Chantal Mouffe

(Charleroi, 1943) is a political scientist specialising in political theory. In her work Mouffe critisises the present Western consensus democraty. Her book On politics (2008) shows how dangerous it is to sweep all political diffences under the carpet. Eventually everyone who doesn't feel at home in the new ‘post-traditional era’ will raise his voice, which will lead to extreme excesses, she claims. As an example she takes the rise of Haider in Austria and the success of Fortuyn in liberal cum social democratic Netherlands in the 1990s, but also the war in Iraq. In the 1960s Mouffe was active in the student and feminist movements. In 1985 she and Ernesto Laclau published Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, an influential book in which she stood up for a radical pluralist democracy. Mouffe is a professor at the University of Westminster and lectured at other European, US and Latin America universities.