Climate Change Politics: Communication and Public Engagement By ...

Liberal democracy requires consensus on the rules of the game, but it also calls for the constitution of collective identities around clearly differentiated positions and the possibility of choosing between real alternatives. This agonistic pluralism is constitutive of modern democracy, and rather than seeing it as a threat, we should realize that it represents the very condition of existence of such democracy.

(Mouffe, 1993/2005, p. 4)

The notion of agonistic politics builds on a distinction between antagonism (between enemies) and agonism (between adversaries). Whereas an enemy is to be excluded from the polis, an adversary’s existence is accepted as legitimate, as is the adversary’s right to defend his or her ideas.

Advancing the project of a “radical and plural democracy,” Mouffe (1993/2005, 2000, 2005; see also Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) advocated conceptualizing democracy in terms that not only allow for but also encourage confrontation and pluralism. She offered the democratic paradox as an alternative to the universalist-rationalist perspective (Habermas, 1996; Rawls, 1993) that has dominated political theory since the last half of the 20th century. Whereas the universalist-rationalist perspective shares with Enlightenment science the aim of establishing universal truths independent of context, the agonistic perspective contends that the “illusion of consensus and unanimity” is fatal to democracy because a “healthy democratic process” requires the “vibrant clash of political positions and an open conflict of interest” (Mouffe, 2000, p. 130). Agonistic politics entails continual negotiation of the democratic paradox between individual freedom and community equality, without seeking an impossible reconciliation between the two. It supports neither accepting all views as equally valid, which leads to anarchy, nor building an artificial consensus, which leads to authoritarianism and tyranny. To avoid both anarchy and tyranny, a polity must find ways to enable political clash, and it must do so in a way that ensures appropriate representation