GDL

Lasse Thomassen’s (2005) generous response to my argument concerning the relationships between deconstruction and radical democracy (Barnett, 2004) focuses


primarily on a methodological point. This is the issue of whether it is legitimate to treat the more or less disparate writings of authors as a homogenous whole. He


suggests that by treating Laclau and Mouffe’s writings as a singular body of work, I am guilty of homogenising ideas that are more diverse than I give them credit for. I


have to concede that he is correct here, although I should say that I was quite consciously making this decision. I was interested in trying to discern some broad


patterns of conceptualisation that are shared by various writers, and not just these two. My argument was meant as a provocation, and I took Laclau and Mouffe’s version(s) of radical democracy as just one example of what I think is a wider genre of poststructuralist theory e by which I mean an approach to conceptualisation and evaluation that shares certain features of expository style, argumentative form, and substantive content. On another occasion, I might well agree that it is important to stress the differences between writers, but for my purposes it seemed valid and justifiable to treat this range of work as fairly coherent (just as they do, I suppose, when they talk lightly of ‘Liberalism’, or ‘the Enlightenment’, or reiterate some fairly woolly caricatures of ‘Habermas’ or ‘Rawls’).

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