CONCEPT
Radical Democracy
Mouffe's alternative to both liberal consensus-seeking and revolutionary transformation — a democratic vision that affirms conflict as constitutive while radicalizing equality and liberty across ever more domains of social life.
The political project Mouffe developed with Laclau and elaborated across her later work. Radical democracy rejects the classical Marxist assumption that democracy is bourgeois and must be superseded by revolutionary transformation. It equally rejects the liberal assumption that democracy consists in the procedural management of a fundamentally settled social order. Instead, radical democracy extends the logic of democratic struggle — the demand for equality and liberty — into ever more domains of social life: workplace, gender relations, racial hierarchy, ecological relations, and now the governance of technological infrastructure. The project is radical not because it seeks rupture but because it takes the democratic promise seriously as an ongoing struggle rather than a historical achievement.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework provides the positive alternative to the critique Mouffe directs at stewardship and technocratic governance of AI. Radical democracy does not reject expertise but rejects the authority of expertise — the claim that knowledge about a domain confers the right to govern