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Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
In this hugely influential book, Laclau and Mouffe examine the workings of hegemony and contemporary social struggles, and their significance for democratic theory. With the emergence of new social and political identities, and the frequent attacks on Left theory for its essentialist underpinnings, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy remains as relevant as ever, positing a much-needed antidote against 'Third Way' attempts to overcome the antagonism between Left and Right.
212 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1985
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About the author
Chantal Mouffe
76 books237 followersChantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist. She holds a professorship at the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom. She is best known as co-author of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Ernesto Laclau. Their thoughts are usually described as post-Marxism as they were both politically active in the social and student movements of the 1960s including working class and new social movements (notably second-wave feminism in Mouffe's case). They rejected Marxist economic determinism and the notion of class struggle being the single crucial antagonism in society. Instead they urged for radical democracy of agonistic pluralism where all antagonisms could be expressed. In their opinion, ‘...there is no possibility of society without antagonism’; indeed, without the forces that articulate a vision of society, it could not exist.
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December 27, 2011
I have to start by saying that I haven't felt so much antipathy towards a book in a long time. But I want to present a thoughtful account of why I personally think it weak, especially sense, in the quarter century since its initial publication, it has been much discussed and celebrated. My evaluation of the book will also be, I hope, an evaluation of the book's historic moment. For I don't think Hegemony and Socialist Strategy could have earned the accolades, or even the notice, that it has received if it appeared at any other era than it did. The book was first published in 1985, and even the preface for the second edition was written in 2000, before 9-11 and the accompanying transformations of the political sphere.
To elucidate the central argument: Laclau & Mouffe (L&M, henceforth) hold that pre-capitalist societies, including some contemporary “third-world countries” that have been under-developed by imperialism, naturally bifurcate into opposing camps because of the extremity of the oppression experienced at the hands of the royalists/ imperialists/ compradores. But, claim L&M, when societies experience “democratic revolutions,” such as those of the French and the American, societies become too complex to bifurcate into two, simplistically class-based camps. Democratic societies are objectively more complex, say L&M, than all societies that came before them.
Even this early into L&M's thesis, I take profound issue. It strikes me as extremely ahistorical (and Euro-centric) to say that until the democratic revolutions of Western Europe and the United States, societies were so simplistically divided between the oppressors and the oppressed, that bifurcation along such lines was inevitable. Indeed, were not the complexities of many pre-industrial societies exactly what colonizers exploited to divide the resistance to them? The Colonial settlers of the Americas exploited the distrust that existed between different Native American tribes to make them form short-lived “alliances” with the Whites so as to attack the other tribes. And such antagonisms have existed in every society at every stage, and have countless times made resistance or revolution impossible. However, in every eon, there have been the occasional successful articulation of unity that lead to general insurrection. Look at the uprisings that characterize Chinese history at every historic step. Nothing about European democratic society is unique for not easily bifurcating. Such articulations of unity are always rare and difficult, there are always a multitude of antagonisms amongst the masses to be over-come, yet there is also no stage in history that shows itself to be fully immune from such senses of unity.
L&M follow their logic and say that Karl Marx came to political maturity in a newly democratic western Europe. He therefore witnessed the birth of a society more complex than he could fully comprehend. He had to, according to L&M, impose the codes of pre-democratic Europe onto the democratic Europe he found himself in. L&M think Marx coped with the complexities of the new society by inventing the theory of class-struggle, by imposing a bifurcating narrative- proletarian v. bourgeoisie- on a society far too nuanced to accord to that model.
Despite their criticisms of Marx, L&M think highly of the early socialist movement. The depressions of the late nineteenth century made the decline of capitalism seem eminent and natural. Leaders such as Kautsky had faith that socialism could be achieved through the proper engagement in the democratic process. As long as the struggle for socialism was carried out under the banner of democratic reform it had, for L&M, liberatory potential because it allows more people to engage in the democratic process, instead of scrounging to survive.
According to L&M's historical narrative, when capitalism recovered from the economic crisis in the early years of the twentieth century, Marxist leaders sought to re-convince themselves of the inevitability of the socialist transformation. Kautsky rationalized the non-transformation of society by saying that there was a profound gap between the consciousness of the proletariat and its historical role. Thus, Marxism began to become more and more theoretical. To get the proletariat to act “correctly” they would have to be made to understand a theory of how things were going to be, not how things were in the present. And this theory was apparently only understood by the intellectual element- the vanguard.
L&M posit that as much as Kautsy and the “vanguard” liked talking about the future, they were already living in the past. They claim that by the beginning of the twentieth century, European and American capitalism had already achieved a degree of complexity where there no longer was, in the sense that Marx understood it, a working class. For L&M, capitalist democracy provides workers with methods of becoming politically engaged in society and raises living standards to such levels that workers are no longer merely workers but also politically engaged consumers. Their interests are thus, L&M claim, no longer fully oppositional to that of the capitalist state. The relation is rather an open articulation that cannot be expected to take any one form or direction.
Here, I must interject some of my deepest objections to L&M's method and project. For all of their interrogations of the “presumptions” of the Marxist tradition, L&M's work rests on a litany of simplistic presumptions. First of all, they presume without argument or defense that the methods of political engagement open to workers in western capitalist societies are legitimate and empowering. What happens to their argument about the integration of the working class into the political process if we do not consider the political process legitimate? On a deeper level, even the sub-title of the book, “Towards a Radical Democratic Politics” presumes that, even if we consider western style representational democracy legitimately democratic, that we consider this a “good” in and of itself. What if one objects to democracy as a principle? And of course, this has been a legitimate subject of philosophical debate since Plato. That democracy is “good” and that western European style representational democracy is in fact democratic are never questioned by L&M. They seem to hold such questions as unthinkable.
