Chantal Mouffe
Belgian post-Marxist political theorist (born 1943)
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Through Political philosophy, Philosophy and Europe
Education
Chantal Mouffe studied at the Universities of Leuven, Paris and Essex and has worked in many universities throughout the world (in Europe, North America and Latin America). She has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton and the CNRS (Paris). During 1989–1995, she served as Programme Director at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. She currently holds a professorship at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster in the United Kingdom, where she is a member of the Centre for the Study of Democracy.
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Work
She developed a type of post-Marxist political inquiry drawing on Gramsci, post-structuralism and theories of identity, and redefining Leftist politics in terms of radical democracy. With Laclau she co-authored her most frequently cited publication Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and she is also the author of influential works on agonistic political theory, including Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically and The Democratic Paradox. Her book For a Left Populism was published in 2018.
A prominent critic of deliberative democracy (especially in its Rawlsian and Habermasian versions), she is also known for her use of the work of Carl Schmitt, mainly his concept of "the political", in proposing a radicalization of modern democracy—what she calls "agonistic pluralism". She has developed an interest in highlighting the radical potential of artistic practices. Mouffe's Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (2013) has been criticised by Timothy Laurie for its strong focus on State institutions, noting that Mouffe's "professed enthusiasm for (some) non-Western Islamist movements is solely conditional upon their assumption of State instruments".
Critical
The sociologist Pierre Birnbaum believes that Chantal Mouffe's theory is "fundamentally foreign to any Marxist or even socialist demonstration, and also contrary to any sociological analysis." He particularly calls into question her recourse to voters' emotions rather than their reason, "in an explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment embodied by Jürgen Habermas", but also of "the essentials of contemporary political theory"; according to the sociologist, Chantal Mouffe's thought is "an interpretation of the foundations of mobilization certainly inspired explicitly by the experiences of Latin America, but which seems to find its distant origin in the rants, in the 19th century, of Gustave Le Bon or of Gabriel Tarde."
Honors
- Doctorate, honoris causa, University of Valparaíso, Chile (2014).
- Doctorate, honoris causa, University of Costa Rica (2019).
- Doctorate, honoris causa, KU Leuven, Belgium (2019).