CONCEPT
Agonistic Pluralism
Mouffe's positive model of democratic political life — institutionalized contestation among adversaries who share a democratic framework while passionately disagreeing about its content.
The constructive alternative to both deliberative democracy (which seeks rational consensus) and antagonistic politics (which collapses into enmity). Agonistic pluralism treats political life as the ongoing struggle among plural, legitimate, incompatible visions of the good. The goal is not to arrive at agreement but to sustain institutional spaces where disagreement can be expressed, contested, and provisionally settled — always with the understanding that settlements are temporary, excluded positions will return, and the struggle is democracy's beating heart rather than a deficiency to be overcome. Adversaries recognize each other's legitimacy; they do not seek each other's elimination. They fight, but within rules that preserve the conditions of continued fighting.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Buyl et al. 2025 study of LLM ideology demonstrated what agonistic pluralism looks like in the material infrastructure of AI. The researchers found that different large language models from different geopolitical regions reflect systematically different ideological positions. Their explicitly Mouffean conclusion: rather than pursuing ideological neutrality (which is a hegemonic operation disguised as procedural fairness), regulation should preserve
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