The authors point out that in a revolutionary crisis, as conceived by Marxism, every individual struggle, for example, that of peasants being forced to grow crops for royalists and being left with too little to eat, has two identities. It has its individual nature as a struggle, but it is also part of the totality of the crisis. The peasants must be made to feel that their struggle is interrelated with, for instance, the struggle of industrial workers for better wages and working hours. This has been termed by Marxists as “class consciousness.” L&M point out, seemingly thinking it a more radical statement than it is, that class unity is not literal but symbolic- sense the struggles of peasants are not identical to those of the workers, the struggles of women not the same as those of male workers, those of some minorities are different than those of the working class of the dominant race, etc.
We must say, of course, that in the Lacanian sense that L&M are using “symbolic,” class is indeed symbolic as all social knowledge, including that of the “self,” is a linguistic displacement. “Class” is just another way of rationalizing the trauma of being, and on some level, it is an arbitrary one, like all other designations. However, it should here be pointed out that L&M seem to posit the identity of “peasant,” or “woman” as if they are not themselves symbolic. As if there could be a discourse of “the woman” that is fully authentic! This is doubly odd as much of post-structuralist discourse, the tradition that L&M claim to come from, has attempted to prove the arbitrary nature of precisely these types of “foundational” designations and the binaries on which they depend.
So we can say, along with L&M, that every revolutionary crisis is never fully natural but the result of competing political discourses that unite different groups under the banner of one interest over another. This is not a radical claim. It was an idea fully developed by the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s. Gramsci remained an orthodox Marxist-Leninist because he thought that the interests at stake were inherently class interests. L&M, again supposedly radically, claim that the interest at play in hegemony is not necessarily class based and can come from any social situation where an antagonism exists. They feel that this claim fully denounces Marxism as a theory.
I think that a Marxist could respond to L&M's claim of the arbitrary nature of the hegemonic subject- that it need not be class based- by saying: “Okay. So what?” One can recognize that there may in Marx be a somewhat out-dated, and indeed even simplistic and over-totalizing concept of class without throwing out the notion of class struggle. The fact that the working class does not have a naturally privileged revolutionary role, and that class is ultimately just another way of articulating an, at the ultimate instance artificial, concept of unity does not change the fact that class is an effective articulation of revolutionary unity. The fact that the most dogmatically conservative Stalinist might be made uncomfortable by L&M's suggestions about the arbitrary nature of the hegemonic agent does not mean that Marxism as a body of thought need be threatened by it. L&M consistently seek to reduce the latter to the former, with little argumentative rigor.
Indeed, given the ways that racism, in particular, has been an instrumental weapon of atomization of the masses in American society, class would seem an especially potent unitary mantra in America. L&M posit that white-collar employees are not working-class, but this is an illusion that only holds during the times of “comfortable capitalism,” such as the years when the book was written.
As all politics is ultimately just the “game of hegemony” for L&M, they describe two different ways of playing the game. The “authoritarian” way- the Leninist way- relies on a vanguard that represents the working class. The working class remains only a subject of reference. Their presence is thereby made impossible. Instead, their participation is fully symbolic, and every moment in history becomes only a fragment of a larger narrative of a future that never comes.
Again, I say this is a simplistic and context-less way of looking at Leninism. For one thing, what is “Leninism?” L&M discuss it as if it has only one form- that of the monolithically bureaucratic. But societies as radically different as those of Cuba, the DPRK, and Vietnam could all be described as being led by Leninist governments, and anyone who knows anything about any of those countries understands that the cultural traditions of the relative countries have shaped the way their respective states have developed at least as influentially as anything Lenin ever posited. There is no one “Leninism!”
And what are L&M to say to one who holds the participatory bodies of a vanguard party such as that of Cuba to be closer to direct democracy than western representational democracy. L&M consistently hold that any such view is simply non-sensible and unworthy of reply.
L&M then describe the “democratic” method of partaking in hegemony. They hold that entities such as the British Labor party were created by a more advanced working-class than that of the Russia of 1917 and therefore that such entities, which ultimately endorse capitalism, are actually more working class in nature than vanguard parties. So, through this more legitimately democratic participation in discourse, the working class is not represented but must present itself in the political sphere. As not all problems can be reduced to class issues, such as the struggle for gay equality, this present class of worker/consumers must then attend to the needs of a given community- such as the gay community, by acknowledging its presence in the discourse- and the discourse is thus transformed by the new presence within it of the gay community. The workers, in becoming consumers and having their interest tied to that of the state, become the state, and the state in turn begins to acknowledge more diverse struggles.
To describe the landscape of democratic hegemony, L&M return to Lacan and his concept of the suture. The suture is the process by which a subject copes with the unknowability of the other by filling in the mystery of otherness with the subject's own discourse- one's own presumptions about being. The other, for Lacan- the mother, becomes knowable as lacking (devoid of phallus) as opposed to terrifyingly mysterious. Hegemony sutures in that it fills in the unknowability of the political, which is in turn tied to the unknowability of the floating discursive signifier. This suturing is never all together successful, however. If it were, there could be no play of meaning, and therefore no hegemonic operations. Discourses always try to present themselves as a totality. Indeed, claim L&M, contingency is only articulatable because the totality of discourse is always trying, in vain, to reassert itself.
While I acknowledge that any discourse can give way to the impulse to claim that it answers all questions, I think L&M overstate the danger of this impulse. A healthy discursive practice is possible within almost any discourse. Marxism can, and sometimes does, fall into the trap of claiming that it answers all questions, but it does not have to do so to function as a discourse.
A position within the totality of any one discourse L&M call a “moment.” An “element” is a difference that is not articulated so as to make the totality seem possible. L&M call the excess which hegemony cannot suture, and which makes a multiplicity of discourses possible, the “field of discoursivity.” “Antagonisms” are, for L&M, the limits of the experientially social- the situations in which the other prevents a subject from being wholly itself and vice-versa. Any negated difference, any element reduced to a moment, has the potential to become a site of antagonism, and it is just these moments of antagonism that call for a hegemonic articulation in a democratic sphere, so as to re-assert, at least momentarily, the totality.
