CHANTAL MOUFFEplayed by passions, values, beliefs, and all the various forms of collective identification in
political action. This is not to deny that these can have consequences that are not always
welcome. But by attempting to impede all those motivations for playing a role in the
political domain, many democratic theorists end up eliminating the very forces that move
people to political participation.
This is why the ‘‘agonistic’’ model of democracy seems to me much better suited to
deal with the question of religion than the ‘‘deliberative’’ one. According to the advocates
of the deliberative model, all divisive issues, like religion, should be relegated to the sphere
of the private in order to allow for a rational consensus to be established in the public
realm. In their view, religious considerations do not have a legitimate place in political
deliberation, since they are the expression of particularistic passions. The ‘‘priority of the
right over the good’’ requires that only moral, universalizable concerns be considered
legitimate. As a result, in both the Rawlsian and the Habermasian versions of deliberative
democracy—albeit in different ways—religious arguments are excluded from politics. By
contrast, the model of agonistic pluralism that I am proposing acknowledges the impor-
tance of religious forms of identification as legitimate motives for political action and
does not attempt to keep them outside the political realm. This does not mean, of course,
that it would allow legal recognition of demands that would put into question the very
basis of the constitutional order and that could abolish, for instance, the separation be-
tween church and state. The principles of liberal constitutionalism are to be respected.
But as long as they accept to adhere to those rules, religious believers will not be forced
to keep their concerns out of the democratic public arena.
Once distinctions of church/state, public/private, religion/politics cease to be consid-
ered equivalent, it is possible to imagine the multiplicity of forms in which religion could
begin to play a legitimate role in liberal democratic societies. What liberal democracy
requires is not the elimination of religion from the public sphere, as most versions of
deliberative democracy argue. Indeed, the agonistic view of democracy that I have just
delineated asserts that there is a place for religious forms of intervention within the con-
text of agonistic debate. What a liberal democratic regime requires is that those interven-
tions should be made within the constitutional limits set by its principles of legitimacy.
Those constitutional limits will, however, vary according to the way different societies
interpret the ethico-political principles that are constitutive of modern democracy and
the type of hegemonic articulation established between its liberal and its democratic com-
ponents. It is therefore a mistake to imagine that there is a single correct, universal way
of envisaging liberal democracy. How the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy
are institutionalized in specific conditions is part of the agonistic struggle. And this is an
issue that should always remain open to contestation.
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