Identity politics and the democratization of democracy: Oscillations between power and reason in radical democratic and standpoint theory

Criticism against identity politics, both in public discourse and political theory, has intensified over the past decade with the rise of right-wing populism and the polarization of politics (Walters, 2018). Such criticism portrays identity politics as a threat to democracy, alleging that it erodes community, rational communication, and solidarity. Drawing on radical democratic and standpoint theories, I argue for the opposite thesis; namely, that identity politics is crucial for the democratization of democracy. I show that democratization works through disrupting hegemonic discourse and is, therefore, a matter of power; and that such power politics are reasonable when following minority standpoints generated through identity politics. In other words, the universal democratic claims of equality and freedom can only become effective through their repeated actualization in particular power struggles. Identity politics is a contested term. Nevertheless, there are systematic overlaps between current criticisms of identity politics that mainly repeat arguments that have been similarly articulated since the 1990s. Communitarians criticize identity politics as dividing the political community, liberals criticize it as disruptive of the public sphere and free deliberation (Fukuyama, 2018; Habermas, 2020; Lilla, 2017), and Marxist and anarchist theorists argue that identity politics undermines the struggle for justice and emancipation and stabilizes state power through neoliberal diversity politics (Fraser, 1990, 2007; Kumar et al., 2018; Newman, 2010; Táíwò, 2022; for a critique of these debates, see Bickford, 1997; Walters, 2018; Young, 2000, pp. 82−87; Paul, 2019). Based on universalist accounts of the political,1 all three positions share the concern that particularist identity politics conflates social positions with epistemological possibilities and political positions, resulting in standpoint fundamentalism. In other words, the critics claim that, in identity politics, it matters more who speaks than what is said.2 Discussions about difference (Benhabib, 1996), counterpublics (Fraser, 1990), and inclusion (Young, 2000) at the intersection of deliberative and Critical theory early criticized such universalist accounts of the political for their exclusionist effects. While these works offer valuable resources to construct the argument that strengthening identity politics is important for the development of more inclusive deliberations and institutions, they frame this as a correction of reason, leaving the aspect of power underdeveloped. To understand both the severe resistance against more inclusive politics and the strategic need for non-deliberative means to achieve it—such as protest, civil disobedience, “cancel culture,” or uprising—what is necessary is a theoretical framework that describes democratization as an oscillation between power and reason. Even Mansbridge (1996) does not offer such a theoretical framework, despite explicitly arguing—contrary to deliberative democracy—that power through coercion is central for democracy and rightly points to the need for “protected enclaves” (p. 57) for the development of minoritarian standpoints. As the tension between power and reason, and respectively, particularism and universalism, is at the center of agonistic3 radical democratic theory (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001; Lefort, 1988a; Mouffe, 2008; Rancière, 1999), it is better suited to develop such a framework than deliberative approaches.4 This tension should not be understood as one where identity politics is positioned on the side of particularism and its critics on the side of universality; rather, it is constitutive of identity politics, and in extension, democracy itself. “Identity politics”—in the sense of the history of the term's origin as well as the current debate—refers to the political practice of marginalized groups who, in relation to the construction of a collective identity and standpoint, defend themselves against their disadvantages due to structures, cultures, and norms of the majority society. Following Combahee River Collective (1979, p. 365), a Black feminist organization, identity politics can be defined as “focusing upon our own oppression,” thus starting from particular experiences and standpoints. However, this should not be conflated—as some contemporary critics do—with essentialist interest group politics. Rather, identity politics is directed against oppression in general, insofar as it is an intersectional and “integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” (Combahee River Collective, 1979, p. 362). This oscillation between particularist and universalist accounts of oppression is not a flaw in the Collective's text but stems from the inherent tension within identity politics. This tension has been discussed in the rich debates on identity politics, especially in the writings of intersectional feminism (Alcoff, 1988; Alcoff et al., 2006; Bickford, 1997; Briskin, 1990; Gamson, 1995; Hekman, 1999; Kruks, 1995; McNay, 2010; Nicholson, 2008; Whittier, 2017; see also the edited volumes, Benhabib et al., 1995; Hames-Garcia & Moya, 2000; and for an overview, see Bernstein, 2005; as well as Heyes, 2020). However, there is no systematic account of the tension between particularism and universalism in these works, which, indebted to that tradition, I will develop with the aim of strengthening it. As “identity politics” is a contested term, alternative conceptual strategies exist. For example, Young (2000) speaks of the “politics of difference” of “structural social groups” to describe what I call “identity politics,” while, following critics (pp. 82–87), she uses the term “identity politics” for the tendency toward substantialist, merely cultural, and potentially non-intersectional exclusive group-interest politics (p. 