Can articulations save the planet?

Chantal Mouffe has played an active role in promoting the ‘discursive hegemonic’ politics of left populism, not least in her two most recent books, For a Left Populism and Towards a Green Democratic Revolution: Left Populism and the Power of Affects. Taking these books together, this review article shows how these interventions build on Mouffe's earlier work on ‘the political’ and her vision of ‘radical democracy’ based on an ‘agonistic pluralism’. It argues that we find in Mouffe's latest work some of the salient problems of her overall project. The article focuses on two such problems: Mouffe's notion of antagonism (and its cognate, agonism); and the question of collective action.