When different contents- such as skin collar, dress, and language, all function to suggest one fact- i.e. membership in a subordinated group- the differences between the contents become elements through the process of “equivalence.” The identity created through equivalence is purely negative- it is based purely on what the subordinated group is not. Relations of subordination can become sites of antagonism only when their identity is negative. Positive identities of subordination, such as “slave” or “surf” cannot become sites of antagonism because a “slave” is not in any way denied a state of being. There is nothing contradictory about a state of slavery. A slave's “slave-ness” is not in any way denied by the master. Quite the opposite.
At first, this struck me as a truly bizarre claim- as if slavery could not give way to revolt. However, I think L&M mean that situations like slavery give way to bifurcations that are not actually antagonistic. They do not require a hegemonic articulation to maintain the discursive totality because such relations will give way to revolt. What I do think L&M overlook, however, is that slavery is a by-product of democracy! It was most common in western society under Greek and American democracy! While it may be true that slavery leads to bifurcation, not the antagonistic discourse defined by L&M, its status as a democratic institution problemitizes further L&M's claim that representational democracy is uniquely complex, and cannot lead to bifurcated struggles.
Nonetheless, L&M maintain that representational democracy gives way to relations of subordination that are fully excluding of the subordinated party exactly because the subordinated is supposed to have the freedoms owed to all people under humanist democracy. This creates a contradiction- the subordinated is made into what (s)he supposedly cannot be under democracy. This creates a crisis for the discourse of democracy that hegemony will have to address, so as to bring the subordinated party into the discourse. Therefore, L&M declare, any legitimate leftist, who wants to see more liberties, must embrace liberal democracy because it leads to a multiplicity of political spaces, and thus struggles. The Bolshevik model insists on Jacobin bifurcation, and the stifling of alternative struggles.
This ignores the ways in which struggles not directly addressed by socialism, such as gay rights, have taken root and made great gains in Cuba, and through the participation of its vanguard party, but I have already made this point.
L&M say that for the democratic system to maintain health, no discourse within it can seek to view itself as central or foundational. There can be no determinate antagonism. L&M acknowledge that there is always the potential of a “master antagonism” presenting itself in democracy, and this is why
contemporary democracy has a tendency to bifurcate... into the “democratic” and the “totalitarian”...
Let us ignore L&M's clumsy, circular finish. L&M's vision of radical democracy is highly akin to Habermas's deliberative democracy- as L&M acknowledge in their preface. And my question for both is how is a system that allows liberation only through participation not itself monolithic. L&M, unlike Habermas, at least acknowledge that their system is totalizing, but could their be a system more terrifyingly invasive than one that demands that every subject sacrifice its difference so that the system can incorporate it, thereby diversifying democracy?
At the end of the day, the thing that fascinates me most about this slight work is the way in which it captured the intellectual imagination of western Europe and the U.S. in the 1980s- through to 9-11. I think the book is an interesting time-capsule of its era, one that turned out to be closer to a moment.
L&M base their arguments on what they feel to be the unique complexity of western democracy. They feel that the working class has become a consumer class that has helped shape contemporary capitalism through the creation of the well-fare state, through insisting on a “humane capitalism.” What L&M could afford to ignore in 1985 is that workers did not create the capitalist well-fare state. It was provided by the ruling class so as to disincline the workers towards the appeals of revolutionary socialism. L&M apparently did not foresee that once the Soviet bloc fell, the well-fare state would be completely destroyed. They were writing in a moment where the victory of capitalism in the Cold War seemed eminent. And humanity had to feel some relief simply at any end to the Cold War. It had, after all, subjected the world to a bifurcation that threatened to destroy it through nuclear war-fare. The New World Order promised peace and freedom from bifurcation, but it was yet unclear the monstrous and brutal form this new uni-power would take. L&M's ahistorical analysis of western capitalism is thus revealed as the utopian moment of neo-liberalism's nascent, utopian self-regard.
To elucidate the central argument: Laclau & Mouffe (L&M, henceforth) hold that pre-capitalist societies, including some contemporary “third-world countries” that have been under-developed by imperialism, naturally bifurcate into opposing camps because of the extremity of the oppression experienced at the hands of the royalists/ imperialists/ compradores. But, claim L&M, when societies experience “democratic revolutions,” such as those of the French and the American, societies become too complex to bifurcate into two, simplistically class-based camps. Democratic societies are objectively more complex, say L&M, than all societies that came before them.
Even this early into L&M's thesis, I take profound issue. It strikes me as extremely ahistorical (and Euro-centric) to say that until the democratic revolutions of Western Europe and the United States, societies were so simplistically divided between the oppressors and the oppressed, that bifurcation along such lines was inevitable. Indeed, were not the complexities of many pre-industrial societies exactly what colonizers exploited to divide the resistance to them? The Colonial settlers of the Americas exploited the distrust that existed between different Native American tribes to make them form short-lived “alliances” with the Whites so as to attack the other tribes. And such antagonisms have existed in every society at every stage, and have countless times made resistance or revolution impossible. However, in every eon, there have been the occasional successful articulation of unity that lead to general insurrection. Look at the uprisings that characterize Chinese history at every historic step. Nothing about European democratic society is unique for not easily bifurcating. Such articulations of unity are always rare and difficult, there are always a multitude of antagonisms amongst the masses to be over-come, yet there is also no stage in history that shows itself to be fully immune from such senses of unity.
