Lauclau And Mouffe's Theory Of Radical Plural Democracy

As main representatives of post-Marxism, Laclau and Mouffe have co-authored“Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics”, which is an important text for post-Marxist theory research. The radical plural democracy theory constructed by Laclau and Mouffe is put forward as a strategy of contemporary capitalism to socialism.Radical plural democracy theory develops under the pluralistic state of mutual affection and mutual influence by economic globalization. Radical plural democracy is a new interpretation of the traditional theory of Marxism democratic ideas.It is the most programmatic political stand in their and even the whole theory of Marxism research.With the twists and downfall of the west socialist movement and the successive defeat of left-wing's, the conscious of right-wing liberal democracy struggles to rebuild democracy through revolutionary fight, but this makes democracy in deep crisis. It is under the background of the crisis of traditional Marxist theory that the radical theory of pluralist democracy appears. The New Left represented by Laclau and Mouffe reconstructed the democracy radically through discourse system in a multivariate and radical way. They stand for new social movement such as feminism, ecological,pacifism and so on to replace traditional democratic revolution of the proletariat. More people are attracted to participate in the modern social democratic movement through this form. Laclau and Mouffe propose combining people with different identities by using equivalent logic, and relying on “articulation”, an important mechanism, to realize the variety of substitute and the way of fight in the diversity problem, and then promoting the development of radical plural democracy. The purpose of radical plural democracy is to rebuild the political center with the combination of all kinds ofdemocratic fight. The core of the plural democracy theory is to achieve full democracy,the end result of his theory is ultimately :“Back to the hegemonic struggle”. Admittedly,to some extent, Laclau and Mouffe's radical democratic theory enriches the Marxist criticism of the modern society, and has an important social influence and provides a new perspective for socialist democratic politics construction. However, their proposition of replacing proletarian revolution with radical democracy can't fundamentally change the essence of inequality in capitalism society. Therefore,there is also some limitation of Laclau and Mouffe's theory.