Chantal Mouffe

Chantal Mouffe (born 17 June 1943) is a Belgian political theorist, currently teaching at the University of Westminster.

She is best known for her contribution to the development—jointly with Ernesto Laclau, with whom she co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy—of the so-called Essex School of discourse analysis, a type of post-Marxist political inquiry drawing on Gramsci, post-structuralism and theories of identity, and redefining Leftist politics in terms of radical democracy and context-free grammars of power relations. Her highest cited publication is Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics at 15309 times, according to Google Scholar.

Chantal Mouffe studied at the Universities of Louvain, Paris and Essex and has worked in many universities throughout the world (in Europe, North America and Latin America). She has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton and the CNRS (Paris). During the 1989–1995 period she served as Programme Director at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. She currently holds a professorship at the Department of Politics and International Relations, the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom, where she directs the Centre for the Study of Democracy.