86). As the common understanding of “identity politics” entails the breadth of the critical politics of marginalized groups, I think it is important to defend, specify, and revive that term, instead of trying to establish a new term that is not currently criticized. This conceptual strategy underscores that, in general, the critical politics of marginalized groups promote democratization and inclusivity. This, of course, does not mean that all identity politics are equally democratizing. The argument is thus not a carte blanche for every practice of identity politics; rather, the reconstruction of the democratizing function of identity politics is not only descriptive but also normative, as it allows a differentiation of identity politics from exclusive group-interest politics and thereby criticizes identity political projects if they show tendencies to develop into exclusive group-interest politics. To understand identity politics as a democratizing oscillation between power and reason, the radical democratic account has to be refined through standpoint theory. I will proceed in the following steps. First, I will systematically reconstruct the equivalences of both theoretical traditions, filling a gap in the existing research literature that is ignorant of these equivalences. Both put forward a critique of common notions of objectivity and universality, privileging the particularity of oppressed knowledges.5 In contrast to the communitarian, liberal, and Marxist accounts that are based on universalist conceptions of the political, these traditions argue that breaking through established understandings of universal discourse through the use of particular identity politics is central to the further democratization of democracy. However, the radical democratic affirmation of identity politics as a particular disruption of the universal prima facie confirms the critics’ fear that identity politics destroys universal normativity and with it the very foundation of democracy, by fostering exclusive group-interest politics. This points to a more fundamental problem in radical democratic thought, which Volk (2018) recently called a lack of consensus orientation. If politics is only conceptualized as critique, disruption, and protest, this amounts to a rather one-sided account of politics that blends out the importance of institutions and deliberation. Thus, while radical democratic theory helps to understand that the tension between universalism and particularism is constitutive of democracy and identity politics, it risks resolving this tension toward particularism by overemphasizing power instead of reason as definitive of the political. It is, therefore, necessary to correct its lack of consensus orientation to develop the radical democratic account of identity politics. To this end, in the second section, I demonstrate how standpoint theory refines the radical democratic interpretation of identity politics. This addresses the concerns that identity politics undermines intersubjective discourse and offers a solution to the lack of consensus orientation in radical democratic theory in general.6 Standpoint theory allows a substantiation and reconciliation of two claims that are contradictory at first sight. First, that particular standpoints are necessary to criticize the current discursive and institutional order, and second, that such standpoints are based on intersubjective reason and “strong objectivity” (Harding, 1993). This helps to clarify the democratizing function of identity politics and the normativity of radical democratic theory in order to criticize interpretations of this school that reject any claims to objectivity based on the fundamental contingency of the political. Such a total rejection of objectivity is the philosophical basis for the aforementioned lack of consensus orientation in radical democratic thought, leading to dissolving the power/reason tension toward power. The radical democratic and standpoint theoretical interpretation of identity politics that I propose thereby explains that the ongoing oscillation between power and reason, respectively, particularism and universalism, is constitutive of identity politics, and by extension, of democracy. Radical democracy shares two fundamental arguments with standpoint theory. In this section, I will reconstruct the critique of objectivity and universality, and in the following section, I will detail how both theoretical traditions privilege oppressed knowledges. Radical democratic theory is a postfoundationalist theory: It claims that foundations are contingent and therefore an objective theory of the social cannot exist (Marchart, 2007). Rather, politics is the attempt to universalize one particular interpretation of the social and to install it as a hegemonic regime. A primary concern of radical democratic critique is hence the depoliticization caused by expert knowledges and restrictive discourses in neoliberal post-democracy, which often sideline critical voices. Acknowledging the differences in their respective positions, I will reconstruct the critiques of objectivity by Lefort, Mouffe, Laclau, and Rancière. As early as 1966, Lefort (1990)—a key thinker in the tradition of radical democracy—developed a notion of the political as necessarily contingent and contested. He develops his account by criticizing the objectifying theories of Marxism on the one hand, and liberalism on the other. Both are foundationalist theories: they derive politics from an objective account of the social, in the form of economic determinism in the case of Marxism, and as a universalism incompatible with social conflict in the case of liberalism. Both tell stories of an origin of the political that presupposes an ahistorical position (Lefort & Gauchet, 1990, p. 95). Analyzing the logic of the attempts to provide a foundation, and their continuous failure, Lefort defines the political as the ongoing conflictual foundation of society (Lefort & Gauchet, 1990, p. 96). Democracy