological’? It’s hard to avoid concluding that Mouffe’s thought is in this regard deeply confused, an object lesson in the impossibility of combining the humanist tradition of the liberals and the early Marx with the anti-humanist tradition of Nietzsche and Foucault.

Does Mouffe misrepresent liberalism and deliberative democracy? Might Mouffe respond that even if her view suffers from inconsistencies and tensions, at least it is an advance on the liberalism and deliberative democracy she criticises? At one point she concedes that she is unlikely to convince liberals and deliberators that agonism is ‘the “true” understanding of “the political”; rather, she will ‘bring to the fore the consequences for democratic politics of the denial of “the political” as I define it’ – which of course is the besetting sin of liberalism and deliberation (2005: 4). But liberals and deliberators can respond that her criticisms on this score rest on some gross misrepresentations of their views.

First, the claim that liberalism denies the permanent reality of disagreement and conflict in the political sphere will come as astonishing news to liberals. The permanence of social and political disagreement and conflict is in fact a cornerstone of the liberal outlook, going back to the birth of liberalism in the wake of the seventeenth-century wars of religion. It is precisely because people will always disagree about the nature of the human good that liberals argue for mutual toleration

6 The alignment with Hobbes is accepted by Mouffe herself (1996: 146). See also the comparisons by Keane 2003: 180, Wenman 2003: 181.

16 and limited corresponding to the recognition of personal rights and . As Charles Larmore puts it, ‘liberalism … has taken to heart one of the cardinal experiences of modernity. It is the increasing awareness that reasonable people tend naturally to differ and disagree about the nature of the good life’ (1996: 122). Liberalism emphatically does not deny the permanence of social conflict; on the contrary, the permanence of social conflict is a condition for liberalism. If anything it’s the Marxist tradition that looks forward to the emergence of a perfected society at the end of history, in which significant social conflicts are transcended.

It’s true that liberals do seek consensus on the terms of a political framework with which to contain and manage social conflict. Rawls, for example, distinguishes ‘the good’, on which agreement is not to be expected, from ‘the right’, or the framework of rules on which agreement is possible and desirable (1971: 446-449). Could Mouffe maintain her objection to liberal consensus at this level? The trouble here is that her own position is no different. She agrees that ‘a pluralist democracy demands a certain amount of consensus and that it requires allegiance to the values which constitute its “ethico-political principles”’ – that is, freedom, equality and toleration (2000: 103). She adds that this is nevertheless a ‘conflictual consensus’, in which disputes continue about how the framework principles should be interpreted. But this point, too, can be accommodated by liberals if Rawls’s theory of the right is supplemented by deliberative democracy. That brings me to the next issue.

A second feature of liberalism and deliberation that Mouffe objects to is their alleged ‘finality’ – that is, ‘trying to fix once and for all the meaning and hierarchy of the central liberal-democratic values’ (2000: 93). There is some truth in this claim as a description of traditional liberal theory, but whether it points to anything objectionable is another matter. We have already seen that Mouffe fixes some meanings and hierarchies of values herself. Indeed, that’s unavoidable for any political position. Moreover, some forms of liberalism may be more flexible than others, especially when supplemented by deliberative democracy. The leading theorists of liberal-oriented deliberation are clear that the deliberative process is open- ended and that the decisions that are necessary under that process are only provisional (e.g. Gutmann and Thompson 2004: 6-7). This provisionality applies not only to ‘ordinary’ decisions under deliberation but also to the acceptance of deliberation

17 itself. In this respect the deliberative view is more reflexive than that of Mouffe, who never considers what would happen if her preferred agonism were applied to itself – that is, if agonistic arrangements were themselves the subject of a passionate contest for hegemony between rival collective identities.7

A third aspect of the liberal-deliberative approach objected to by Mouffe is its tendency to underestimate the political role of ‘the passions’, especially so far as these are associated with collective identities. ‘The mistake of liberal rationalism is to ignore the affective dimension mobilised by collective identifications and to imagine that those supposedly archaic “passions” are bound to disappear with the advance of individualism and the progress of rationality’ (2005: 6). It is true that liberalism in general does appeal to rational argument. The traditional model of liberal rationality, the , tries to capture the idea that social and political systems are not part of the furniture of the universe, as on typically premodern views, but human arrangements which those living under them may or may not have good reason to accept. But the basic point of this ‘rationalism’ is to pay due respect to persons as autonomous beings capable of governing their own lives – the same notion of persons as fundamentally free and equal that Mouffe says she accepts.

