Abstract
Introduction
Discussions around populism have come to form a major component of contemporary political science, with scholars engaging with the rise of movements positioned against the status quo from the right and left (Moffitt, 2016; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017; Urbinati, 2019). A critique commonly made of populist formations, which pit ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’, is that they are necessarily anti-pluralist: that populism homogenises ‘the people’, suppressing the heterogeneity of democratic publics (Galston, 2018; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017; Müller, 2016). These scholars, largely operating within the ideational approach to populism, however, tie pluralism closely to liberal-democratic institutions without fully interrogating the ways in which certain interest groups are denied recognition by such institutions. There are those who claim, in contrast, that populism’s pluralism depends on whether it is articulated in a left-wing or right-wing form (Laclau, 2005). Left-wing populism, some suggest, presents the groups which constitute ‘the people’ as unified in their common exclusion, rather than as homogeneous (Katsambekis, 2022; Mouffe, 2018; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014).
Lacking in these latter accounts, however, is a precise conceptualisation of pluralism that is distinct from those who argue for its essential incompatibility with populism. Such a theoretical development is necessary to account for the ways in which liberal-democratic institutions often fail to recognise the demands of the marginalised, which populism has the potential to redress (Panizza, 2005). This article aims to develop an understanding of pluralism which can act as a counter-hegemonic challenge to exclusionary liberal governance, particularly in its neoliberal guise, and be used as a critical tool to analyse contemporary left-wing populist formations. I, therefore, make a theoretical contribution to populism studies by furnishing the critical study of populism with a concept of pluralism that parts from the ideational approach’s myopic focus on liberal-democratic institutions and the inclusion of pre-existing identities into the body politic.
I tackle this gap in the literature in three sections. First, I set out how existing parties and movements on the populist left have attempted to grapple with the issue of pluralism, and survey the understanding of pluralism developed by those mainly situated within the ideational approach to populism. I critique their liberal-democratic conception from two angles, arguing that it does not account for liberal democracy’s ability to accommodate reactionary politics, nor does it recognise how certain groups are excluded from liberal-democratic institutions. Second, as the leading theorists of critical populism scholarship, I turn to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001) to discern how they navigate this purported tension between pluralism and populism. After laying out the political ontology of their earlier co-authored work, I suggest that while Mouffe sacrifices populism’s counter-hegemonic potential in pursuit of pluralism, Laclau sacrifices pluralism for counter-hegemony through his insistence that the universal can only be articulated through the particular. Finally, to move past this impasse, I use insights from the psychoanalytic literature to formulate pluralism as universal non-belonging (McGowan, 2020), which grounds plurality in the constitutive lack shared by all subjects. This allows us to advance an indeterminate concept of ‘the people’, potentially compatible with left-populism. In doing so, I highlight the possibility of a pluralistic and counter-hegemonic form of left-populism and invite other critical scholars of populism to consider pluralism in terms beyond those set out by liberal political theory.
Pluralism in populism (studies)
With some notable exceptions (García Agustín, 2020; Mouffe, 2018; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014), pluralism is understood as non-populism, and vice versa (Abts and Rummens, 2007; Müller, 2016; Pappas, 2019; Urbinati, 2019). For those who contrast pluralism with populism, two major lines of thinking emerge. Some claim that pluralism is an innate feature of democracy as such, which populism undermines (Abts and Rummens, 2007; Müller, 2016; Urbinati, 2019). Others, mainly from the ideational approach to populism, understand populism as an illiberal form of democracy (Albertazzi and Mueller, 2013; Galston, 2018; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017; Pappas, 2019). In this section I argue, regardless of the purported differences between these positions, that both claim liberal democracy is the ultimate guarantor of pluralism. I suggest this fails to account, however, for the ways in which liberalism itself constrains pluralism. I then outline the contributions of those who argue for pluralism and left-populism’s compatibility, and highlight the need for a more precise conception of pluralism.
Far from only a theoretical concern, populist parties and social movements of the left have variously attempted to deal with the thorny issue of pluralism. In fact, critiques from the left have been levied at populist formations for being insufficiently attentive to, for example, feminist and anti-racist demands (Grattan, 2021; Maiguashca, 2019; McKean, 2016). This is particularly evident in the case of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-populist discourse in France which, regardless of his references to a more cosmopolitan ‘people’ (Mélenchon in Mortimer, 2022), continues to be constrained by lingering Islamophobia (Kleinberg, 2023). Similarly, although increasingly central in their discourse, Spanish left-populist party
In theoretical terms, most conceptualise populism as an illiberal form of democracy (Albertazzi and Mueller, 2013; Galston, 2018; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017; Pappas, 2019). This understanding is particularly evident in the ideational approach to populism. The ideational approach understands populism as a thin-centred ideology which pits the homogeneous and morally virtuous ‘people’ against the corrupt ‘elite’ and argues that politics must deliver on the general will of such a ‘people’ (Mudde, 2004). Within this approach, populism’s illiberalism is accredited to its supposed anti-pluralism. Pluralism, is, therefore, thought of as an essential trait of liberalism. For Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (2017), populism is democratic because it is rooted in the principle of popular sovereignty. It is anti-pluralist and illiberal, however, because of its infringement upon minority rights. Populism holds, according to Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017), that nothing should constrain the will of ‘the people’, including the rights of minorities. In contrast with pluralism, populism, they claim, presents ‘the people’ as homogeneous, erasing the differences between individuals, and asserts that ‘the people’ can speak in a unified voice (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017).