is the political regime—in contrast to totalitarianism—that acknowledges the original division of society and continuously gives it unity through political representation (Lefort & Gauchet, 1990, p. 110). The argument is epistemological: there is no universal account of society, but only the contingent and particular political attempts to ground society. Democracy thus takes into account the notion that there is no objective and universal account of society, but that its identity is essentially conflictual and contested (Lefort, 1988b). Thus, attempts to bring the democratic conflict to closure by positing a particular truth as universalistic and objective against the plurality of ideologies is, according to Lefort, totalitarian (Lefort & Gauchet, 1990, p. 111). Laclau and Mouffe (2001) take up Lefort's theory—the political as contingency and conflict—in their approach to hegemony, antagonism, and radical democracy. First, their work is crucial for analyzing how identities and political subjectivities are constituted within this postfoundationalist framework; something that I will return to later. Second, they analyze—more historically and concretely than Lefort—how objectification and universalization work in contemporary societies. Laclau's (2000a, 2000b) account of politics as a logic of the universalization of particular demands helps to understand how a neoliberal regime of expertocracy, liberal and deliberative political theory, and the breakdown of social democratic parties, installed a political hegemony that is objectifying politics by suppressing political conflict and agonistic alternatives. Mouffe (2000, 2008) especially elaborated on this critique of post-democracy (Crouch, 2004) as a matter of political theory and the hegemony of liberal and deliberal approaches therein. Thus, objectification is the key strategy of universalization through which the liberal hegemony stabilizes itself. While this (neo-)liberal objectification is anti-democratic and depoliticizing, it is not necessarily totalitarian. Rancière (1999, pp. 21−43) radicalizes the critique of universalism and objectivity through his differentiation of “politics” and “police.” “Police” is Rancière's term for the regime of institutionalized politics as well as the discursive and normative order, while “politics” is the assertion of equality through the eruptive contestation of police from the position of those excluded by the police. It is key that “police,” as an institutional order, is based on a regime of the visible and sayable. It is thus connected to an epistemic order that defines some as intelligible while radically excluding others. This means that every positive order is partial, excluding, and thereby unjust. Thus, Rancière's account helps to debunk claims that pertain to the universality and objectivity of a given order, as the critics of identity politics do, by cloaking such injustice and stabilizing the order. Standpoint theories put forward a similar criticism against claims of objectivity and universality. While they focus on academic truth production and not on political hegemony, they share the critique that objectivity and universality are devices that cloak the particular, political, and unjust character of a given order. From feminist and Black perspectives, standpoint theories show that a traditional understanding of objectivity leads to precisely the opposite of a realist and plausible assessment of the social: a particular perspective of cishet male and White mainstream society. This means that scientific claims to neutrality are never neutral; they cloak their particular standpoint. Both radical democracy and standpoint theory agree that when conceptualized as the opposite of politics, objectivity leads to a particular perspective of hegemony that hides its particularity by presenting it as universality. The sciences’ commitment to social neutrality disarmed the scientifically productive potential of politically engaged research on behalf of oppressed groups. […] Androcentric, economically advantaged, racist, Eurocentric, and heterosexist conceptual frameworks ensured systematic ignorance and error about not only the lives of the oppressed, but also about the lives of their oppressors and thus about how nature and social relations in general worked (Harding, 2004b, p. 5). Thus, the conventional conception of objectivity and universality leads to the presentation of the particular standpoint of the privileged as universal. By linking this analysis to the concepts of “hegemony” and “police” in radical democracy—which emphasize the interplay between knowledge and power—one can argue that conventional views on universality and objectivity bolster the majoritarian hegemony and the prevailing “police.” These very mechanisms are at stake in the contemporary critique of identity politics: by rejecting identity politics as particularistic, they universalize the perspective of the privileged. Is there, then, a way out of these false foundationalist conceptions of objectivity and universality that lead to hegemonic knowledge regimes? Standpoint theory and radical democracy do not only share the postfoundationalist critique of universality and objectivity, they also argue that privileging oppressed knowledges can help overcome foundationalist universality. Standpoint theories develop “stronger” accounts of objectivity that take into account the plurality of standpoints. However, focusing on epistemological discussions, they do not lay out the consequences for democracy that might follow from this standpoint thinking. These consequences become clear through radical democratic theory. Standpoint theories argue for “starting off thought” from the lives of marginalized people [as this] will generate illuminating critical questions that do not arise in thought that begins from dominant group lives (Harding, 1993, p. 56). The critique of conventional objectivity does not entail overthrowing the concept of objectivity altogether. On