Content area
Full text
Jürgen Habermas is perhaps the leading contemporary defender of the 'unfinished project' of modernity and Enlightenment reason. His work is often contrasted with post-structuralist thinkers who are typically cast as intellectual enemies of the Enlightenment. Habermas's defence of the political and philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment has long been a benchmark against which political theorists have measured their own positions. For example, Jean-François Lyotard claimed that Habermas's discourse-theoretical approach, with its 'search for universal consensus', is outdated because it denies the incommensurate and 'heteromorphous' nature of the postmodern social bond (Lyotard, 1984, pp. 65, 66). In response to such critiques, Habermas labelled various postmodernists in the 1980s as 'young conservatives', because in his view they rejected the progressive side of Enlightenment reason, and he accused them of falling into a 'performative contradiction' (Habermas, 1987, p. 13). Habermas presented the contributions of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida as inconsistent because they tend to deny the epistemological and normative presuppositions they use to make their arguments. More recently, a number of prominent political theorists in the Anglo-American academy have differentiated their 'agonistic' conceptions of democracy from Habermas's project of discourse ethics. Perhaps the most critical is Chantal Mouffe, who maintains that Habermas puts liberal democracy at risk because his theory of discourse ethics supposedly overburdens contemporary citizens with a necessity to strive towards rational consensus. She says that the 'very condition of consensus' and 'the process of argumentation' of Habermas's theory is 'fatal for democracy', because it eliminates 'pluralism from the public sphere' (Mouffe, 1999, pp. 47, 52).
Various commentators have examined the relationship between Habermas and Mouffe, or between deliberative and agonistic forms of democracy, and have argued that their positions are incommensurate.1 In some ways this is understandable, given that Habermas and Mouffe draw on different philosophical traditions. Mouffe invokes Claude Lefort's conception of the 'democratic revolution' to explain political modernity and Carl Schmitt's distinction between friend and enemy, which for her represents the 'specificity of the political' (Mouffe, 1993, p. 2; 2000, p. 101). For (Mouffe, 2005, p. 11), the political is ultimately the realm of decision and conflict, not discussion and consensus. She also draws upon Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony, a form of power that entails coercion and consent (Mouffe,...