It may also be true that some versions of liberalism place too much emphasis on reason and are neglectful of the role of the emotions as a constructive force in politics. But this is at most a matter of degree, and is certainly not equally true of all forms of liberalism. Mouffe’s judgement may apply in the case of some forms of liberalism strongly influenced by Kant, who understood moral autonomy as the conquest of the passions by reason. But liberalism has many sources other than Kant, including Mill, who is very far from denying to the emotions a central role in moral experience and judgement. For Mill, ‘individuality’ is a matter not just of cold reason but of ‘experiments in living’ that require the application of ‘all [a person’s] faculties’ (1974: 123). Even in the case of Kantian liberals Mouffe’s claim is dubious, since the leading example, Rawls, does not deny the importance of the emotions either in the life of the liberal citizen or in his own arguments for justice as fairness (1971: ch. 8).

7 What would happen, I suggest, is that some people will identify with the agonistic camp and some will not. This would probably leave matters much as they are at present.

18 Similarly, in the case of deliberative democracy, it is true that deliberation involves reasoning, but that need not amount to ‘ignoring’ or ‘leaving aside’ or ‘eliminating’ the emotions, as Mouffe alleges (2005: 6, 2000: 95, 103). Obviously, people engaged in deliberation may have strong feelings about the questions at issue. The point about reason is that it provides a crucial check on those emotions, getting people to respond to political questions not only vigorously but fairly – since one thing reason can do is remind people that their arguments must be applied consistently and that the interests of others are, prima facie, just as worthy of respect as their own. Recall that the deliberative stress on reasoned justification is in part a response to the aggregative model, in which self-interest and irrational prejudice are indefeasible.

Mouffe’s exaggerated claims about the alleged liberal-deliberative denial of the passions are linked to a one-dimensional assumption that ‘liberal rationalism’ cannot accept the permanent reality of collective identifications. She gives the example of nationalism as one of the mass movements that liberals and deliberators will ‘disappear with the advance of individualism and the progress of rationality’ (2005: 6). Here again, the most liberals should concede is that certain kinds of liberalism are guilty on this count; many others are not. Mouffe herself allows some notable exceptions to her rule, including Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Raz and (also John Gray, whom I would hesitate to count as a genuine liberal). Other names that could be added to this list are William Galston (2002) and Will Kymlicka (1995). These are hardly marginal figures in contemporary liberal theory. What they show is that liberalism is by no means ill-equipped to take account of group identifications such as nationalism, since a sense of group belonging can be understood as a crucial dimension of individual well-being.

A similar response can be made to a fourth criticism launched by Mouffe against liberals and deliberators. This is that they seek to derive their conclusions from a process of reasoning that claims an impossible ‘neutrality’ or ‘impartiality’ or ‘proceduralism’ that owes nothing to any particular conception of the good, and so can be accepted by everyone equally (2000: 86-9, 91-2). Here, once more, the accusation attaches more convincingly to some kinds of liberalism than to others. Some liberals, like Rawls and , have claimed that the basic principles of liberalism are ‘neutral among conceptions of the good’ (Rawls 1971, Dworkin

19 1977, 1985). But others, such as Galston, Kymlicka and Raz have denied this claim and argued the case for liberalism on explicitly ‘comprehensive’ grounds – that is, as grounded in a particular conception of the human good.

I agree with Mouffe that neutralist justifications of liberalism cannot be sustained, but that still leaves the comprehensive justifications. It’s also worth noting that there is a sense in which a more relaxed version of neutrality is acceptable, and intersects with the comprehensive view. The idea of neutrality is essentially a late development of the basic liberal commitment to toleration and accommodation of different ways of life. This remains a valuable ideal – on Mouffe’s view too. Even if no political form can be absolutely neutral among conceptions of the good, some political forms approach that ideal more closely than others – hence, the notion of neutrality might not be abandoned altogether if it takes the form of an ‘approximate neutrality’ that simply maximised the range of ways of life to be accommodated (Kekes 1997: 175). Much the same position can be reached by those comprehensive liberals who argue that the liberal conception of the good can be understood in a capacious or ‘parsimonious’ way that leaves room for many different interpretations (Galston 1991, 2002).

