Mouffe, Chantal (1943–)

AbstractChantal Mouffe started her career in the late 1970s as a Marxist, and today she is one of the leading theorists in the Anglo‐American academy, working with a broadly poststructuralist approach. Mouffe's oeuvre moves through a number of distinct phases: an initial Marxist period elaborated in her first edited volume of 1979,Gramsci and Marxist Theory; a post‐Marxist stage developed in the influential 1985Hegemony and Social Strategy, co‐authored with Ernesto Laclau; and a consolidated period, from the early 1990s on, where Mouffe's work is best understood as part of an emerging tradition of agonistic democracy and where, in particular, she has sought to address the challenges posed by the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt.