The Postmodern Turn in Political Theory: Power, Discourse, and the Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy

SANO MURMU

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i02.74507

The Postmodern Turn in Political Theory: Power, Discourse, and the Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy

Author(s)	Mr. SANO MURMU
Country	India
Abstract	Abstract The postmodern turn in political theory represents a seismic epistemological and normative change of the certainties of modernist structures in the face of fragmented, contingent and discursively constituted view of politics. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard are also thinkers that undermine the conceptual grounding of universal truth, rationality and stable political subjectivity and thus reconfigure the conceptual landscape of power and legitimacy. This paper explores the ways in which postmodern political theory transforms the conceptualization of power into a diffuse, relational, and networked relationship between knowledge and discourse as opposed to being concentrated in a centralized position of the state or ruling elite. It also examines how discourse is involved in the production of political realities, identities and regimes of truth based on the discursive and hegemonic paradigm introduced by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It is within this theoretical framework that the paper critically examines the new crisis with regard to democratic legitimacy in the modern societies. The weakening of the normative basis of the democratic consensus and public reason is due to the erosion of meta-narratives, the proliferation of rival truth claims, and the mediatization of politics. The legitimacy becomes volatile and disputed as democratic institutions are more and more likely to work in a terrain of fragmented identities, algorithmic communications and symbolic struggles. Postmodernism is a space that enables pluralism, marginal voices and critical resistance, but it is also a space that raises the threat of eroding the potential of shared norms and joint decision making. The article ends by suggesting a re-conceptualization of democratic legitimacy that balances postmodern lessons with the imperative to have normative foundations, participatory politics and institutional responsibility in a more complicated political order.
Keywords	Postmodernism; Political Theory; Power; Discourse; Democratic Legitimacy; Foucault; Hegemonic; Laclau & Mouffe.
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 2, March-April 2026
Published On	2026-04-12
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i02.74507

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The Postmodern Turn in Political Theory: Power, Discourse, and the Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy

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