Laclau & Muoffe's Radical Democracy: A Response to the Confusion of the New Left: A Critique on the Book “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy”

Hegemony and socialist strategy; towards radical democratic politics of Laclau and Moff (1985), in the face of the confusion of the new left proposed the theory of radical democracy. This theory is progressive in at least two respects: 1. Democracy based on antagonistic politics. Laclau and Muoffe stated that controversy is a part of politics and hegemony is the only way to control it, but in contingent situations, the demands of opposing discourses can be articulated around an empty signifier and a new hegemony can replace previous hegemony. This process opens the way beyond Hobbesian pessimistic realism (and its authoritarianism) and Kant's moral idealism (and its conciliatory democracy); 2- Positive postmodernism in the form of the idea of ​​post-fundamentalism. By accepting open and temporary hegemony, Laclau and Muoffe not only supported pluralism and its accompanying particularism, but also established an authority (reference) for political decisions and actions, thus it moves beyond universal fundamentalism to the Habermasian type and specifical anti-fundamentalism to the Deleuze type. The former implies accepting the authority of reason to eliminate differences in the process of communicative action, and the latter implies the separation of minorities from the majority and the rejection of any general authority for political action. Nevertheless, there are still fundamental criticisms of Laclau and Muoffe's intellectual project, including the superiority of the political over the economic and the social; the weakness of the subject's action; Western-centerism, and the Tendency to neo-Kantian transcendence.