Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemonic Project: The Story So Far (original) (raw)
Related papers
Since its original publication fifteen years ago, this hugely influential book has been at the centre of much debate. The arguments and contrQversies it has aroused are, furthermore, far from abating: the disintegration of the SoVIet bloc, the emergence of new social and political identities linked to the transformation of late capitalism, and the crisis of a left-wing project whose essentialist underpinnings have increasingly come under fire have, If anything, made more relevant than ever the theoretical perspective that the book proposes. Moreover the political project of 'radical and plural democracy' that it advocates provides a much-needed antidote to the attempts to formulate a Third Way capable of overcoming the classical opposition between Left and Right.
Two Theories of Hegemony: Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau in Conversation
Political Theory, 2021
This essay stages a critical conversation between Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, comparing their different appropriations of Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony. In the 1980s, Hall and Laclau engaged with Gramsci and with one another in order to conceptualize what they regarded as a triangular relation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the Left, and the emergence of new social movements. While many of their readers emphasize the undeniable similarities and mutual influences that exist between Hall and Laclau, this essay focuses on the differences between their theories of hegemony and locates the starkest contrast between them at the level of theoretical practice. While the main lesson that Hall drew from Gramsci was the privileging of conjunctural analysis, Laclau proceeded to locate the concept of hegemony at a higher level of abstraction, developing a political ontology increasingly indifferent to any specific conjuncture. The essay argues that this difference between conjunctural analysis and political ontology has a significant impact on Hall's and Laclau's respective understandings of two key political formations: populism and identity politics. Thus by focusing on these two formations, the essay argues that Hall's work should not be read as a derivative or even undertheorized version of Laclau's, for this tendency obscures substantial differences between their
Post-hegemony: politics outside the usual post-Marxist paradigm (2014, slightly revised & updated)
This article looks at Laclau and Mouffe’s work as a starting point to raise some questions concerning post-Marxist and/or post-Gramscian accounts of politics. I argue that their take on hegemony oscillates between conceiving it as one form of politics amongst others and as the form of politics as such. They ultimately settle for the latter. This is problematic, if only because the absence of an outside shields their theory of hegemony from the test of its own contingency and prevents it from being falsified. This discussion clears the field for post-hegemony. I use ‘hegemony’ in the specific sense that these authors give to the term and not to designate the dominant force in a contested political field. By preceding it with the prefix ‘post’ I acknowledge temporality as a conceptual shift rather than as a discontinuity between past and present: what comes after hegemony is ways of thinking and doing politics that don’t conform to what the theory of hegemony prescribes. Yet what is at stake is not any outside. Electoral politics has been around for a long time and rarely bothered with the mechanics of the hegemonic format. Post-hegemony instead names an outside that seeks to elude hegemony explicitly. It includes viral politics and some aspects of what people like Beasley-Murray, Hardt, Negri and Virno have called the politics of the multitude, such as exodus, exodus or defection that I will examine here, but it need not be limited to these.
Post-hegemony: politics outside the usual post-Marxist paradigm (Contemporary Politics, 2007)
Contemporary Politics, 2007
This article looks at Laclau and Mouffe’s work as a starting point to raise some questions concerning post-Marxist and/or post-Gramscian accounts of politics. I argue that their take on hegemony oscillates between conceiving it as one form of politics amongst others and as the form of politics as such. They ultimately settle for the latter. This is problematic, if only because the absence of an outside shields their theory of hegemony from the test of its own contingency and prevents it from being falsified. This discussion clears the field for post-hegemony. I use ‘hegemony’ in the specific sense that these authors give to the term and not to designate the dominant force in a contested political field. By preceding it with the prefix ‘post’ I acknowledge temporality as a conceptual shift rather than as a discontinuity between past and present: what comes after hegemony is ways of thinking and doing politics that don’t conform to what the theory of hegemony prescribes. Yet what is at stake is not any outside. Electoral politics has been around for a long time and rarely bothered with the mechanics of the hegemonic format. Post-hegemony instead names an outside that seeks to elude hegemony explicitly. It includes viral politics and some aspects of the politics of the multitude like exodus or defection that I will examine here, but it need not be limited to these.
The aim of this presentation is twofold. On the one hand it attempts to retrace the emergence of the notion of the hegemonic project, in various debates, beginning with the debate within British Marxism on Thatcherism as a hegemonic project. On the other hand, by means of a return to Gramsci's thinking on hegemony, it attempts to rethink the notion of the hegemonic project in contemporary political debates in the left and to suggest that we must attempt to think of hegemonic projects not as simple political projects or electoral strategies, but rather as historical initiatives of the subaltern.
