ABSTRACT
Agonistic theory claims to offer a radical understanding of politics and, more narrowly, democracy, that is distinct from the understandings underpinning traditional liberal pluralism, on the one hand, and deliberative democratic theory, on the other. Where liberal pluralism stresses bargaining over individual interests and deliberative democrats mutual understanding and consensus through dialogue, agonistic democracy privileges plurality, difference and contestation. In this there is arguably a palpable link between contemporary agonists and the work of Hannah Arendt. She, like they, stressed the irreducible plurality of opinions, the importance of keeping diversity and difference in sight, and the striving, contestatory nature of all genuinely political endeavour. However, some agonists, specifically Chantal Mouffe and those influenced by her, believe Arendt, in emphasizing equality and free interaction as the essence of political life, endorsed an unrealistic vision of the political that blinds us to the realities of domination, coercion and hostility. Following Carl Schmitt, Mouffe insists that the defining features of the political, what distinguish it from other forms of human activity, are exclusion and enmity. A radical politics, a politics which wishes to break with existing hegemonies, must in her view be one which acknowledges the primacy of ineradicable antagonism.
