disclaimer: i don't read much political theory, so take my review with a grain of salt. BUT i found mouffe's analysis insightful - she gets right to the point of why consensus-based "third way" politics failed, and it's hitting home a little too hard right now (biden-harris :/).
politics is about power, and claims to power inevitably comes into conflict. there's no way to find a perfect compromise that doesn't leave people out; in fact, the very nature of liberal democracy requires that some population - usually non-citizens - are excluded from the "universal" rights that liberalism offers.
civic procedure, too, is necessarily exclusive: by making voting (or town halls, protests, etc.) the official mechanism of change, you're already upholding one epistemology over another. a lot of western political philosophers start with the assumption that liberal democracy is the "end of history" and must be defended, when it's always been just one set of values and practices among many.
rather than giving up on democracy, mouffe says we should embrace "agonistic democracy." agonism accepts ideological conflict as natural and productive, but focuses on transforming conflict into agreed-upon channels (e.g. party politics) instead of pushing radical politics out, which engenders further violence. she insists that both the content of politics as well as its official procedures should always be up for legitimate debate. finally, open deliberation does not lead us toward an objectively optimal outcome, but a temporary and uncertain decision.
the essays can get a little repetitive at times, but honestly it helped me. mouffe is also good at giving explainers on basic positions/debates in political philosophy, like contextualism vs. universalism, Rawls vs. Habermas, etc.
To start with, what is the best way to designate the new type of democracy established in the West in the course of the last two centuries? A variety of terms have been used: modern democracy, representative democracy, parliamentary democracy, pluralist democracy, constitutional democracy, liberal democracy. For some people, the main difference with ancient democracy lies in the fact that in larger and more complex societies direct forms of democratic rule are no longer possible; it is for that reason that modern democracy has to be representative.
Others, like Claude Lefort, insist on the symbolic transformation which made possible the advent of modern democracy: 'the dissolution of the markers of certainty'.' In his view, modern democratic society is a society in which power, law and knowledge experience a radical indeterminacy. This is the consequence of the 'democratic revolution', which led to the disappearance of a power that was embodied in the person of the prince and tied to a transcendental authority. A new kind of institurion of the social was thereby inaugurated in which power became 'an empty place'.
The novelty of modern democracy, what makes it properly 'modern', is that, with che advent of the democratic revolucion', the old democratic principle that 'power should be exercised by the people' emerges again, but this time within a symbolic framework informed by the liberal discourse, with its strong emphasis on the value of individual liberty and on human rights. Those values are central to the liberal tradition and they are constitutive of the modern view of the world. Nevertheless, one should not make them part and parcel of the democratic tradition whose core values, equality and popular sovereignty, are different. Indeed, the separation between church and state, between the realm of the public and that of the private, as well as the very idea of che Rechtsstaat, which are central to the politics of liberalism, do not have their origin in the democratic discourse but come from elsewhere.
It is therefore crucial to realize that, with modern democracy, we are dealing with a new political form of society whose specificity comes from the articulation between two different traditions. On one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of law, the defence of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relation berween those two distinct traditions but only a contingent historical articulation.
The dominant tendency today consists in envisaging democracy in such a way that it is almost exclusively identified with the Rechtsstaat and the defence of human rights, leaving aside the element of popular sovereignty, which is deemed to be obsolete. This has created a 'democratic deficit' which, given the central role played by the idea of popular sovereignty in the democratic imaginary, can have very dangerous effects on the allegiance to democratic instirutions.
As my discussion of Carl Schmitt's theses in Chapter 2 makes clear, democratic logics always entail drawing a frontier between us' and 'them', those who belong to the 'demos' and those who are outside it. This is the condition for the very exercise of democratic rights. It necessarily creates a tension with the liberal emphasis on the respect of 'human rights', since there is no guarantee that a decision made through democratic procedures will not jeopardize some existing tights. In a liberal democracy limits are always put on the excrcise of the sovereignty of the people. Those limits are usually presented as providing the very framework for the respect of human rights and as being nonnegotiable. In fact, since they depend on the way 'human rights' are defined and interpreted at a given moment, they are the expression of the prevailing hegemony and thereby contestable. What cannot be contestable in a liberal democracy is the idea that it is legitimate to establish limits to popular sovereignty in the name of liberty. Hence its paradoxical nature.