Public Sociology and Civil Society by Patricia Mooney Nickel

Author:Patricia Mooney Nickel [Nickel, Patricia Mooney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317253327
Google: ow_vCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-17T06:00:05+00:00

A Note on Post-Marxism

Like public sociology and civil society, the ideal of radical democratic network governance has been institutionalized within a particular knowledge regime. Sørensen and Torfing’s thesis on post-liberal radically democratic network governance belongs to a theory of politics known as post-Marxism, which is most often associated with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics and Mouffe’s The Return of the Political seem to occupy an uncontested position as the “radical theory books” in the governance, administration, management, and policy literatures.2 The excitement surrounding Laclau and Mouffe’s work as a basis for the “radical democratic nature” of contemporary governing, which I argue is not the least bit radical, is hard to ignore. It is therefore difficult to fully engage with contemporary statements on governing if one does not first address post-Marxism. (For lucid explorations of post-Marxism, see el-Ojeili 2001; Tormey 2001; Townshend 2004.) This fact alone is telling of the legitimating relationship, intentional or not, that post-Marxism has in relationship to governing. Curiously, to borrow a phrase used by Fredric Jameson (1984) to describe postmodernism, in its institutionalization post-Marxism acts as “the political logic of late capitalism.”

I want to note at the outset that, although it is not possible to fully consider “radically democratic network governance” without also considering its main referent—post-Marxism as it is expressed by Laclau and Mouffe—I strongly suspect that the work of Laclau and Mouffe enjoys what Gouldner (1970) called the halo effect, or deviance credits granted to an author due to their prestigious title or university affiliation:

When a scholar is confronted with a very prestigious colleague’s work, which he finds difficult to understand or to see the importance in, he is more likely to blame himself than when confronted with similarly obscure work by a less prestigious colleague…. Faced with the obscure work of prestigious colleagues, scholars are also likely to favor it with the assumption that its manifest muddiness is indicative of a hidden depth…. Because of its difficulty the work must be given an “interpretation.” … The result, then, is that the new doctrine is protected by becoming deeply internalized in each adherent and by developing the social solidarity of the first-generation “seed-group.” (201–202)

These seed groups, having made a significant investment in an idea, have a vested interest in its institutionalization. It is, at the least, true that post-Marxism has been widely institutionalized within the contemporary governance literature.

I also want to note that, although they claim to have made a radical break, many of Laclau and Mouffe’s observations were made years earlier by Western Marxists, phenomenological Marxists, and feminists who were influenced by what are called postmodern and post-structural ideas (see Agger 1991b), while still maintaining the critical perspective that there is nothing radically democratic about the present. As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner (1991) note, “Laclau and Mouffe fail to observe that critiques of reductionism, essentialism, and teleological visions of history and the proletariat have already been made within the Marxist tradition” (201).

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