El retorno de lo político

The world has suffered various upheavals: ethnic, religious and nationalist conflicts that have in turn coincided with crises of effectiveness and legitimacy that Western democracies have been going through. In this book, Chantal Mouffe argues that liberal democratic theory is incapable of understanding these problems, especially given its inadequate and essentialist conception of politics. The universalism, rationalism and individualism of liberal theory end up causing a strong blockage in the face of the specificity of the political, mainly in the face of the essential role played by antagonisms and power in social life. Mouffe is convinced that hard-earned democratic revolutions could be undermined by such misunderstandings about the sources of political identity. Conceived as a development of the program that the author has already advanced, with Ernesto Laclau, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, this work shows that the central categories of political theory -citizenship, community and pluralism- need to be reformulated from an anti-essentialist perspective. . In this way, Mouffe critically converges with the work of Carl Schmitt and John Rawls, as well as with the challenge posed by feminist theory, and produces a text whose main objective is to place the project of a plural and radical democracy on more adequate bases than those proposed by liberal theory. The Return of the Political is an original and risky proposal that will allow us to understand how the chasm between democratic theory and the turbulent events taking place in this troubled world could be bridged.