How can we agree to disagree?

Nationalism, India, and the political theory of political identity: Part III

The previous two posts looked at the core question of political theory: if we disagree on fundamental issues, how can we possibly live together? This is, in my view, the key political theoretical issue: political philosophy is a question of how we live well together; certainly we can live “together” in an abstract sense, such as occupying the same space, but if the relations between individuals is to be conducive to the public good, then we need to know what those relations should look like.

The post considered a one of the most prominent contemporary answers to this question, given by John Rawls. Rawls’s answer was essentially a major thought experiment, asking “if we had perfect ignorance of our place in society, knowing that society would still be stratified, how would we structure it to ensure that the least advantaged would be in its best possible position?” Rawls used a famous technique, the “Veil of Ignorance”, to answer this.

In this section, I look at a thinker I’ve discussed before: Ernesto Laclau.

§ Ernesto Laclau and Popular Democracy

So far in this series, we have looked at a radical authoritarian form of defining a people, and a more mainstream, contractarian view of defining a people. Now, we move onto a more radically democratic vision, developed and worked out over many years by the post-Marxist thinker, Ernesto Laclau.

In describing himself as a post-Marxist, Laclau aimed to move Marxism beyond simple economic determinism, whilst retaining a commitment to radical, popular action that would allow for a raising of political consciousness.

Laclau, born in Argentina in 1935, received a PhD from the University of Essex in 1977, and served as the Professor of Political Theory there from 1986, until his death in 2014. Laclau’s work served as the inspiration for a significant number of modern leftist thinkers, but was influenced, funnily enough, by Carl Schmitt, who had become a major source of inspiration for radical leftist thinkers across Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.

Laclau’s theory, developed in part with his long-term romantic and academic partner, Chantal Mouffe, is terminologically dense and quite different from the other two theories looked at thus far in this series; however, it becomes remarkably coherent when explained fully, so please bear with me on this.

The first point to recognise in Laclau’s theory is that it is fundamentally different from both Schmitt and Rawls: whereas Schmitt’s basic analytical unit was the fighting collectivity, and Rawls’ was the Kantian individual, Laclau emphasis the constantly undetermined subject. He writes that ‘individuals are not coherent totalities but merely referential identities which have to be split up into a series of localised subject positions… the very notion of ‘individual’ does not make sense in our approach’. In other words, Laclau rejects both the idea of a fixed ‘social’ world, and a ‘pre-social individual’: each is a determinant for the other in a dialectic relationship.

The implicit recognition of pluralism means that, in Laclau’s theory of the social, there is a simultaneous recognition of what we share, and what do we not share.

This might sound like a theoretical tangent, but it is actually central to the question, ‘who are we?’: ‘we’ are a product of articulation, as ‘all groups are particularities within the social, structured around specific interests’. To make it clearer, Laclau moves away from the idea of ‘the social’ as a fixed, objective ground within which individuals or groups act, and moves instead toward a system in which ‘the social’ is the product of articulated identities. Modern examples of this are everywhere, from such groups as Black Lives Matter, to the #MeToo movement. The point here is that there are identities built around interests.