L&M follow their logic and say that Karl Marx came to political maturity in a newly democratic western Europe. He therefore witnessed the birth of a society more complex than he could fully comprehend. He had to, according to L&M, impose the codes of pre-democratic Europe onto the democratic Europe he found himself in. L&M think Marx coped with the complexities of the new society by inventing the theory of class-struggle, by imposing a bifurcating narrative- proletarian v. bourgeoisie- on a society far too nuanced to accord to that model.
Despite their criticisms of Marx, L&M think highly of the early socialist movement. The depressions of the late nineteenth century made the decline of capitalism seem eminent and natural. Leaders such as Kautsky had faith that socialism could be achieved through the proper engagement in the democratic process. As long as the struggle for socialism was carried out under the banner of democratic reform it had, for L&M, liberatory potential because it allows more people to engage in the democratic process, instead of scrounging to survive.
According to L&M's historical narrative, when capitalism recovered from the economic crisis in the early years of the twentieth century, Marxist leaders sought to re-convince themselves of the inevitability of the socialist transformation. Kautsky rationalized the non-transformation of society by saying that there was a profound gap between the consciousness of the proletariat and its historical role. Thus, Marxism began to become more and more theoretical. To get the proletariat to act “correctly” they would have to be made to understand a theory of how things were going to be, not how things were in the present. And this theory was apparently only understood by the intellectual element- the vanguard.
L&M posit that as much as Kautsy and the “vanguard” liked talking about the future, they were already living in the past. They claim that by the beginning of the twentieth century, European and American capitalism had already achieved a degree of complexity where there no longer was, in the sense that Marx understood it, a working class. For L&M, capitalist democracy provides workers with methods of becoming politically engaged in society and raises living standards to such levels that workers are no longer merely workers but also politically engaged consumers. Their interests are thus, L&M claim, no longer fully oppositional to that of the capitalist state. The relation is rather an open articulation that cannot be expected to take any one form or direction.
Here, I must interject some of my deepest objections to L&M's method and project. For all of their interrogations of the “presumptions” of the Marxist tradition, L&M's work rests on a litany of simplistic presumptions. First of all, they presume without argument or defense that the methods of political engagement open to workers in western capitalist societies are legitimate and empowering. What happens to their argument about the integration of the working class into the political process if we do not consider the political process legitimate? On a deeper level, even the sub-title of the book, “Towards a Radical Democratic Politics” presumes that, even if we consider western style representational democracy legitimately democratic, that we consider this a “good” in and of itself. What if one objects to democracy as a principle? And of course, this has been a legitimate subject of philosophical debate since Plato. That democracy is “good” and that western European style representational democracy is in fact democratic are never questioned by L&M. They seem to hold such questions as unthinkable.
The authors point out that in a revolutionary crisis, as conceived by Marxism, every individual struggle, for example, that of peasants being forced to grow crops for royalists and being left with too little to eat, has two identities. It has its individual nature as a struggle, but it is also part of the totality of the crisis. The peasants must be made to feel that their struggle is interrelated with, for instance, the struggle of industrial workers for better wages and working hours. This has been termed by Marxists as “class consciousness.” L&M point out, seemingly thinking it a more radical statement than it is, that class unity is not literal but symbolic- sense the struggles of peasants are not identical to those of the workers, the struggles of women not the same as those of male workers, those of some minorities are different than those of the working class of the dominant race, etc.
We must say, of course, that in the Lacanian sense that L&M are using “symbolic,” class is indeed symbolic as all social knowledge, including that of the “self,” is a linguistic displacement. “Class” is just another way of rationalizing the trauma of being, and on some level, it is an arbitrary one, like all other designations. However, it should here be pointed out that L&M seem to posit the identity of “peasant,” or “woman” as if they are not themselves symbolic. As if there could be a discourse of “the woman” that is fully authentic! This is doubly odd as much of post-structuralist discourse, the tradition that L&M claim to come from, has attempted to prove the arbitrary nature of precisely these types of “foundational” designations and the binaries on which they depend.
So we can say, along with L&M, that every revolutionary crisis is never fully natural but the result of competing political discourses that unite different groups under the banner of one interest over another. This is not a radical claim. It was an idea fully developed by the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s. Gramsci remained an orthodox Marxist-Leninist because he thought that the interests at stake were inherently class interests. L&M, again supposedly radically, claim that the interest at play in hegemony is not necessarily class based and can come from any social situation where an antagonism exists. They feel that this claim fully denounces Marxism as a theory.
I think that a Marxist could respond to L&M's claim of the arbitrary nature of the hegemonic subject- that it need not be class based- by saying: “Okay. So what?” One can recognize that there may in Marx be a somewhat out-dated, and indeed even simplistic and over-totalizing concept of class without throwing out the notion of class struggle. The fact that the working class does not have a naturally privileged revolutionary role, and that class is ultimately just another way of articulating an, at the ultimate instance artificial, concept of unity does not change the fact that class is an effective articulation of revolutionary unity. The fact that the most dogmatically conservative Stalinist might be made uncomfortable by L&M's suggestions about the arbitrary nature of the hegemonic agent does not mean that Marxism as a body of thought need be threatened by it. L&M consistently seek to reduce the latter to the former, with little argumentative rigor.
Indeed, given the ways that racism, in particular, has been an instrumental weapon of atomization of the masses in American society, class would seem an especially potent unitary mantra in America. L&M posit that white-collar employees are not working-class, but this is an illusion that only holds during the times of “comfortable capitalism,” such as the years when the book was written.
As all politics is ultimately just the “game of hegemony” for L&M, they describe two different ways of playing the game. The “authoritarian” way- the Leninist way- relies on a vanguard that represents the working class. The working class remains only a subject of reference. Their presence is thereby made impossible. Instead, their participation is fully symbolic, and every moment in history becomes only a fragment of a larger narrative of a future that never comes.