Pluralism is apparently guaranteed by institutional protections of minority rights (Hawkins, 2010) and is constituted by an open and heterogeneous conception of ‘the people’ whose will cannot be simply expressed (Ochoa Espejo, 2015). Unlike populism, Paulina Ochoa Espejo (2015) claims, pluralistic movements are constituted by self-doubt and uncertainty. This comfort with a lack of firm grounding, for Ochoa Espejo (2015), is what differentiates the liberal-democratic pluralist from the populist.
In contrast, some contend that populism is undemocratic, rather than merely illiberal (Abts and Rummens, 2007; Müller, 2016; Urbinati, 2019), while still arguing it to be anti-pluralist. This is due, in part, to the affirmation of these thinkers of Jürgen Habermas’ (1998) co-originality thesis, which holds that the liberal and democratic elements of liberal democracy are inseparable. Therefore, these scholars locate pluralism in democracy, rather than only in liberalism and, because of liberalism and democracy’s supposed co-originality, suggest that liberal democracy is the only desirable, and perhaps only possible, form of democracy. I argue, however, that as we delve into this body of work, this distinction collapses, and ultimately, liberalism and pluralism are thought to be inseparable. For Jan-Werner Müller (2016), the populist leader argues that they, and only they, are the legitimate voice of ‘the people’, and as such, have the exclusive right to govern. Similarly, Nadia Urbinati (2019) claims that the populist leader presents themselves as legitimate because of their unmediated relationship with ‘the people’, rather than their electoral success. Populism, they argue, freezes majorities in place to permanently hold power. This is also what makes populism anti-pluralist for Abts and Rummens (2007), who allege that populism seeks to occupy the empty place of power in perpetuity.
Populism is presented as partially dictatorial, contrasting with democratic pluralism. However, pluralism and liberalism are also inextricably linked for these thinkers. Müller (2016: 9) formulates liberalism as ‘a respect for pluralism and an understanding of democracy as necessarily involving checks and balances (and, in general, constraints on the popular will)’ and describes the institutions of liberal democracy as a ‘moderating influence’ (Müller, 2016: 36). Although, for Müller, populist anti-pluralism is undemocratic, rather than only illiberal, it is, nevertheless, liberalism which he argues to be the best protector against the monism of populism. Urbinati (2015) similarly emphasises the importance of intermediary institutions between citizens and the state to prevent either elite capture of democracy, or a populist uprising. These interventions reflect the hegemonic understanding of democracy as liberal-democratic. Whilst Müller and Urbinati claim to defend democracy, rather than only liberalism, against populism, they do so on liberal-democratic terrain.
For both understandings of pluralism outlined here, liberal democracy is its natural home. This reflects Jonathan Dean and Bice Maiguashca’s (2020) claim that the likes of Urbinati and Müller can be considered as theoretical offshoots of the ideational approach. The response of these thinkers to populism is a reassertion of liberal-democratic values and practices. Here, there is not only a narrow conception of pluralism, but a narrowing of democratic horizons. By claiming that liberal democracy is a bulwark against the supposed anti-pluralism of populist politics, liberal democracy becomes positioned as the only desirable form of democratic life, regardless of its many exclusions, which I now explore.
Having identified the close connection forged between pluralism and liberalism in the populism studies literature, I suggest that such a connection underestimates the ways in which liberalism constrains pluralism. As Aurelien Mondon (2024) argues, although liberalism positions itself as a bastion of pluralism, it has been able to accommodate reactionary politics throughout its history, particularly in its facilitation of racism and empire (Bell, 2016; Losurdo, 2011; Mills, 1997).
Identifying pluralism at the institutional level also risks entrenching liberal democracy’s elitism and marginalising popular participation (Stavrakakis and Jäger, 2018). Mudde (2004), for example, centres elitism as a constitutive feature of liberal democracy through his claim that elite-centred institutions provide guarantees against democratic overreach, preventing tyrannical majorities from depriving political opponents of their rights. In fact, this appeal to checks and balances within elite institutions only obscures the role that such institutions have played in diminishing the rights of marginalised people. This was apparent in the 2022 US Supreme Court decision on abortion, which Kelly O’Donnell and Naomi Rogers (2023) place in continuity with historic elite restrictions on reproductive rights. Thus, even the principles of 20th century liberal American pluralism, which praised the ability of competing grassroots associations to influence policy outcomes in liberal democracies, are undermined (Dahl, 1961; Lindblom, 1965; Lipset, 1959).