A final thought in this connection is that, despite her complaints about liberal neutrality, Mouffe claims a spurious neutrality of her own. As we have seen, she claims that her position is ‘anti-essentialist’, when in fact it rests on essentialist claims concerning the person and ‘the political’. I would go further: Mouffe’s essentialism is actually narrower, or more demanding, than that of most kinds of liberalism. That is because of her insistence, reminiscent of classical , on placing politics at the centre of people’s lives. While liberals typically acknowledge that people are animated by a great variety of conceptions of the good, in which political participation may play a greater or lesser role, Mouffe appears to believe, without quite saying so (because explicitly normative language is to be avoided ), that the human good is essentially that of the political participator.

Value pluralism, liberalism and deliberative democracy So far, I’ve challenged Mouffe’s agonistic model of democracy by bringing out the hollowness of its pretensions to radicalism, the sense in which it both requires and is

20 incapable of justification, and the various ways in which its criticisms of liberalism and deliberative democracy rest on misrepresentations of those views. I now turn to the bedrock of Mouffe’s case, her notion of value pluralism. The human tendency to antagonism that she says is denied by liberal deliberation and acknowledged by antagonism is rooted in the ultimate plurality of values. It is because values are plural that, according to Mouffe, there can be no rational resolution of value conflicts (2000: 102). If value conflicts cannot be resolved rationally, then that would seem to rule out the liberal and deliberative quest for reasoned justification of fundamental principles. However, I do not believe that Mouffe possesses the best understanding of value pluralism and its implications. She is right that the plurality of values implies the permanence of political disagreement and conflict, but this is not as unrestricted and non-rational as she supposes. On the contrary, value pluralism suggests a case in favour of liberalism and deliberation.

Before proceeding, I note that if we were to accept Mouffe’s irrationalist interpretation of decision making under value pluralism, that would rebound against her own position too. After all, Mouffe is attempting a reasoned justification of agonistic democracy, at least within the limits identified earlier. If she were correct in her claim that no position can be insulated from the need for non-rational choice among conflicting plural values, then that stricture would apply no less to her own arguments than to those of her opponents.

Should we accept Mouffe’s irrationalism, however? As mentioned earlier, her notion of value pluralism is taken from Weber. For Weber, modern disenchantment has created a moral world characterised by a pervasive subjectivism. Even our most fundamental values are subjective, because ascribed to features of the world rather than discovered as objective features of the world. Consequently, our judgements when those values come into conflict are also subjective. This, it seems to me, is an unnecessarily bleak and narrow view of human value and its plurality. We may no longer conceive of the world as a divinely ordered cosmos, but that in itself does not mean the end of any notion of value as objective. A naturalistic conception of the human good – of what counts as living well for any human being – is still possible on the evidence of human experience as recorded in history, literature, and even the social sciences. This conception of the human good will, of course, be a framework

21 rather than a detailed blueprint, since it must accommodate much of the variety of lives that human beings have in fact regarded as valuable. But to say that the human good must be ‘thinly’ described in order to accommodate diversity is not to deny that it can be described at all.

There may by many candidates for the best description along these lines, but as space is short I shall simply nominate Martha Nussbaum’s theory of ‘human capabilities’ as at least a leading contender: there is a set of basic capabilities, reflecting the experiences of many different cultures, without which a life cannot count as good human life (see, e.g., Nussbaum 2000: 78-80). These capabilities are incommensurable with one another – that is, they are without a common measure, irreducibly distinct, each bearing its own intrinsic value. This makes Nussbaum’s position a value-pluralist one, but without the blank subjectivism of Weber.

However, it is one thing to show that ultimately plural values can be objective in Nussbaum’s sense, another to show that our choices among those values, when they conflict, could be rational. If values are incommensurable, then doesn’t it follow that our choices among such values must be non-rational? If incommensurability means the absence of a common measure, doesn’t that mean the absence of any criterion according to which one value might be given a greater weighting than another?

Simply to assume, as Mouffe and others do, that choices among incommensurables must be non-rational or decisionist is to ignore a substantial and sophisticated literature that argues otherwise. Writers who defend the possibility of practical reasoning under value pluralism include Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Henry Richardson, John Gray, John Kekes, William Galston and Ruth Chang. 8 Although it’s impossible to do full justice to their views here, the relevant common ground they share can be roughly summarised as follows. When values are incommensurable with one another, that means that they are so distinct that they cannot be brought within a single measure or a single ranking that applies in the abstract or in every case. Liberty and equality, for example are distinct

8 Berlin and Williams 1994; Nussbaum 1992, 2001; Richardson 1997, 2003; Gray 1995a: 154-5, 2000: 36; Kekes 1993: ch. 5, Chang 1997 (which contains several articles along these lines).