Again, I say this is a simplistic and context-less way of looking at Leninism. For one thing, what is “Leninism?” L&M discuss it as if it has only one form- that of the monolithically bureaucratic. But societies as radically different as those of Cuba, the DPRK, and Vietnam could all be described as being led by Leninist governments, and anyone who knows anything about any of those countries understands that the cultural traditions of the relative countries have shaped the way their respective states have developed at least as influentially as anything Lenin ever posited. There is no one “Leninism!”
And what are L&M to say to one who holds the participatory bodies of a vanguard party such as that of Cuba to be closer to direct democracy than western representational democracy. L&M consistently hold that any such view is simply non-sensible and unworthy of reply.
L&M then describe the “democratic” method of partaking in hegemony. They hold that entities such as the British Labor party were created by a more advanced working-class than that of the Russia of 1917 and therefore that such entities, which ultimately endorse capitalism, are actually more working class in nature than vanguard parties. So, through this more legitimately democratic participation in discourse, the working class is not represented but must present itself in the political sphere. As not all problems can be reduced to class issues, such as the struggle for gay equality, this present class of worker/consumers must then attend to the needs of a given community- such as the gay community, by acknowledging its presence in the discourse- and the discourse is thus transformed by the new presence within it of the gay community. The workers, in becoming consumers and having their interest tied to that of the state, become the state, and the state in turn begins to acknowledge more diverse struggles.
To describe the landscape of democratic hegemony, L&M return to Lacan and his concept of the suture. The suture is the process by which a subject copes with the unknowability of the other by filling in the mystery of otherness with the subject's own discourse- one's own presumptions about being. The other, for Lacan- the mother, becomes knowable as lacking (devoid of phallus) as opposed to terrifyingly mysterious. Hegemony sutures in that it fills in the unknowability of the political, which is in turn tied to the unknowability of the floating discursive signifier. This suturing is never all together successful, however. If it were, there could be no play of meaning, and therefore no hegemonic operations. Discourses always try to present themselves as a totality. Indeed, claim L&M, contingency is only articulatable because the totality of discourse is always trying, in vain, to reassert itself.
While I acknowledge that any discourse can give way to the impulse to claim that it answers all questions, I think L&M overstate the danger of this impulse. A healthy discursive practice is possible within almost any discourse. Marxism can, and sometimes does, fall into the trap of claiming that it answers all questions, but it does not have to do so to function as a discourse.
A position within the totality of any one discourse L&M call a “moment.” An “element” is a difference that is not articulated so as to make the totality seem possible. L&M call the excess which hegemony cannot suture, and which makes a multiplicity of discourses possible, the “field of discoursivity.” “Antagonisms” are, for L&M, the limits of the experientially social- the situations in which the other prevents a subject from being wholly itself and vice-versa. Any negated difference, any element reduced to a moment, has the potential to become a site of antagonism, and it is just these moments of antagonism that call for a hegemonic articulation in a democratic sphere, so as to re-assert, at least momentarily, the totality.
When different contents- such as skin collar, dress, and language, all function to suggest one fact- i.e. membership in a subordinated group- the differences between the contents become elements through the process of “equivalence.” The identity created through equivalence is purely negative- it is based purely on what the subordinated group is not. Relations of subordination can become sites of antagonism only when their identity is negative. Positive identities of subordination, such as “slave” or “surf” cannot become sites of antagonism because a “slave” is not in any way denied a state of being. There is nothing contradictory about a state of slavery. A slave's “slave-ness” is not in any way denied by the master. Quite the opposite.
At first, this struck me as a truly bizarre claim- as if slavery could not give way to revolt. However, I think L&M mean that situations like slavery give way to bifurcations that are not actually antagonistic. They do not require a hegemonic articulation to maintain the discursive totality because such relations will give way to revolt. What I do think L&M overlook, however, is that slavery is a by-product of democracy! It was most common in western society under Greek and American democracy! While it may be true that slavery leads to bifurcation, not the antagonistic discourse defined by L&M, its status as a democratic institution problemitizes further L&M's claim that representational democracy is uniquely complex, and cannot lead to bifurcated struggles.
Nonetheless, L&M maintain that representational democracy gives way to relations of subordination that are fully excluding of the subordinated party exactly because the subordinated is supposed to have the freedoms owed to all people under humanist democracy. This creates a contradiction- the subordinated is made into what (s)he supposedly cannot be under democracy. This creates a crisis for the discourse of democracy that hegemony will have to address, so as to bring the subordinated party into the discourse. Therefore, L&M declare, any legitimate leftist, who wants to see more liberties, must embrace liberal democracy because it leads to a multiplicity of political spaces, and thus struggles. The Bolshevik model insists on Jacobin bifurcation, and the stifling of alternative struggles.
This ignores the ways in which struggles not directly addressed by socialism, such as gay rights, have taken root and made great gains in Cuba, and through the participation of its vanguard party, but I have already made this point.
L&M say that for the democratic system to maintain health, no discourse within it can seek to view itself as central or foundational. There can be no determinate antagonism. L&M acknowledge that there is always the potential of a “master antagonism” presenting itself in democracy, and this is why
contemporary democracy has a tendency to bifurcate... into the “democratic” and the “totalitarian”...
Let us ignore L&M's clumsy, circular finish. L&M's vision of radical democracy is highly akin to Habermas's deliberative democracy- as L&M acknowledge in their preface. And my question for both is how is a system that allows liberation only through participation not itself monolithic. L&M, unlike Habermas, at least acknowledge that their system is totalizing, but could their be a system more terrifyingly invasive than one that demands that every subject sacrifice its difference so that the system can incorporate it, thereby diversifying democracy?
At the end of the day, the thing that fascinates me most about this slight work is the way in which it captured the intellectual imagination of western Europe and the U.S. in the 1980s- through to 9-11. I think the book is an interesting time-capsule of its era, one that turned out to be closer to a moment.