How liberalism could be underpinned by a radically inclusive notion of ‘the people’ when borders, and other lines of exclusion, continue to act as key divisions between who is, and is not, part of ‘the people’ is also unclear. Ochoa Espejo’s (2015) designation of the ethos of the open ‘people’ as being distinctly liberal runs in contrast to really existing liberalism (Mondon, 2024). Liberal-democratic states have developed increasingly harsh border regimes (Walia, 2021), continue to marginalise women from political participation (Dahlerup, 2018), and mainstream transphobia by constructing it as one side of a legitimate debate over gender identity (Amery and Mondon, 2024). Ochoa Espejo’s ethos of self-doubt and uncertainty around ‘the people’s’ constitution does not survive the treatment of such a people by really existing liberal regimes. While Müller (2014) and Mudde (2021) have expressed frustrations with really existing liberalism, they nevertheless hold on to a faith in liberal democracy’s ability to live up to its egalitarian promises. However, the entrenched relations of exclusion and elitism outlined here bring this into question.
There are those, in contrast, who refute this incompatibility between populism and pluralism, particularly in populism’s left-wing variations, and point to populism’s ability to give voice to otherwise unmet demands (García Agustín, 2020; Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2018; Panizza, 2005; Prentoulis, 2021; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014). Giorgos Katsambekis (2022: 54), operating within the discursive approach which understands populism as a people-centric and anti-elitist discourse, takes umbrage with the ‘morality thesis’ and the ‘homogeneity thesis’ of the ideational approach. While the former argues that populism is a dangerously moralistic form of politics, the latter claims that populism portrays ‘the people’ as necessarily homogeneous. The ideational approach deems both problematic for pluralism as moralistic politics risks converting ‘the elite’ from a legitimate adversary to an illegitimate enemy and presenting ‘the people’ as homogeneous precludes their plurality (Katsambekis, 2022). Katsambekis (2022) rejects the morality thesis, demonstrating that populism is not a uniquely moralistic form of politics, with non-populist actors similarly portraying political opponents as morally deplorable. He also argues that ‘the people’ of left-populism are not homogeneous, but merely unified in their interests as the underdog (Katsambekis, 2022). Scepticism towards populism’s supposed anti-pluralism has also been shared by those operating within the ideational approach (Akkerman et al., 2014; Ellenbroek et al., 2023; Zaslove and Meijers, 2024).
What these more critical accounts are missing, however, is a precise conception of pluralism. As Mark Wenman (2003) explains, pluralism cannot be thought of only as the institutional balancing of influence between constituencies that already exist. If pluralism is located only at the level of the state, those who are denied access to recognition by institutions are excluded, as are the identities that have yet to emerge (Connolly, 2005). Interest groups, as evidenced by Laclau (2005) and Connolly (2005), surface in the context of new demands. A more satisfying conception of pluralism must, then, address not only the ability of existing interest groups to influence politics, but the context within which new groups come into being.
Further focus must also be given to relations of power in a more critical conception of pluralism. Recently, political elites have cohered around neoliberal forms of governance which have disciplined the demos with market forces and the nominal withdrawal of the state, meaning polities are increasingly governed by unresponsive elites (Brown, 2015; Crouch, 2004; Mair, 2013). Political projects that have refrained from a head-on encounter with these practices of governance, opting for more horizontal forms of democratic participation, have lacked the counter-hegemonic power needed to contest neoliberalism’s monist content over the long term (Dean, 2016). 1 In a context of increasingly marginal influence of the public over policy outcomes (Gilens and Page, 2014; Mair, 2013), to not contend with elite coherence when advancing a pluralist agenda is unwise. Without accounting for these structural constraints, one risks pursuing plurality without pluralism (Marsh et al., 2001). The proliferation of groups may be desirable, but without addressing uneven distribution of power, pluralism is not achieved. An emancipatory understanding of pluralism must account for how countervailing forces can rebalance relations of power by meaningfully challenging elites.
This demands, therefore, a conception of pluralism that is counter-hegemonic, considering neoliberalism’s narrowing of democratic horizons. As (post-)Marxist theorists have long argued, competing for hegemony requires a degree of verticality (Gramsci, 1971; Laclau, 2005; Thomassen and Prentoulis, 2013). In the building of a counter-hegemonic bloc, demands from certain sections of society come to represent the whole demos, such that the multitude is cohered into a ‘people’ that can contest the hegemony (Laclau, 2005). Reconciling pluralism and counter-hegemony, sometimes posited as in tension (Howarth, 2008), if not as incompatible (Khan, 2008), is the challenge that I take up in the remainder of this article.
