Chantal Mouffe (French: [muf]; born 17 June 1943)[1] is a Belgian political theorist, formerly teaching at University of Westminster.

She currently holds a professorship at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster in the United Kingdom, where she is a member of the Centre for the Study of Democracy.

A prominent critic of deliberative democracy (especially in its Rawlsian and Habermasian versions), she is also known for her use of the work of Carl Schmitt, mainly his concept of "the political", in proposing a radicalization of modern democracy—what she calls "agonistic pluralism".

[7] The sociologist Pierre Birnbaum believes that Chantal Mouffe's theory is "fundamentally foreign to any Marxist or even socialist demonstration, and also contrary to any sociological analysis."

He particularly calls into question her recourse to voters' emotions rather than their reason, "in an explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment embodied by Jürgen Habermas", but also of "the essentials of contemporary political theory"; according to the sociologist, Chantal Mouffe's thought is "an interpretation of the foundations of mobilization certainly inspired explicitly by the experiences of Latin America, but which seems to find its distant origin in the rants, in the 19th century, of Gustave Le Bon or of Gabriel Tarde.