Mouffe’s analysis is important for a number of reasons. First, while based in the world as it actually exists – a world of difference and diversity, it also points to the normative and the importance of politics and political activity 124 Paul Bunyan
by guest on January 23, 2016 from as the means through which such differences and potential antagonisms can be resolved or legitimately contested. Second, it provides an understanding of social change as being essentially adversarial in nature involving conflict as well as consensus. In the theory of community development, there has tended to be an oversimplification in the dichotomy that is made between consensus- and conflict-based models of social change. In reality, social change involves both, but as discussed earlier, under neo-liberalism and, in particular, the narratives of partnership and the Big Society, the agonistic dimension has largely been written out of the equation. Third,Mouffe’s understanding is located within a wider conceptual framework of power and hegemony. Thus for Mouffe, ‘What is at stake in the agonistic struggle ... is the very configuration of power relations around which a given society is structured’ (2005, p. 21).