Although those who argue for populism’s pluralistic potential are mainly situated within the radical-democratic tradition, there remains a question as to whether pluralism is retrievable from its liberal context. Most notably, the American pluralist tradition has built upon the contributions of Alexis de Tocqueville and James Madison, prioritising stability and equilibrium between competing forces over more participatory forms of politics (Kornhauser, 1960; Lipset, 1959; Shils, 1956). Nevertheless, the contributions of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have sought to account for pluralism in their radical-democratic approaches by focusing not only on how power can be distributed among pre-existing subjectivities, but the very processes through which these subjectivities come into being. In the following sections, I formulate pluralism around the principle of non-belonging to arm more radical approaches to political theory with a critical tool that can be used to evaluate the pluralism of populist formations, without resorting only to a liberal vocabulary. I illustrate how populism can inject some pluralist rebalancing of power into an otherwise monist (neo)liberal conjuncture by integrating insights from psychoanalytic political theory into the radical-democratic thought of Ernesto Laclau and, to a lesser degree, Chantal Mouffe.
Laclau and Mouffe compared: Hegemony, pluralism, and populism
Having identified the need for a more comprehensive understanding of pluralism within critical approaches to populism, this section surveys the contributions of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on pluralism, as the two main points of reference for critical populism scholarship. Others have attempted to reconcile pluralism with more radical conceptions of democracy, most notably William Connolly (1995, 2005, 2017), yet Laclau and Mouffe’s specific focus on pluralism, populism, and hegemony makes them prime candidates for exploration here. In this section, after outlining the political ontology of Laclau and Mouffe (2001), I engage with their individual contributions on populism and pluralism (Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2005a, 2018, 2022). I suggest that while Mouffe’s (2005a, 2018) agonistic project sacrifices populism’s counter-hegemonic potential for pluralism, Laclau’s (2005) insistence that the universal can only be contingently articulated through the particular, rather than universality itself being accessible, stymies a more pluralist version of populism. Because of its sustained focus on counter-hegemony, I suggest that Laclau’s account is more promising, yet seek to part from his formulation of universality in the subsequent section.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (2001) attempt to bring together hegemony and radical, plural democracy remains deeply influential. Laclau and Mouffe (2001) formulate a post-foundational political ontology which argues that all objects are discursively constituted, and that these objects cannot be grounded by extra-discursive foundations. As society is merely a web of discourses that only refer to one another, it necessarily lacks permanent foundations which exist outside of this system. For Laclau and Mouffe (2001), society is marked by antagonisms in the form of relational identities, where one identity is both dependent on, and threatened by, the existence of another. As such, identities of objects and subjects are always prone to rearticulation, whereby equivalential and differential relationships between objects and subjects change how identities are understood in the social world (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). Subjects develop their identity through contrast, yet this alternative mode of living marks the contingency of one’s own identity. Such antagonisms prevent society from being understood as a coherent totality, free of conflict.
Vitally, this post-foundational approach does not claim that society lacks grounding, but that there is a plurality of competing discourses which variously attempt to provide the ultimate ground to the social world (Marchart, 2007). In this context of a lack of permanent foundations, hegemony is understood as the moment in which a nodal point, one privileged signifier, provides temporary fixity (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 99), where a particular hegemonic project covers up the radical contingency of identities (Howarth and Stavrakakis, 2000). Securing hegemony, then, in these post-foundational conditions means ‘not only representing social reality but making it come into being as such’ (Farkas and Schou, 2024 [2020]: 35), providing temporary fixity to the social world.
Politically, different demands expressed by hegemonic formations cohere together in a chain of equivalence against the status quo, but also in a vertical relationship of representation where a nodal point signifies the individual struggles which make up the hegemonic bloc (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). The building of this alliance is the drawing together of disparate struggles that are not connected
Starting with Mouffe’s (1992, 2005a, 2013) project of agonistic pluralism, she argues that the contemporary public sphere has become too depoliticised, with political parties tacitly accepting a neoliberal consensus. Mouffe suggests that there is a need for more disagreement in the public sphere between competing ideological projects of the left and right. However, rather than different projects relating to each other as enemies, Mouffe contends that as long as they accept the liberal-democratic rules of the game, these projects must accept each other’s legitimacy. As Mouffe (2005a, 2018) herself proclaims, this project is an extension of liberal-democratic norms, rather than a rupture from them. Left-populism, for Mouffe (2018), should compete on this terrain of agonistic struggle.