22 considerations: neither can be reduced to the other or to units of some meta-value like utility, and neither always outweighs the other. However, that does not preclude the possibility that there may be good reason to rank liberty before equality, or vice versa, in a particular case or context. What makes this possible is that a particular context may involve, or generate, a ‘covering value’ (Chang 1997: 5) or set of background criteria according to which the goods in question (that is, the particular instances of these that concern us here) may be ranked or traded off for good reason. So, for example, in the context of a society-wide commitment to reform in the direction of greater social justice, there may be good reason to diminish the liberty of taxpayers in order to expand equality of opportunity in education, health care and so forth. The decision process would not be quantifiable, it would not be algorithmic, but it would still be rational in the sense that there would in that situation be a decisive reason to favour one possible outcome over another. This is not to say that every conflict of plural values has a rational solution; only that, given an appropriate understanding of what counts as rational in value judgement, reasoned decisions in this field are possible. That is enough to falsify Mouffe’s blanket assumption that no value conflict is rationally resolvable.

Indeed, I’d go further: not only is practical reasoning compatible with value pluralism, but pluralism itself gives us a reason to regard deliberation as an especially important ethical and political value. Here I can do no more than sketch a case I’ve set out in greater detail elsewhere (Crowder 2002: ch. 8, 2004: ch. 7). The basic argument is that value pluralism imposes on us hard choices among rival values, and that such choices that can be made well only by people who possess a capacity for independent critical reflection.

First, choices among conflicting basic incommensurables, if they are to be made well, must be made rationally: it’s not enough to approach such decisions arbitrarily or with indifference. That’s because of a principle that I call ‘respect for plurality’ – that is, respect for the plurality of basic values. Given the objectivity of universal values in Nussbaum’s sense, they cannot be treated casually but must be taken seriously. Further, given the plurality or incommensurability of such values in the sense accepted by all value pluralists, we should respect all such values equally. In the case of Nussbaum’s capabilities, for example, we should show the same fundamental

23 concern for all of the items on the list, and not just arbitrarily privilege one of these or a selective package. That means that when they come into conflict, we must take seriously the decisions we are then faced with concerning sacrifices and trade-offs. To take such decisions seriously is to require good reasons for them, since the alternative is to allow some genuine values to be neglected or downgraded as a result of whims or prejudices or unexamined feelings.

Second, when we try to reason in such cases, we cannot rely conclusively on the usual suspects among ready-made ethical decision procedures. We cannot rely on simple monist systems, such as , since these rest on absolute value-rankings (such as the privileging of utility, however defined) that are subject to reasonable disagreement on pluralist grounds – why should we favour this ranking in every case rather than some other?9 Nor, for the same reason, can we rely on the rankings implicit in conservative or relativist appeals to tradition or culture. The same argument applies to Mouffe’s appeal to ‘collective identities’: these, too, stand for the privileging of certain values over others – in this case the values that identify the group.

Consequently, value pluralism obliges us to think for ourselves in a strong sense. We must be prepared to deal with each choice situation on its own terms, weighing all relevant competing considerations, including those that conflict with rules and customs. We must be able to stand back from received rules, customs and identifications, recognise the value rankings these embody, and critically assess their application in the circumstances. This may involve appeal to background values such as personal and collective conceptions of the good, but these too must be subject to revision. In short, value pluralism obliges us to be autonomous – or at least to possess the capacity for autonomy.10

9 Note that this leaves open the possibility that there may be good reason to privilege utility or some other value in some particular case. 10 My argument is that under pluralism lives can count as good to the extent that they exhibit a capacity for personal autonomy rather than its actual, or continual, exercise. This leaves open the possibility that people may choose autonomously to live in traditional, non-autonomous ways. For the distinction between capacity and exercise in relation to personal autonomy, see Brighouse 2000: chs 4-5; Reich 2002.

24 This pluralist case for personal autonomy implies a case for both liberalism and deliberative democracy. If the capacity for critical reflection is such a crucial component of the human good, then that should be reflected not only in personal but also in political life. First, people are more likely to possess such a capacity if they live in a polity that encourages it: a liberal polity. Second, to encourage critical reflection is not merely to make possible its exercise in private life but in the public sphere too. What is needed is a society in which the capacity for independent critical thought is honoured by the culture as a whole. That principle surely extends not only to the kind of individual lives that can be lived in that culture, but also to the manner in which its political decisions are made: such decisions should be, where possible, deliberative.

This view takes issue, of course, with the aggregative status quo, which privileges interests over reasoned justification. It also opposes Mouffe’s agonism in much the same terms. If anything, Mouffe’s version of democracy appears in this light as essentially the aggregative model with the addition of Foucauldian and Schmittian knobs. Just as in the aggregative case, interests and power are paramount for Mouffe, and reasoned justification is excluded or marginalised. She may protest that her view is more ‘radical’ than standard interest-group politics, in that it presents ‘the political’ as a contest for ‘hegemony’, but I indicated the emptiness of that claim earlier: this turns out to be a power-driven contest between rival interpretations of liberal democracy. How is that vision of ignorant armies clashing by night any different from what we have now? Deliberative democracy, by contrast, offers a vision of politics in which the critical reflection of ordinary citizens is given a major role. To argue for this is not to demand that politics become a wholly cerebral field of dispassionate dispute among disembodied minds. Contrary to Mouffe’s exaggerated picture, deliberation does not involve the ‘elimination’ of the passions, or of passionate attachments to collective identifications. It involves only the critical questioning of those attachments and the assumptions they generate.11

11 Nor does deliberative democracy require that every political decision be made through public deliberation, the nature of which is unavoidably cumbersome and open-ended. Rather, the proper role of deliberation is confined to long-term consensus building in matters of general principle. See Chambers 1995.

25 Problems remain with the deliberative model, of course, as with every model. In the case of deliberation, the most obvious problem is how such an outlook can be institutionalised. I cannot deal with this here, except to note that the literature of deliberation contains many interesting suggestions.12 What I do hope to have shown is that the case for deliberation is not damaged by the criticisms advanced by Mouffe. Her critique of deliberation and of liberalism more generally is unco-ordinated and misleading, and her agonistic alternative is nothing more than a description of orthodox interest-group politics translated into the fashionable and incoherent language of post-structuralism. In particular, her bedrock understanding of value pluralism is shallow and self-defeating. Far from undermining liberalism and deliberative democracy, value pluralism provides them with a foundation.13

References Ackerman, B. and J. Fishkin. 2003. ‘Deliberation Day’, in J. Fishkin and P. Laslett, eds, Debating Deliberative Democracy. Oxford: Blackwell. Ackerman, B. and J. Fishkin. 2004. Deliberation Day. New Haven, Conn: Yale UP. Bellamy, R. 1999. Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise. London and New York: Routledge. Bellamy, R. 2000. ‘Liberalism and the Challenge of Pluralism’, in Rethinking Liberalism. London and New York: Pinter. Berlin, I. 1990. ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. H. Hardy. London: John Murray. Berlin, I. 2000. ‘My Intellectual Path’, in The Power of Ideas, ed., H. Hardy. London: Chatto & Windus. Berlin, I. 2002. Liberty, ed. H. Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berlin I. and B. Williams, 1994, ‘Pluralism and Liberalism: a Reply’, Political Studies 42, pp. 306-9. Brighouse, H. 2000. School Choice and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chambers, S. 1995. ‘Discourse and Democratic Practices’, in S. K. White, ed., The

12 See, e.g., Ackerman and Fishkin 2004; Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 2004; Fishkin and Laslett 2003; Macedo 1999. 13 For an alternative route from value pluralism to liberal deliberative democracy, see Bellamy 1999, 2000.

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28 Schmitt, C. 1996 [1932]. The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schumpeter, J. 1943. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Unwin. Smith, A. M. 1998. Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary. London: Routledge. Weber, M. 1948 [1919]. ‘Politics as a Vocation’, and ;’Science as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wenman, M. 2003. ‘”Agonistic Pluralism” and Three Archetypal Forms of Politics’, Contemporary Political Theory 2: 165-186. Williams, B. 1978. ‘Introduction’ to I. Berlin, Concepts and Categories, ed. H. Hardy. London: Hogarth, 1978.

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