the contrary, it is about conceptualizing a better version of objectivity, which Harding (1993) calls “strong objectivity.” This objectivity is reflective of the contextualization and limitations of particular knowledges. It is “about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object” (Haraway, 1988, p. 583). In other words, “Only partial perspective promises objective vision” (Haraway, 1988, p. 583). Standpoint theories do not solely make this claim philosophically but are also based on the real existing perspectives of marginalized people. The analysis of these perspectives shows that due to their situatedness, they achieve knowledge that remains undisclosed to the hegemonic perspective but needs to be taken into account to achieve strong objectivity. Thus, standpoint theories are not simply about the pluralization of knowledge; they also assign epistemic privilege to oppressed knowledges (Toole, 2021). The epistemic privilege of oppressed knowledges has been shown through the experiences of women and the experiences of Blacks and People of Color, who need a specific understanding of the social to navigate and survive it. For example, Hartsock (2004) argues that the position of women in reproductive labor enables a critique of masculine ideology. Black scholars refer to personal experience to describe their particular social, and thereby epistemological position within the racialized order. Early, Du Bois (2007, p. 8) spoke of a “double consciousness” that Blacks develop. In a similar vein, hooks (1984, preface) argued that the Black perspective is twofold, both from “the outside in and from the inside out,” as racism requires the awareness of the separation of margin and center. Thus, Blacks in the United States developed an “oppositional view—a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors” (hooks, 1984, preface). Because of their Black feminist social position, Black female researchers can see anomalies in the normal sciences better than white scholars; for example, the systematic leaving out of Black perspectives from normal research (Collins, 1986). Taken together, these diverse empirical accounts of the differentiated positions amount to the insight that it is only through a plurality of “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988) that a better account of oppression can be reached. Radical democratic theory also privileges oppressed knowledges. Because no universal perspective is possible in postfoundationalism, radical democracy conceptualizes politics as standpoint-dependent. When democracy is understood as protest by the excluded and disenfranchised, it is dependent on their standpoint. To privilege the perspectives of the oppressed is rooted in the Marxist account of the proletariat as a revolutionary class, and radical democratic theory is post-Marxian in so far as it transforms this standpoint thinking to disentangle it from economic determinism. For Lefort (1990), democracy is characterized by the emptiness of the place of power and the institutionalization of struggles about that power, stemming from the non-fixed identity of society. This is the thinking of pluralistic democracy, based on the impossibility of conventional foundations, and the politically disastrous consequences of attempts to do so. Just as with the standpoint theoretical conception of situated knowledges, Lefort thus puts forward a pluralistic epistemology. His postfoundationalist theory of democracy can thus be seen as a first step in drawing out the consequences of standpoint epistemologies for political theory. However, as Ingram (2006) shows, Lefort is ambiguous. He can be, and has been, interpreted in a liberal and radical democratic vein, emphasizing either the need for stable institutions and universal human rights to confine social conflict, or the ongoing critique of the exclusions of a given regime. While the liberal interpretation falls back on what standpoint theories call the “god trick”—that is, an (imagined) neutral perspective that gives the framework to conflict but is not itself contested—the radical democratic interpretation is more plausible when taking into account standpoint theories. Rancière is a radical democratic reader of Lefort. His conception of democracy, as an ongoing struggle against exclusions by the excluded, is directed against a substantive notion of the people as homogeneous and self-identical. This argument can be further supported by standpoint theory, as the “god trick” not only needs to be avoided from the institutional perspective but also when it comes to political subjectivities. Presupposing identical people in political theory entails a majoritarian conception that leads to the epistemic exclusions of minoritarian perspectives analyzed by standpoint theory. The privileging of oppressed knowledges is intrinsic to Rancière's aforementioned difference between “police” and “politics.” “Police” entails political exclusions rooted in epistemic exclusions targeting specific groups. These can only be countered through the political–epistemological demands of these groups to be included through their assertion of equality. Rancière calls such particular demands for inclusion in the name of equality “politics.” Thus, standpoint theory helps to understand the development of a standpoint as the necessary condition for politics (in Rancière's sense). Radical democratic theory, on the other hand, makes clear that such struggles about political epistemology are not confined to the space of science, but are at the core of the political, transcending any given institutional regime. Vis-a-vis standpoint theory, Rancière helps to understand that the struggle for inclusion into “police” has no clear limitations, but can and often needs to transgress given institutionalized forms of political deliberation; for example, in civil disobedience or revolutionary upheavals. Thus, while standpoint theory privileges oppressed knowledges to develop a stronger notion of