Mouffe and 'The Political' - with Pieter Maeseele and Seongcheol Kim
Chantal Mouffe (1940 – ) is a contemporary Belgian political theorist, a well-known public intellectual, and a prolific writer. As the co-author of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), Mouffe can certainly be considered a classic theorist of democratic politics and of – a term she helped coin – the ‘political’. In her work, Mouffe takes issue with what she calls the domination of neoliberal ideology in contemporary politics and argues passionately against the rationalist model of democratic politics embraced by the likes of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. Even more intriguingly, unlike Ernesto Laclau, her partner both in life and in her professional career, Mouffe has rigorously applied her thinking to topics in international relations, delving on the contradictions of the liberal internationalist project and foreseeing negative consequences for the development of our global order. In Episode 5 of our podcast, together with Pieter Maeseele (University of Antwerp) and Seongcheol Kim (University of Bremen) we discuss On the Political, published in 2005, and Mouffe’s latest piece, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution. Left Populism and the Power of Affects from 2022. We explore questions such as: What is the difference between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’? Are we witnessing a deepening of ‘antagonisms’ globally? What’s next for the liberal international order in the face of war and unstable multipolarity?