From domination to emancipation and freedom: reading Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxism in conjunction with Philip Pettit’s neo-republicanism

Gulshan Khan

doi:10.1332/204378919x15526540593660

Abstract

In this paper, I bring Ernesto Laclau's post-Marxist approach into conversation with the analytical thinker Philip Pettit, who has developed an influential neo-republican conception of freedom as ‘non-domination’. Both thinkers aim to reconfigure power and domination towards more democratic and egalitarian relations and I evaluate the political implications of their respective conceptions of domination/non-domination, emancipation and freedom. I show that despite these common points of reference, the two authors exhibit considerable differences which manifest in their respective conceptions of structure and agency. In the opening section, I compare Laclau's and Pettit's respective conceptions of ‘domination’ where I highlight the differences between them in two alternate readings of Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House. In the second section, I examine their respective understandings of ‘emancipation’ and ‘freedom’, and I demonstrate that Pettit does not model his conception of freedom as non-domination on the idea of emancipation. This stands in contrast to Laclau, for whom emancipation remains the focal point of political struggle, despite formal equality, and who maintains the idea of the possibility of a more radical transformation in the underlying structures of society. In the final section, I consider Laclau's and Pettit's alternative conceptions of politics where both thinkers place a premium on democratic contest in challenging and overturning arbitrary power. I show that for Pettit political freedom is a mode of contestability within the established institutions, while Laclau's notions of emancipation and freedom functions at the level of competing hegemonic projects, and this facilitates a form of political struggle that might transcend the existing regime to instantiate a new institutional order. I conclude by amalgamating the respective strengths of both thinkers to provide a multi-layered analysis of contemporary forms of domination to better aid our understanding about the kinds of struggle needed to contest them.

Highlights

Since the publication of Hegemony and Social Strategy in 1985, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe are widely acknowledged as leading representatives of post-Marxism and ‘radical democratic’ theory
Laclau starts from the (Althusserian) premise that the dominant structures ‘interpellate’ individuals as subjects, but, on Laclau’s account, they fail repeatedly to achieve this aim, that is with any completion or ‘totality’. It is in this constitutive failure of social structures to ever fully determine an objective order, that we find the potential emergence of a subject of freedom and emancipation, i.e. in a moment of structural ‘dislocation’ (Laclau, 1996: 101; 1996b: 54).3. These are crucial differences, and they lead, in turn, to another key distinction between the two authors, which is that for Pettit political freedom is a mode of contestability within the established institutions, whilst Laclau’s notions of emancipation and freedom functions at the level of competing hegemonic projects, and this facilitates a form of political struggle that might transcend the existing regime to instantiate a new institutional order
He clearly rejects the teleological assumptions of Marx’s theory of history, which presume a certain necessity in the forthcoming proletarian revolution and which portray the post-revolutionary communist society in terms of de-conflicted or pacified society; seen as synonymous with the realisation of ‘man in his species being’ and with a postpolitical ‘administration of things’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Laclau, 1990; Marx, 1994). These assumptions drop out of Laclau’s post-Marxist and anti-essentialist approach. Despite these theoretical moves, it is evident that Laclau retains what is arguably the core of Marx’s political/human emancipation distinction, which is the idea that any genuine politics of emancipation must contest the underlying structural sources of subordination that persist in modern societies despite our formal equality as citizens, and that the moment of ‘emancipation’ allows for the possible emergence of a different kind of institutional ordering

Summary

Introduction

Since the publication of Hegemony and Social Strategy in 1985, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe are widely acknowledged as leading representatives of post-Marxism and ‘radical democratic’ theory. It is in this constitutive failure of social structures to ever fully determine an objective order, that we find the potential emergence of a subject of freedom and emancipation, i.e. in a moment of structural ‘dislocation’ (Laclau, 1996: 101; 1996b: 54).3 These are crucial differences, and they lead, in turn, to another key distinction between the two authors, which is that for Pettit political freedom is a mode of contestability within the established institutions, whilst Laclau’s notions of emancipation and freedom functions at the level of competing hegemonic projects, and this facilitates a form of political struggle that might transcend the existing regime to instantiate a new institutional order.

Results

Conclusion