Mouffe’s (2005b: 50) suggestion that so-called ‘right-wing populism’ can legitimately participate in political life, regardless of her personal opposition to their policies, is in keeping with liberalism’s permissive attitude towards the far right. In contrast to its claim of being a bulwark against reaction (Mondon, 2024), the liberal hegemony has long provided mainstream support for racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Brown, 2023; Mondon and Winter, 2020). While one might want to argue, against Mouffe, that the inclusion of the far right in the polity is a betrayal of liberal-democratic values, this misses Mouffe’s inadvertent insight: liberal democracy and reactionary politics can, and often do, comfortably sit together. It is notable that Mouffe has also positioned herself as a proponent of progressive patriotism (Errejón and Mouffe, 2016), which risks reproducing exclusionary nationalism in its construction of in-group and out-group dynamics (Tinsley, 2022). Her recent interventions on left-populism (Mouffe, 2018, 2022), which sustain a commitment to national-parliamentarism do little to assuage these concerns. In jettisoning a rigorous focus on counter-hegemony for a project of agonistic pluralism, Mouffe ends up achieving neither. The monist forces of (neo)liberal hegemony, and the exclusions it perpetuates, are entirely commensurate with her agenda.
More promising, then, is Laclau’s contribution. Although not his first intervention on populism (see Laclau, 1977), Laclau’s (2005) highly influential work, The whole process of the Russian revolution started with three demands: ‘peace, bread, and land’. To whom were these demands addressed? The more the equivalence expanded, the more clear it became that it was not just to the tsarist regime. Once we move beyond a certain point, what were requests within institutions became claims addressed to institutions, and at some stage they became claims against the institutional order. When this process has overflown the institutional apparatuses beyond a certain limit, we start having the people of populism.
As a populist formation, the content of these demands becomes partially empty, such that they come to represent ‘the people’ as a whole. These demands move beyond being requests for social goods addressed
Arguably, however, through the privileging of the part which holds a coalition together, this highly vertical form of counter-hegemony leaves little room for plurality and democratic experimentation at the base level. Camila Vergara (2020) suggests, for example, that Laclau’s part-as-whole formulation opens him up to accusations of proto-totalitarianism, whereby the particularity of the part imposes itself as a totalising identity. As Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis (2019: 8) point out, in Laclau’s formulation, the populist coalition of ‘the people’ performs a dual function. It is both the excluded part, the
While Katsambekis (2022) is correct in arguing that left-wing populist parties are no less pluralistic than their non-populist competitors, the evidence of such parties embodying more emancipatory forms of pluralism while retaining their counter-hegemonic credentials appears thin. The gap between rhetoric and delivery that ‘people’s parties of a new type’ have shown in their relationship with feminist politics, for example, marks this deficit (Breeden and Porter, 2022; Caravantes, 2021; Kantola and Lombardo, 2019).
This is not to say that populism always, or even mostly, takes the form of a political party in Laclau’s thought. Others working in a Laclauian tradition have explored the ways in which social movements operate under populist logics by unifying a downtrodden ‘people’ in opposition to ‘the establishment’ (Eklundh, 2019; Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis, 2014; Kioupkiolis, 2019). Nevertheless, the part-as-whole formulation that is central to Laclau’s understanding of populism is one that needs to be navigated when excavating populism’s pluralistic potential.
Pluralism and the principle of non-belonging
Thus far we have outlined the contributions of Laclau and Mouffe on the potential tensions between populism, pluralism, and hegemony. While Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism is compatible with the exclusions of contemporary liberal governance, Laclau retains a focus on the importance of populism being a counter-hegemonic force yet undermines the pluralism of this formation through his assertion that universality is only achievable via the particular.
Going one step further than Laclau’s assertion that counter-hegemony requires a particularity standing in for the whole demos, following Todd McGowan (2020), I argue that a constituency can be unified through shared non-belonging, accounted for by Jacques Lacan’s formulation of the essential lack in subjectivity. This levels a challenge to the monism of our conjuncture, which enforces homogenising identity categories on subjects, such as ‘consumer’ or ‘citizen’. Instead, understanding pluralism as non-belonging allows subjects to relate singularly to this universal lack, while simultaneously pursuing a counter-hegemonic challenge to the neoliberal order in the form of a radically indeterminate populist subject of ‘the people’. I focus on the concept of ‘universality’ to contrast my position on pluralism with both the ideational approach to populism and the agonistic approach of Mouffe (1992). Whereas these currents formulate pluralism in terms of how to balance the interests of competing groups, each with their own particular identity, I suggest that couching pluralism in terms of universality, understood as the ontological lack shared by all subjects, can be a more generative alternative.
