Vision and Imagination in Radical Democratic Theory: Reflections on Mark Kaswan and Chantal Mouffe

I contend that Mark Kaswan’s "Happiness, Democracy, and the Cooperative Movement" and Chantal Mouffe’s "Agonistics" forward two distinctive and in many ways rival accounts of the radical democratic project. I show through a comparative analysis of Mouffe’s and Kaswan’s strategic aims and proposals that most of their differences concern the function and desirability of conflict/cooperation in socio-political life. More abstractly, I claim that Kaswan’s endorsement of the cooperative movement is framed by a quasi-foundational democratic theory with a substantive notion of human interests in the same way that Mouffe’s valorization of non-violent conflict is informed by a post-foundational democratic theory working from highly formal anthropological presuppositions.