Chantal Mouffe

Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist and a recurrent Visiting Fellow of IWM. She has lectured at many universities in Europe, North America and Latin America. She has held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, and the CNRS Paris. From 1989-1995, she served as Programme Director at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster in the United Kingdom, where she directs the Centre for the Study of Democracy. Mouffe is well known for her agonistic conception of democracy and viewed as one of the main theoretical references of Podemos. The critical dialogue with Marxism and the Left that she opened up in Gramsci and Marxist Theory (1979) characterises the main thrust of her work. Many further and highly successful books include Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985, with Ernesto Laclau), The Return of the Political (1993), On the Political (2005), and For a Left Populism (2018). Recently, she became most famous for advocating a left populism that is oriented towards equality and social justice.