Considering the charge of proto-totalitarianism levelled at hegemony and Laclau’s part-as-whole formulation of populism (Khan, 2008), Vergara (2020) asserts the particularistic nature of populist politics. Rather than suggesting that a left-populist formation should attempt to stand in for society at large, she argues that populism is an explicitly plebeian form of politics, motivated by reducing inequality between
In Vergara’s (2020) model of plebian populism, one may be concerned that reifying a fundamental division between
In fact, this fundamental equality between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ has potentially far-reaching consequences for the emancipatory potential of left-wing populism. For the purposes of this article, however, it is important to note that this claim to equality is a universal one. Mindful of the risks associated with a universality that arises out of a particularity, as in Laclau’s formulation, Eisenstein and McGowan (2012) locate universality in absence: subjects all share a constitutive lack. No one quite belongs to society. While Laclau and McGowan both affirm the centrality of this constitutive lack, they read it differently. For Laclau (2005), the constitutive lack is what incites the subject to identify with a particular that stands in for the universal, in the ultimately futile hope of suturing this lack in their subjectivity. For McGowan (2022), however, it is precisely this lack which forms the basis of an accessible universality unmediated by the particular.
To tease out this divergence between Laclau and McGowan, the Lacanian notion of constitutive lack must be unpacked. Jacques Lacan’s (1977) treatment of subjectivity is grounded in the mirror stage of early child development in which the child comes to identify with the fixed and complete image it sees in its own reflection. However, such an identification is alienating: the reflected image is at a distance from the child. This image fuels the desire of the child to achieve wholeness, which establishes itself as a lack in subjectivity (Lacan, 1977). This instability moves the child to language for stable identity. The symbolic order of language is ‘the order of a master and a guarantor’ (Stavrakakis, 1999: 21), mediating all attempts to find a subjectivity of fullness which resembles the alienating image in the mirror. However, the lack in the subject persists through this integration into the symbolic order in the form of all the lost possibilities of subjectivity which are sacrificed when entering the symbolic. The ways of being, unaccounted for by the symbolic order, haunt the subject in the form of the unsymbolisable Real: the possibilities of identities that could have been (Stavrakakis, 1999). As Yannis Stavrakakis (1999) argues, such a lack is demonstrated by the repeated attempts of subjects to find new identities offered by the symbolic order, none of which are entirely satisfying. This allows us to locate a basis for collective organising, without one particularity forcing its positive content upon all others to unify a counter-hegemonic bloc. Instead, this bloc is unified through what all its components lack.
I contend that through collectively organising around universal non-belonging, there is potential to contest neoliberal monism and its enforced particularities. By grounding such a project in the lack shared by all, the pitfalls of inclusivity are avoided, which relies on a majority granting rights to minorities, thus depending on a hierarchical differentiation (Thomassen, 2017). The universality of non-belonging liberates subjects from their place in the symbolic order as a consumer and producer in a harmonious marketplace (McGowan, 2022), or as a citizen of a nation-state. Because of this lack, one can never truly be the perfect consumer or citizen, such that the hole in their subjectivity is filled. By embracing absence, individuals can relate singularly to the universal without the mediation of the identity conferred upon them by the symbolic structure (McGowan, 2020). In advancing a project which, instead, seeks to transgress the boundaries of the symbolic order, pluralism is captured in a more meaningful sense.
There is a key difference here between Laclau and McGowan’s respective formulations of universality. While, for Laclau (2007), the place of universality is occupied by a particular which comes to represent the universal, for McGowan (2018), universality beyond particularity is accessible through shared absence. As McGowan (2018: 200) claims, ‘[u]niversals exist on the basis of what is missing in signification. We discover the universal through what cannot be said, even as we name this absence. Every authentic universal refers to a signifying absence’. This is what differentiates a more traditionally Laclauian conception of populism from one which brings in the concept of universal non-belonging. For Laclau (2005), ‘the people’ names the part which stands in for the whole, whereas, through our conception, it names a constituency that is made coherent by a universal lack.
This concept of populism is a universal one, as the signifier of ‘the people’ remains permanently empty. Rightly, universality has been thought of sceptically in the wake of the totalitarian projects of the 20th century (McGowan, 2022). Jacques Derrida (1974) suggests, for example, that any claim to universality is, in fact, a masquerade which conceals an imposed particularity underneath. This is apparent in contemporary French politics where the discourse of the Republic claims to be universally inclusive, yet relies upon the suppression of difference (Nadi, 2017). The treatment of Muslim women by the French state and the policing of their bodies in the name of universal
As McGowan (2020) shows, however, these are arguments against particularity, not universality. 20th century totalitarianism and the French Republic, among others, sought, and continue to seek, to impose their particularity, falsely positioning it as universal. They formulate universality as something made, rather than found. Lyotard is correct in his assertion that the universalising of a particularity is coercive. However, Eisenstein and McGowan (2012) claim that universality is not a presence, but an absence. No one fully belongs to society as their identity is foisted upon them rather than freely chosen (McGowan, 2020). The universal component of human experience is this lack, no identity category quite fits the subject (Stavrakakis, 1999). This is what makes racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter universal. As McGowan (2020: 185) argues:
Success for Black Lives Matter could only be everyone paying attention and recognizing that we all partake in the nonbelonging that the murdered black people represent. This mark of this success would not be total integration. Instead, it would occur when lives that don’t belong would become impossible to shoot without collapsing the entire social order.