L&M base their arguments on what they feel to be the unique complexity of western democracy. They feel that the working class has become a consumer class that has helped shape contemporary capitalism through the creation of the well-fare state, through insisting on a “humane capitalism.” What L&M could afford to ignore in 1985 is that workers did not create the capitalist well-fare state. It was provided by the ruling class so as to disincline the workers towards the appeals of revolutionary socialism. L&M apparently did not foresee that once the Soviet bloc fell, the well-fare state would be completely destroyed. They were writing in a moment where the victory of capitalism in the Cold War seemed eminent. And humanity had to feel some relief simply at any end to the Cold War. It had, after all, subjected the world to a bifurcation that threatened to destroy it through nuclear war-fare. The New World Order promised peace and freedom from bifurcation, but it was yet unclear the monstrous and brutal form this new uni-power would take. L&M's ahistorical analysis of western capitalism is thus revealed as the utopian moment of neo-liberalism's nascent, utopian self-regard.
Read
February 7, 2017Whereas someone like Althusser is mainly interesting as an episode of Marxist intellectual history, Laclau and Mouffe remain extremely relevant to social struggles today.
This book was published in the mid-eighties, when neoliberalism was still relatively new. The authors seek to outline an antidote, or counter hegemonic project which here goes by the name of radical democracy. For all their rebarbative philosophical jargon, these pages often have the feel of a manifesto. This is particularly so of the last chapter.
Unlike dogmatists of the old left, the authors see the value of the new social movements - environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, etc. However, they also recognize the danger that these movements would lead to greater fragmentation and isolation, to the fetishization of difference as an end in itself, giving capital a free pass to continue plundering the commons.
Thirty years on and unfortunately it looks like the latter is more or less what's happened. Obviously it would be too much to expect a mere book to halt capitalism in its tracks. The good news, if there is any, is that the struggle is far from over. Laclau recently passed but Mouffe is still very much alive and publishing. More importantly, their work has been the inspiration to Syriza and Podemos, two of the most vital insurgent groups on the left in recent years.
Neoliberalism continues it reign, but, as recent events indicate, it may have entered an openly absurdist phase, in which its given up any claim to reason or normativity. The call for radically democratic socialist movement has never been more urgent.
This book was published in the mid-eighties, when neoliberalism was still relatively new. The authors seek to outline an antidote, or counter hegemonic project which here goes by the name of radical democracy. For all their rebarbative philosophical jargon, these pages often have the feel of a manifesto. This is particularly so of the last chapter.
Unlike dogmatists of the old left, the authors see the value of the new social movements - environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, etc. However, they also recognize the danger that these movements would lead to greater fragmentation and isolation, to the fetishization of difference as an end in itself, giving capital a free pass to continue plundering the commons.
Thirty years on and unfortunately it looks like the latter is more or less what's happened. Obviously it would be too much to expect a mere book to halt capitalism in its tracks. The good news, if there is any, is that the struggle is far from over. Laclau recently passed but Mouffe is still very much alive and publishing. More importantly, their work has been the inspiration to Syriza and Podemos, two of the most vital insurgent groups on the left in recent years.
Neoliberalism continues it reign, but, as recent events indicate, it may have entered an openly absurdist phase, in which its given up any claim to reason or normativity. The call for radically democratic socialist movement has never been more urgent.
December 27, 2020
"Two mad scientists - one Argentinian, one Belgian, neither situated in orthodox communist movements - pour the corrosive substrate of Derrida and Wittgenstein II onto the theory and history of Marxism." The original review went on for about five thousand more characters, but this says enough, actually.
dont-read
October 16, 2017به روز رسانی: "شاید از این به بعد سری به ترجمه های جدید از مهمترین آثار فکری غرب بزنم، صرفا برای بررسی کیفیت ترجمه و احیانا تلنگری به نسل در حال ظهور دلالان فرهنگی"
متاسفانه ترجمه آنقدر ضعیف بود که اجازه مطالعه را بعد از چند صفحه نداد که برای اثری با این اهمیت بنیادین و به نوعی کلاسیک برای سنت فکری چپ جدید ناامید کننده است. شاید این آفت فرهنگی جدیدی است که مترجمی گمنام و بی تجربه به خودش اجازه میدهد که یکی از مطرح ترین و پیچیده ترین آثار فکری دنیا را این گونه ترجمه کند. خوش بختانه زبان متن اصلی انگلیسی است
متاسفانه ترجمه آنقدر ضعیف بود که اجازه مطالعه را بعد از چند صفحه نداد که برای اثری با این اهمیت بنیادین و به نوعی کلاسیک برای سنت فکری چپ جدید ناامید کننده است. شاید این آفت فرهنگی جدیدی است که مترجمی گمنام و بی تجربه به خودش اجازه میدهد که یکی از مطرح ترین و پیچیده ترین آثار فکری دنیا را این گونه ترجمه کند. خوش بختانه زبان متن اصلی انگلیسی است
December 23, 2014
Ms Thatcher was a post-structuralist, or the birth of non-politics
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
I suggest reading this from the end, where the problem eventually emerges that justified that whole 'project', i.e. the difficulty encountered by political theorists to situate 'new' movements such as feminism and environmentalism on the map of traditional political antagonisms. To solve the problem, the authors in the central part of the book have no other option but to say that a definition of society is not possible, even though it has family resemblances with a precarious web of subjectivities without centre and fixed geometries. Which is probably existentially accurate and epistemologically true.
But poltics is not the field of the epistemologically true. Politics is the domain of what you want (aka 'desire', somewhat unconvincingly). The authors frame very well what the Right wants and accurately describe an ideology that by 1985 has gained the upper hand (aka 'hegemony') by promoting a crystallized vision of social order and the economy that is the more powerful for lacking any epistemological foundation whatsoever.
