Rethinking Theories of Political Discourse: The Limitations of the Deliberative-Agonistic Split
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: What are “theories of political discourse,” why do they matter to political theory, and where do current ones fall short? This dissertation mines the existing resources availed by contemporary democratic theory in order to respond to the discursive challenge of “pernicious polarization,” particularly in the United States. The most comprehensive and influential theories of political discourse today have been furnished by the almost 40-year debate between deliberative democracy and agonism, both of which offer normative models centered on ameliorating the quality of political discourse. The key finding of the dissertation is that the foundational works of the deliberative-agonistic split lack the conceptual resources for remediating pernicious polarization. The reason is because each of these normative models of democracy ground the plausibility of approximating their normative ideals in what I call the “assumption of adversarial recognition”: the assumption that citizens can disagree with one another – even vociferously, as advocated for in agonistic accounts like Chantal Mouffe – but nevertheless recognize one another as legitimate actors committed to ‘the rules of the game.’ On the one hand, any theory of political discourse inevitably embraces some degree of conflict. On the other, they must somewhere draw a line in the sand between ‘healthy’ political discourse compatible with democratic life and ‘unhealthy’ political discourse incompatible with democratic life. The foundational accounts of the deliberative-agonistic split each answer this question by systematically erecting a boundary between “adversarial recognition” and “adversarial nonrecognition.” The latter term refers to cases where citizens disagree with one another, and do not recognize each other as legitimate democratic participants. This distinction, I argue, belies the ever-present theoretical possibility and the empirical reality of adversarial misrecognition. Adversarial misrecognition describes conditions in which inter-partisan actors systematically construe and overestimate the extent to which adversaries are existential threats to democracy. In Chapter 1, I explain what constitutes a “theory of political discourse,” provide an overview of the treatment of political discourse in democratic theory, and canvas a series of the most formidable discursive challenges democracies currently face. In Chapters 2-6, I reconstruct four of the most comprehensive theories of political discourse: that of Habermas, Mouffe, Laclau, and Connolly. In doing so, I explore the central role played by the assumption of adversarial recognition in Habermas, Mouffe, and Connolly. In Chapter 7, I construct a two-level ontological model of political discourse and argue that the likeliest way countries like the United States can escape the misrecognition-driven spiral of pernicious polarization is, surprisingly, through a Left populist movement.
Author: Moran, Connor
Institution: University at Albany, State University of New York
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7164616658