We should be mainly sceptical, then, not of true universality, which as Edward Said (1994: xii) claims ‘means taking a risk in order to go beyond the easy certainties provided us by our background, language, nationality, which so often shield us from the reality of others’. Instead, we must understand universality as a tool to critique discourses which position themselves as universal, but instead, coerce others into conforming to an imposed particularity, as has been the case with masculinised and racialised majoritarian conceptions of ‘the people’ in some populist formations (Eklundh, 2022; Grattan, 2021; McKean, 2016).
Although McGowan asserts that universality is accessible without the mediation of a particular, he nevertheless remains loyal to the Lacanian ontology of lack, rather than an ontology of abundance (Tønder and Thomasssen, 2005). As Tønder and Thomasssen (2005) explain, a cleavage in radical-democratic theory persists between those, on one hand, who claim that groups become cohered into hegemonic blocs via common identification with a signifier, and those, on the other hand, who see the goal of radical democracy as pluralisation without the top–down mediation of a signifier. For McGowan (2013), there is still a role for signification, yet the signifier which unites subjects into a common grouping should not name a shared presence, but a shared absence. For example, rather than migrant justice groups unifying around the slogan ‘No One is Illegal’, which constructs an inclusive vision of the future where migrant illegality is eliminated, McGowan (2013: 277) prefers the formulation ‘No One is Legal’ which highlights how no one truly belongs to a legal social order due to the ontological persistence of lack. For McGowan (2013: 277), ‘No One is Legal’ reveals that ‘there is no inclusion that does not partake of the fundamental exclusion that defines the structure’ and that ‘[l]egal citizens must come to recognize that legality doesn’t exist’. As explored above, a universality based on non-belonging subverts the hierarchies of nominally inclusive politics, expressed by ‘No One is Illegal’, which depends on those already included opening up a political community to the excluded.
Bringing this line of thinking back into populism, I understand ‘the people’ of populism as naming the universal ontological lack. Using the psychoanalytic metaphor of sublimation, Thomas Zicman de Barros (2022, 2024) explains that ‘the people’ of a sublimated populism does not have predefined limits, nor does it depend on those already within ‘the people’ including those who are excluded. Instead, this ‘people’ constantly questions its own limits and is open to heterogeneity. He goes on to argue that:
sublimatory populism does not speak in the name of the ‘people’ to discriminate against the subalterns nor to threaten liberal democracy. On the contrary, it deepens and radicalizes liberal democracy. It appeals to the ‘people’ to constantly point out the blind spots of liberal democracy, claiming a place for the subaltern in it (Zicman de Barros, 2024: 333).
Where I would differ slightly from Zicman de Barros, following McGowan’s critique of inclusivity, is by claiming that a sublimated populism does not seek to include the subaltern in liberal democracy. Instead, ‘the people’ of populism names the subalternity of all, unifying ‘the people’ around their common exclusion.
A populism underpinned by shared non-belonging also heads off the critique of moralism, which argues that populism is anti-pluralistic because of its supposedly moralistic division between the pure people and the corrupt elite which always excludes the latter (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008; Hawkins, 2010; Mudde, 2017). As McGowan (2018: 213) claims, a universal project of non-belonging positions its opponents ‘not [as] enemies, but [as] potential allies who have not yet come around’. Because all do not belong equally, no one is prevented from being part of the project.
This universality has intriguing consequences for the status of ‘the elite’ in a pluralistic populist discourse which foregrounds non-belonging. As lack is universally shared, it is a common trait of both ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. Although ‘the people’ antagonise ‘the elite’ on account of their unsatisfied demands (Laclau, 2005), this division is permeable. In McGowan’s terms, ‘the elite’ are both currently antagonists, and the potential allies yet to come around. This is not to say that such a movement should tolerate the reactionary politics so effectively mainstreamed by political elites (Mondon and Winter, 2020), but that the dividing line is a political one that can be crossed. It is worth reasserting here that left-populism is based upon unmet demands, not a claim of ‘the people’s’ moral superiority. As Stavrakakis (2024: 138) clarifies:
[w]hat is at stake in progressive forms of identification is that exclusions are limited to those denying democracy and pluralism itself, and that the frontiers remain relatively open to contestation and can always allow the progressive broadening of the political community.
