Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian-born political theorist currently working as a professor at The University of Westminster and a key member of the Essex School of Discourse Analysis. Her most famous and cited work is Hegemony and Socialist Strategy which she co-authored with Ernesto Laclau. Mouffe’s work is highly applicable to contemporary politics, and can help us understand the nature of how we create assumptions about the world, and the means by which we might change it, with a focus on resisting oppression. In a world of social media, the 24 hour news cycle, and political polarization across the western world, thinkers like Mouffe are extremely useful in aiding our understanding of our collective consciousness as it relates to democracy and society- something she termed 'the democratic imaginary'.
Though she has spent time at universities in France and the US, she has spent most of her academic life in the UK, writing her seminal works during the height of Thatcherism. This is a period in history when philosophers and radical thinkers on the left were attempting to understand the massive shift in assumed common sense represented by, and impacted by Thatcherism and -more broadly- Neoliberalism.
The concept of ‘hegemony’ basically refers to the assumed knowledge of a population; the things we consider possible and impossible, realistic and unrealistic, common-sense and stupidity. Examples of this concept in the real-world would include the description of the USA as a ‘global hegemon’- as in, their superiority and authority over the global system is assumed/taken as a given.
She used a form of discourse analysis (the study of text and image) informed by poststructuralist European thinkers such as Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault. Essentially this involved analysing things like political speeches, campaigns, media content, parliamentary debates, anything containing indications of what the general consensus on political, social, and economic issues might be. By analysing text of this nature (‘text’ in the sense includes image, spoken words, and anything that can be read as having meaning) Mouffe aimed to track the changes in what people took for granted and held as common-sense.
Examples of this in the real world would be the assumption that the British Labour Party caused the 2008 recession. At the time, David Cameron and the Conservative Party had made the budget deficit the key issue of measuring a government's worth. Phrases like ‘economic competence’, ‘fiscal credibility’, and ‘Labour’s overspending’ were widely circulated and amplified by the press, politicians, and commentators. By 2015, this notion had become hegemonic; it was taken for granted to the point where even the Labour party capitulated to the narrative they had overspent. A key result of this hegemonic assumption was Labour’s adoption of austerity politics in 2015.
Looking at the facts objectively, the 2008 crash was a global phenomenon brought on by the US subprime mortgage crisis, the collapse of major banks, and the knock on effects in Europe and Asia including huge cash injections and bail-outs from central banks. Within center-right discourse in the UK, however, the assumed knowledge was that Labour had spent too much on welfare, let in too many immigrants, and caused the Conservative/LibDem coalition to inherit a ‘mess’ they had to ‘sort out’ through spending cuts.
Mouffe by no means invented this concept, or this method of analysis, but she did it exceptionally well, and adapted it to relate to the contemporary issues of the day. With co-author Enersto Laclau, they had a great influence on shaping discourse theory into what it is today. Her 2018 book ‘For a Left Populism’, was extremely accessible for a work of political theory. It referenced real things that have influenced and shaped our collective experience of democracy, politics, and culture. Things like the adoption of environmentalism into the mainstream left, the politics of the LGBT movement, and democratic breakthroughs such as Jeremy Corbyn, Syriza (Greek political party), Brexit, and Trump.
In the early 2000s the ‘Essex School’ set up a postgraduate program which pulled in students from around the globe to contribute, criticise, and further develop the frameworks her’s and other's work had come to create. I would highly recommend to those who want to learn more to buy For a Left Populism, only 113 pages long and absolutely packed with readable insight.
Laclau, Ernesto & Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso, 1985.
Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism. London – New York: Verso, 2018.
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