Why is the Left losing ground then? Because of its obsession with the epistemologically discredited ideas of 'revolution' and 'class'. Democracy - which never gets a proper epistemological treatment (the authors thus betray having a conscience) - demands instead to embrace pluralism and to make alliances across pluralistic struggles (e.g feminism-environmentalism-anti-capitalism) to engage not in a revolution but in a war of position.
All of the above is not Gramsci's fault though - he had other problems to solve.
Thirty years later, under triumphant neo-liberalism and collapsing environmental conditions, it is too easy to see the world divided - quite undemocratically - between exploiters and exploited, in a truly zero-sum game played on a global scale. Two classes. If you're an exploiter, does it really matter who washes the dishes? Can the exploited 'articulate' an 'hegemony' with those among the exploiters who no longer want to wash up?
What is certainly not fixed is how you define your antagonistic classes - this is politics' job. But denying antagonism in favour of a thousand flowers supposed to bloom is to mistake participation - within the safe boundaries of one's class (non-politics) - for a game that cannot be safe for everyone (politics). Ms Thatcher saw the wondrous potential of the 'non-politics in a non-society' rhetoric and touted it, while engaging in a very political game of her own.
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
I suggest reading this from the end, where the problem eventually emerges that justified that whole 'project', i.e. the difficulty encountered by political theorists to situate 'new' movements such as feminism and environmentalism on the map of traditional political antagonisms. To solve the problem, the authors in the central part of the book have no other option but to say that a definition of society is not possible, even though it has family resemblances with a precarious web of subjectivities without centre and fixed geometries. Which is probably existentially accurate and epistemologically true.
But poltics is not the field of the epistemologically true. Politics is the domain of what you want (aka 'desire', somewhat unconvincingly). The authors frame very well what the Right wants and accurately describe an ideology that by 1985 has gained the upper hand (aka 'hegemony') by promoting a crystallized vision of social order and the economy that is the more powerful for lacking any epistemological foundation whatsoever.
Why is the Left losing ground then? Because of its obsession with the epistemologically discredited ideas of 'revolution' and 'class'. Democracy - which never gets a proper epistemological treatment (the authors thus betray having a conscience) - demands instead to embrace pluralism and to make alliances across pluralistic struggles (e.g feminism-environmentalism-anti-capitalism) to engage not in a revolution but in a war of position.
All of the above is not Gramsci's fault though - he had other problems to solve.
Thirty years later, under triumphant neo-liberalism and collapsing environmental conditions, it is too easy to see the world divided - quite undemocratically - between exploiters and exploited, in a truly zero-sum game played on a global scale. Two classes. If you're an exploiter, does it really matter who washes the dishes? Can the exploited 'articulate' an 'hegemony' with those among the exploiters who no longer want to wash up?
What is certainly not fixed is how you define your antagonistic classes - this is politics' job. But denying antagonism in favour of a thousand flowers supposed to bloom is to mistake participation - within the safe boundaries of one's class (non-politics) - for a game that cannot be safe for everyone (politics). Ms Thatcher saw the wondrous potential of the 'non-politics in a non-society' rhetoric and touted it, while engaging in a very political game of her own.
December 31, 2009
Laclau and Mouffe have developed a theory of hegemony, after Antonio Gramsci, that is more fluid and less determined by the ascendancy of one social or economic class; it is, in short, a postmodern reflection on Gramsci.
They begin by positing that there are countless groups within a society, each with a series of perspectives and views. Because of this plurality of groups, it is not possible to know which groups will coalesce into a bloc and be able, through their agreed upon ideas also coming together, to exercise hegemony. Different groups have many possible bloc allies. In the United States, there have been times when Jews and African-Americans have united and worked together, for example, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964; there have been other times when these groups have not been able to work together politically in an harmonious fashion, as with the anti-Jewish slogans of some members of the Nation of Islam (Louis Farrakhan, for instance).
What blocs form and produce a new hegemony depends upon a number of factors: the particular issues which become most salient and lead to groups "choosing up sides" on which position to take with respect to the emergent agenda, pre-existing interests and views characteristic of the group, and the extent to which segments of different groups' views can be articulated together in alliance with other groups to become a bloc.
To use the language of post-structuralism, each potential antagonism of one group with another is a "floating signifier,". . .a 'wild' antagonism which does not predetermine the form in which it can be articulated [linked up:] to other elements in a social system." Furthermore, rapid change is possible in a current hegemony. The groups bound together as a bloc may find their articulation coming apart at the seams; latent antagonisms may come to the fore and lead to a rearticulation of interests into a new bloc. Thus, hegemonies are unstable for Laclau and Mouffe--whereas they tend to be much more stable from Gramsci's perspective. The end result is that dominant views can change swiftly, and the ideas that have led to one set of leaders may disintegrate, precipitating new leaders and new political agendas.
Most dramatically, consider the Soviet Union. Who can forget the rapid collapse of the old Bolshevik apparatus, after seventy years of hegemony. Seemingly, overnight the forces of openness put into motion by Mikhail Gorbachev tore apart the previous grand hegemony. However, there is plenty of potential for a new hegemony developing that will be much less supportive of democratic impulses. Witness events occurring in recent years under the presidency of Vladimir Putin.
This is a difficult work to plow through. Nonetheless, it is a fascinating book and worth the effort to make sense of it.
They begin by positing that there are countless groups within a society, each with a series of perspectives and views. Because of this plurality of groups, it is not possible to know which groups will coalesce into a bloc and be able, through their agreed upon ideas also coming together, to exercise hegemony. Different groups have many possible bloc allies. In the United States, there have been times when Jews and African-Americans have united and worked together, for example, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964; there have been other times when these groups have not been able to work together politically in an harmonious fashion, as with the anti-Jewish slogans of some members of the Nation of Islam (Louis Farrakhan, for instance).