Because of universal non-belonging, no one is necessarily excluded from the collective subject of ‘the people’. A left-populism which constructs this fuzzy boundary between people and elite, based on fundamental equality and shared lack, can preserve the counter-hegemonic weight of a unified movement of ‘the people’, while subverting the homogeneity of a universality imposed from above. Instead, the universality of non-belonging it posits is a route to counter-hegemonic pluralism that rejects the strict confines of neoliberal subjectivity.
In Lacanian terms, left-populist fantasies tend to claim that through the defeat of the malignant establishment, which steals ‘the people’s’ enjoyment (Glynos, 2021), harmony in the political world is achievable. In this fantasy, one particularity merely triumphs over another: ‘the people’ defeat ‘the establishment’ and return to power (Žižek, 2006). In the pluralistic project developed here, however, this fantasy is traversed. By asserting the principle of non-belonging, a left-populist formation can understand that total mastery of the political world is always beyond reach. A left-populism which embraces universal non-belonging is sublimated as satisfaction is found by deviating from the object of desire (Lacan, 1979). As Zicman de Barros (2022) argues, a radical-democratic conception of ‘the people’ asserts its permanent incompleteness: democracy is always deferred, never totally achieved. While one should be sceptical of the possibility of entirely separating a political project from fantasy, sublimation brings in the doubt and uncertainty which underpins pluralistic non-belonging.
This is not to say, however, that Laclau does not contend with the indeterminacy of ‘the people’ within populist formations. Through his concept of heterogeneity, Laclau (2005) argues that any antagonistic relationship, such as between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, is inscribed on a terrain which excludes. There is always something that is not represented by either ‘the elite’ or ‘the people’ (Laclau, 2005). As Thomassen (2019: 338) explains:
some demands or identities are better represented by the empty signifier than others, and so the latter are marginalized. We end up with a people that is internally pluralist and fuzzy around the edges, but also a people that is striated and from which some will be excluded.
Both the constitution of ‘the people’ and the way in which the antagonistic frontier between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ is constructed is always open to rearticulation. Yet, linking to our earlier reflections on universality, for Laclau (2007), there is nevertheless always a particularity which rises above the others, standing in for the universal. Although Laclau (2005) centres heterogeneity as a condition of antagonism, what escapes his attention is the possibility that heterogeneity itself, the indeterminacy of ‘the people’s’ constitution, has the potential to anchor the hegemonic coalition through what is absent, rather than through a present particularity. By building a conception of pluralistic populism on universal non-belonging, we can better attend to the ability of ‘the people’ to reinvent itself and its antagonistic relationship with ‘the elite’, without depending on a universalised particular.
Conclusion
To summarise, I have explored some of the key deficiencies in previous formulations of pluralism, particularly within the ideational approach to populism. Such contributions position pluralism too closely to liberal democracy, and its often-exclusionary institutions, accounting only for interest groups that are already recognised by such institutions, and not those which are denied such recognition, or are even yet to emerge. As two of the most prominent theorists to grapple with the tensions between populism, pluralism, and hegemony, I placed the contributions of Mouffe and Laclau in conversation with each other. While Mouffe’s pursuit of pluralism has led her to sacrifice the focus on counter-hegemony in her and Laclau’s original project (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001), Laclau’s insistence that universality is only accessible through the particular compromises populism’s pluralistic potential. Parting from Laclau, I have argued that identifying universality in a shared constitutive lack avoids the potentially totalitarian impulses of having a particularity represent the whole heterogeneous social space. Understanding ‘the people’ in populism as radically indeterminate, creating a fuzzy boundary between this constituency, and ‘the elite’ which it opposes, allows for a sublimated populism which traverses the fantasy of unmediated popular rule. Thinking of pluralism in terms of non-belonging arms more critical scholars of populism with a conception of pluralism which does not depend solely on a liberal vocabulary.
This article can provide, therefore, a theoretical framework which can guide future empirical work on the relationship between pluralism and left-populism. Others may wish to explore, for example, the different articulations of pluralism found in more vertically orientated left-populist parties when compared with populist social movements or movement parties. Although the aim of this article has been to develop a conception of pluralism which can act as a challenge to the myopic liberal-democratic view of pluralism, by placing the contributions of Laclau, Mouffe, and McGowan in conversation with one another, some further theoretical tensions may have emerged. Whether or not the conceptualisation of universality which I advance in this article is compatible with the post-foundational commitments of the radical-democratic tradition (Marchart, 2007) is an open question. Future research may wish to investigate the reconcilability of these positions. Overall, this article’s formulation of pluralism rooted in universal non-belonging allows scholars sympathetic to the demands for social justice advanced by left-populist formations to evaluate populism’s pluralistic credentials, while at the same time moving beyond the narrow conception of pluralism laid out by populism’s liberal critics.
Footnotes
Funding
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