Education and articulation: Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democracy in school

Abstract

This paper outlines a theory of radical democratic education by addressing a key concept in Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: articulation. Through their concept of articulation, Laclau and Mouffe attempt to liberate Gramsci’s theory of hegemony from Marxist economism, and adapt it to a political sphere inhabited by a plurality of struggles and agents none of which is predominant. However, while for Gramsci the political process of hegemony formation has an explicit educational dimension, Laclau and Mouffe ignore this dimension altogether. My discussion starts with elaborating the concept of articulation and analysing it in terms of three dimensions: performance, connection and transformation. I then address the role of education in Gramsci’s politics, in which the figure of the intellectual is central, and argue that radical democratic education requires renouncing that figure. In the final section, I offer a theory of such education, in which both teacher and students articulate their political differences and identities.

Keywords:

• Democratic education
• articulation
• intellectuals
• Ernesto Laclau
• Chantal Mouffe

Notes

1. Gramsci did not invent this concept, and neither did his Marxist predecessors. As Peter Ives (2004, 63) notes, in ancient Greek hegemon means ‘leader,’ and the word has traditionally been used to designate a type of influence which is not total domination but rather a friendly albeit unequal alliance, in which the subordinated maintains a degree of autonomy (such was Athens’ influence over neighboring city-states).

2. Laclau (1990, 89–93) distinguished between ‘society’ as a closed system and ‘the social’ as an open contingent formation.

3. This view is part of the backbone of Marxist tradition. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1996, 34) quotes Lukács who says that the revolutionary ‘must, to use the words of Marx, explain to the masses their own actions.’