Written in English in 1985 by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a work of political theory in the post-Marxist tradition. Developing several sharp divergences from the tenets of canonical Marxist thought, the authors begin by tracing historically varied discursive constitutions of class, political identity, and social self-understanding, and then tie these to the contemporary importance of hegemony as a destabi...
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Written in English in 1985 by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a work of political theory in the post-Marxist tradition. Developing several sharp divergences from the tenets of canonical Marxist thought, the authors begin by tracing historically varied discursive constitutions of class, political identity, and social self-understanding, and then tie these to the contemporary importance of hegemony as a destabilized analytic which avoids the traps of various procedures Mouffe and Laclau feel constitute a foundational flaw in Marxist thought: essentializations of class identity, the use of a priori interpretative paradigms with respect to history and contextualization, the privileging of the base/superstructure binary above other explicative models.
The book is divided into four lengthy chapters (~50 pages each). The first two chapters deal with conceptual developments in the manner of an intellectual history, albeit with much more of an eye to...
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