objectivity, radical democratic theory shows that without significant political protest and change, it is unlikely that such “stronger objectivity” has political effects. Privileging oppressed knowledges and standpoints is thus pivotal for the further democratization of democracy. How this works concretely in contemporary Western liberal democracies becomes clear in the work of Laclau and Mouffe (2001), who are concerned with how the identity politics of the new social movements can radicalize the democratic revolution by forming new alliances. They analyze the options for leftist politics after it became clear that the traditional Marxist strategy had failed, based, as it was, on an essentialist notion of the working class as a revolutionary subject. The new social movements, which confront various forms of oppression (such as racial or sexual), possess the potential to rejuvenate the radical democratic pursuit of freedom and equality for all; that is, to further democratize democracy. While standpoint theory helps to analyze the epistemic conditions under which such identity political movements can come about, Mouffe and Laclau are key for analyzing how such emancipative politics can become hegemonic. It is only through connecting the different particular projects to a larger one, by so-called “chains of equivalences” (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. 182), that the hegemony of neoliberalism can be challenged. This entails that the critique of universality that is based on “conventional objectivity” does not mean disposing of universality altogether. Quite the contrary, according to Laclau (2000a, 2000b), politics necessarily entails the universalization of particular demands. Yet, how does emancipatory postfoundationalist universalization differ from its false foundationalist counterpart, and upon which concept of objectivity—if at all—is it anchored? In the next section, I argue that standpoint theory's notion of “stronger objectivity” helps to answer this question. Given this systematic equivalence of radical democracy and standpoint theory, their remaining differences can be harnessed productively: standpoint theory helps to refine a plausible radical democratic interpretation of identity politics; radical democracy can learn from standpoint theory that identity politics is not about radical disagreement but intersubjective understanding. That identity politics can be productively interpreted in the framework of radical democracy became clear throughout the discussion of the systematic equivalences between radical democratic theory and standpoint theory. Identity politics is based on the formation of particular standpoints of oppressed groups, and for radical democratic theory, democratization entails the critique of exclusions from such particular standpoints and not from the majoritarian or hegemonic perspective. Thus, following radical democratic theory, identity politics is not a threat to democracy (as universalistic political theorists argue), but necessary for the further democratization of democracy. However, a critic well versed in the current debates on radical democratic theory might remain unconvinced by this interpretation of identity politics. In these debates, radical democratic theory is criticized for reducing politics to a struggle for power through protest and insurrection, as well as having insufficient concepts of normativity, community, deliberation, consensus, and no account of good political institutions (Arato, 2013; Bergem & Bergem, 2019; Herrmann & Flatscher, 2020; Wiley, 2002). This critique mirrors the ongoing debate around identity politics. It is criticized, much like radical democratic theory, for undermining intersubjectivity and discourse due to its exclusivist power politics; for example, by imposing norms of “political correctness” that prevent further discussion or by excluding participants from debates through “cancel culture.” If both radical democratic theory and identity politics share the same problem—the reduction of politics to power that blocks intersubjectivity and reason and might lead to exclusive group-interest politics—a critic of identity politics would have reason to reject the radical democratic interpretation of identity politics as necessary for democratization. For the critic, such a radical democratic interpretation of identity politics would not solve the problem of identity politics dissolving democracy; on the contrary, she would see it as a confirmation of this problem. To defend the radical democratic approach, and to respond to the problem of differentiating democratizing identity politics from potentially exclusive group-interest politics, I will first reconstruct a rational core of such criticism. The problem is, according to Volk (2018, p. 11), “that radical-democratic thinking overemphasizes one central element of democracy, namely the manifestation of conflict, and falls short in properly grasping the second central element in conceptual terms, namely the postulate of understanding between political opponents.” This underdeveloped account of understanding leads to a series of problems, for example, a lack of normative criteria to distinguish between “progressive and regressive forms of political protest” (p. 11), and a tendency toward decisionism instead of normative justifications. The reason for this tendency lies in the critique of universalism and objectivity that I reconstructed above. When the traditional modes of normative theory not only need to fail in their goal to reach universal normativity but also, when the very attempt to reach such justifications leads to the stabilization of hegemony, it is understandable that radical democratic theory tends not to engage with questions of intersubjective justification and draws instead on the given normativity within social movements without further questioning it (Volk, 2018, p. 14). The following critique of radical democratic theory's overemphasis on power could just as well b