agonism

agonism, philosophical outlook emphasizing the importance of conflict to politics. Agonism can take a descriptive form, in which conflict is argued to be a necessary feature of all political systems, or a normative form, in which conflict is held to have some special value such that it is important to maintain conflicts within political systems. Frequently, the descriptive and normative forms are combined in the argument that, because conflict is a necessary feature of politics, attempts to eliminate conflict from politics will have negative consequences.

The descriptive form of agonism can be seen in the critique of pluralism in political science raised by the American political theorist William E. Connolly. Pluralist theorists of the 1950s and ’60s had described the American political system as one in which politics provided an arena in which diverse groups can each equally advocate for their preferred policies, eventually leading to consensus. Connolly criticized that theory for ignoring the differences of power between different groups within American society, which meant that politics was not simply a process for producing consensus but rather a conflict that might result in some groups imposing their preferred policies on others. Connolly subsequently advocated what he called “agonistic respect,” which sees that conflict as something to be maintained, rather than something to be overcome through consensus.

The Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, on the other hand, arrived at agonism by taking issue with the normative presuppositions of contemporary liberalism, particularly American philosopher John Rawls’s idea that a “reasonable pluralism” is a sine qua non of a liberal democratic political order. According to Rawls, any liberal polity must respect the fact that citizens will differ as to their conceptions of the good. The pluralism that a society must tolerate, however, is limited, according to Rawls, by a requirement of reasonableness—that is, the requirement that citizens do not seek to impose their own conception of the good on others who do not share it. Mouffe found this restriction unacceptable because it lays down, as an ethical principle that precedes politics, a restriction on conceptions of the good, which ought to be decided within politics. For Mouffe, politics must involve differences that people are not content merely to agree to differ on. A properly political pluralism must countenance different positions that are genuinely incompatible with one another. According to Mouffe, when Rawls attempted to neutralize such conflict by declaring it “unreasonable,” he thereby declared politics itself unreasonable.

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Mouffe derived this understanding of the importance of conflict to politics from the German jurist Carl Schmitt. According to Schmitt, the defining feature of the political is the identification of a friend and an enemy and the ensuing conflict between them. Mouffe went along with Schmitt’s argument that conflict is essential to the political but argued that conflict need not involve the identification of an enemy whom one wants to destroy. Instead, Mouffe saw the political as a conflict between adversaries who may disagree but who ultimately respect one another’s right to exist. Mouffe called this kind of respectful conflict “agonistic pluralism” in contrast to both the antagonism of Schmitt’s struggle for destruction against an enemy and the reasonable (and hence, with conflict ruled out, nonagonistic) pluralism of Rawls.