Laclau’s Antagonism and Radical Democracy

The purpose of this paper is to trace Ernesto Laclau’s theory of ‘radical democracy.’ After the ‘Cold War,’ the world is going straightly toward global- ized capitalism, called New Liberalism. Under the global triumph of capitalism, democracy is on the skids, and freedom and equality is under threat. In the meanwhile, socialism is no longer accepted as an alternative social system of capitalism. It is this instance that Laclau intervenes in with his famous concepts such as ‘hegemony,’ ‘antagonism,’ and, ‘radical democracy.’He attempts to deconstruct both Marxist theory and liberal democratic thought in order to reinterpret them in such a way that they could contribute to a more sufficient understanding of contemporary politics. On the one hand, he opposes persistently the global tendency toward capitalism. He also rejects the proletariat as a ‘universal’ class for the Revolution, on the other hand. In stead of the Marxist orthodox notions of class contradiction or class struggle, he introduces ‘antagonism(s)’ of the social. His ‘antagonism(s)’ reflects the over-determined social contradictions and various anti-capitalistic movements such as green, feminist, racial, local movements. He argues that ‘antagonism’ is constitutive of human society and that radical democracy is an effect(or a process) of its articulation. The model of radical democracy maintains the idea of an expanded version of democracy in more aspects of social life and of an attempt for constitution and multiplication of new identities.