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December 21, 2006
It is only in the seventh chapter of The Return of the Political that Chantal Mouffe begins to engage with Schmitt. That chapter is entitled 'On the Articulation Between Liberalism and Democracy', and in it Mouffe confronts Rousseau by arguing that democracy must come to terms with pluralism on the grounds that:
under modern conditions, where one can no longer speak of the 'the people' as a unified and homogeneous entity with a single general will, the democratic logic of government and governed cannot alone guarantee respect for human rights. It is only by virtue of its articulation with political liberalism that the logic of popular sovereignty can avoid descending into tyranny.
It is at this point that Mouffe turns to the critiques of liberal democracy coming from the right and to Schmitt's challenge to parliamentary democracy. This is the beginnings of t thinking differently about the political, class, or revolution.
She turns to Schmitt's The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy where he argues that liberalism amd democracy need to be distinquished from one another. She says that we can learn a great deal from Schmitt's critique of parliamentary democracy without having to follow him in his rejection of liberal democracy. She says:
We do not have to accept Schmitt's thesis that there is an inescapable contradiction between liberalism and democracy; such a contradiction is only the result of his inability to grasp the specificity of modern democracy, between its two constitutive principles of liberty and equality. They can never be perfectly reconciled, but this is precisely what constitutes for me the principal value of liberal democracy. It is this aspect of nonachievement, incompleteness and openness that makes such a regime particularly suited to modern democratic politics. Unfortunately, this aspect has never been properly theorized, and liberal democracy lacks the political philosophy that could provide it with adequate principles of legitimacy Schmitt is certainly right to argue that those principles are quite unsatisfactory and in need of reformulation.
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I think Mouffe is right to argue that liberalism and democracy are apples and oranges comparisons. One is a philosophy of maximum liberty, while the other is a science/structure of minimising tyranny. They go hand in hand as an outflow of minimising tyranny is maximising liberty - but they arent the same thing.