Chantal Mouffe
pp. 283-294
in: Paul Smeyers (ed), International handbook of philosophy of education, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
This chapter introduces readers to the work of the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, focusing on her conception of democracy as necessarily agonistic. The chapter casts Mouffe's work as post-Marxist, in the sense that it both has a clearly Marxist heritage and breaks with Marxist assumptions about the primacy of class as political identity. Mouffe's work posits the agonistic contestation of any contingent hegemonic order as both inevitable and constitutive of democracy. The chapter discusses how Mouffe's work has been—or may yet be—taken up by philosophers of education who discuss, for instance, citizenship and political education, or schooling as, itself, the result of contingent political arrangements. Distinctive features of an agonistic conception of democracy for political education include the role of political passions and the understanding of political opponents as adversaries with shared commitments to democratic debate.