Hegemony and the future of democracy: Ernesto Laclau's political philosophy
JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 1999
For political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, social theory must become more strategic if it is to provide a productive analysis of the complexity of contemporary society. Grasping this complexity requires a discourse combining traditions of thought that begin from different starting points but that all converge on political analysis. Thus, as Laclau points out in the interview below, he seeks to deepen the project of radical democracy by operating deconstructively within Marxist categories in order to present an analysis that goes beyond Marxism but that "nourished itself from Marxism as one its roots.» It is toward the goal of developing a strategy for the left that he has devoted himself, first in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (coauthored with Chantal Mouffe) and more recently in Emancipation{s} and New Reflections on the Revolution o/Our Time.
The Concept of Hegemony Goes Beyond Identity Politics and Economism
This summer Palgrave Macmillan published the book Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism by the Argentinean Marxist Juan Dal Maso. Left Voice member Jimena Vergara interviewed Dal Maso, whose book deals with the concept of hegemony as articulated by two of the most brilliant revolutionary Marxists of the 20th century, Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky.
Deconstructing Neoliberal Hegemony
The International Friends of Ilyenkov have been sharing their work on contemporary philosophical and political challenges since 2012. At this, our second symposium, we build on the collective reading and discussion of Ilyenkov’s writings and theoretical work carried out in different disciplines by IFI members since then. The aim is to develop holistic, this-sided dialectical concepts1 that probe and reveal the parts and their dialectical relationship to the whole of today’s neoliberal capitalist society. This approach helps us understand hegemony as a complex of self-related opposites as well as a social-historical formation. We are informed by Ilyenkov’s work on the contradictory nature of the Ideal and his work in demonstrating the movement from the abstract to the concrete and to practice. We probe its internally contradictory nature to discover and help shape forces that can move beyond it.
Fragmented Hegemony in Neoliberalism (2017)
Unpublished
Though Gramsci’s concept of hegemony underwent varyingly intensive phases of perception since the 1970s, it has managed to occupy an increasingly important position in the works of critical theory. Quite rightly, hegemony has become a central term of materialist theorising, since it is able to integrate economic and political, as well as cultural perspectives. The significance of Gramsci’s work resides in his seminal contribution to the development of a non-reductionist materialist theory of politics and the state. Besides the concepts of common sense, hegemony, civil society, and the integral state, specific instances of bourgeois domination are highlighted, while an economistic-deterministic access to the power-critical theory of Marx is avoided. The term hegemony brings to attention social struggles as well as bourgeois techniques of leadership and the production of consensus. Nevertheless, Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony is not detached from economic processes, but explicitly includes economic struggles. The question of whether neoliberalism’s specific mode of production can be adequately explained with the term hegemony is yet to be answered, and is, especially in the German discourse, much debated.1 Subsequently, we want to argue in favour of understanding also the current constellation of neoliberalism as hegemonically mediated. Yet, we assume the existence of a fragmented hegemony, a hegemony formation in crisis.2 Fragmentation in this context does not refer to the fact that hegemony, as a technique of domination, is always related to divisions among the dominating and the subaltern groups within society. It is rather about a historically specific mode of hegemony which is highly selective, non- contemporaneous and linked with non-hegemonic techniques of domination. The purpose of our elaborations is not one in terms of the history of ideas or a philological one. It is intended to be analytical and aims to offer a diagnosis of contemporary times by capturing the change of form that hegemony underwent in neoliberalism. We assume that postwar Fordism3 represents the hegemonic constellation par excellence. At the same time, we also argue that neoliberalism cannot be adequately understood as beyond hegemony. Terminologically, we distinguish our concept from a universalising usage of hegemony (1.), and advocate for a weak historicisation of the term, which does not imply equating hegemony with Fordism (2.). Following this, a more concrete terminological definition of fragmented hegemony is undertaken (3.). Finally, we want to explain our conceptual considerations concerning the mode of operation of fragmented hegemony with the example of governing by debt which is of paramount importance for neoliberalism in this crisis (4.). In the perspective of critical theory, which is decisive for our reasoning, the following reflections are not understood as a purely academic exercise since the assessment of a historical constellation is crucial for the form of its critique and the political strategy of oppositional and emancipatory struggles.