What blocs form and produce a new hegemony depends upon a number of factors: the particular issues which become most salient and lead to groups "choosing up sides" on which position to take with respect to the emergent agenda, pre-existing interests and views characteristic of the group, and the extent to which segments of different groups' views can be articulated together in alliance with other groups to become a bloc.
To use the language of post-structuralism, each potential antagonism of one group with another is a "floating signifier,". . .a 'wild' antagonism which does not predetermine the form in which it can be articulated [linked up:] to other elements in a social system." Furthermore, rapid change is possible in a current hegemony. The groups bound together as a bloc may find their articulation coming apart at the seams; latent antagonisms may come to the fore and lead to a rearticulation of interests into a new bloc. Thus, hegemonies are unstable for Laclau and Mouffe--whereas they tend to be much more stable from Gramsci's perspective. The end result is that dominant views can change swiftly, and the ideas that have led to one set of leaders may disintegrate, precipitating new leaders and new political agendas.
Most dramatically, consider the Soviet Union. Who can forget the rapid collapse of the old Bolshevik apparatus, after seventy years of hegemony. Seemingly, overnight the forces of openness put into motion by Mikhail Gorbachev tore apart the previous grand hegemony. However, there is plenty of potential for a new hegemony developing that will be much less supportive of democratic impulses. Witness events occurring in recent years under the presidency of Vladimir Putin.
This is a difficult work to plow through. Nonetheless, it is a fascinating book and worth the effort to make sense of it.
March 27, 2007
I was assigned this in college as part of a sociology class. To quote another sociology professor: "The first sentence is unintelligible, and it's all downhill from there."
April 4, 2018
I can't promise to have understand this book wholly - and that isn't a criticism, because complexity is justifiable, although sometimes this is needlessly dense - but I did find it interesting, convincing and useful (especially towards the end). I agree with much of Laclau and Mouffe's argument: about the need to move beyond a narrow focus on Class/State/Economy to connect struggles over multiple antagonisms in multiple sites, and the consequent importance of a strategy of hegemony. I appreciated their insistence on a rigorous examination of concepts which abound on the Left.
But that does not mean that I did not have concerns. It might be a little unfair to criticise a work of philosophy for historical inadequacy, but I was struck by the way that - as Lars Lih points out in his New Socialist interview - Laclau and Mouffe focus on the content of theoretical debates between major thinkers. Now, these debates are of course interesting and significant - and much of the book is intended to argue that precisely such debates can be important - but I find this focus unconvincing. Perhaps Laclau and Mouffee would flinch at Lih saying that "the high-level ideological justifications put forth by Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1917 and repeated today were not the base but rather the superstructure of their political stands", but Laclau and Mouffe's inattention to the history of the revolution-from-below compromises their arguments - especially where Laclau and Mouffe's assumptions differ from the (incomparably more scholarly) findings of someone like Lih. Closer to my own area of research, a number of Laclau and Mouffe's statements are sweeping and simplistic: "the monolithic transvestite (!) that Marxism-Leninism presented as the history of Marxism", "the construction of a ghetto where the working class led a self-focused and segregated existence", "a clear separation within the masses between the leading sectors and those which are led", etc. There is a sense that Laclau and Mouffe were happy to take both communist and anti-communist intellectuals at their word, rather than trying to understand the practices of revolutionaries-making-revolution. The overarching historical assumption which justifies their argument, moreover - about the decline of a monolithic politics of class, the growth of new social movements, etc - is also not without problems, and although broadly correct it would probably be challenged by most historians working on those themes. Related to this is the inattention which Laclau and Mouffe pay to revolutions in the periphery - though theoretically important to their argument, there is little engagement with the works of e.g. Fanon - and the almost total dismissal of Mao ("near-to-zero philosophical value") and Maoism, despite quite considerable overlaps of interest and their rather greater political significance.
Without wishing to judge a book by its preface, I suspect these problems feed into the - quite remarkable, given the way Laclau and Mouffe are applauded for prescience - apparent failure to predict (or really understand) any of the developments since the book's original publication. I think, for example, of the comment that "We never thought, though, that discarding the Jacobin friend/enemy model of politics as an adequate paradigm for democratic politics should lead to the adoption of the liberal one" - directly opposite the statement that "there cannot be a radical politics without the definition of an adversary", it feels like a shift has been undergone which the authors won't own up to. At the very least, there should be a recognition that the friend/enemy model needs to be *exploded* and not simply discarded. Similarly, it's extraordinary that Laclau and Mouffe bemoan "the lack in their discourse of any reference to a possible alternative to the present economic order, which is taken as the only feasible one - as if acknowledging the illusory character of a total break with a market economy necessarily precluded the possibility of different modes of regulation of market forces and meant that there was no alternative to a total acceptance of their logics." The point is that this was foreseeable - there are echoes in L&M's comment, in the closing pages of the original, that the 'laicization' of politics had risked "the total expulsion of utopia from the field of the political" - and that the authors should have recognised the damage that the fall of the USSR would do to the Left. Instead, even in the preface, Laclau and Mouffe seem to accept the Cold War narrative of "the triumph of democracy over its communist adversary" - avoiding the consequences of abandoning the struggle for communism for a (whether they like it or not) narrowed politics of democracy.
But that does not mean that I did not have concerns. It might be a little unfair to criticise a work of philosophy for historical inadequacy, but I was struck by the way that - as Lars Lih points out in his New Socialist interview - Laclau and Mouffe focus on the content of theoretical debates between major thinkers. Now, these debates are of course interesting and significant - and much of the book is intended to argue that precisely such debates can be important - but I find this focus unconvincing. Perhaps Laclau and Mouffee would flinch at Lih saying that "the high-level ideological justifications put forth by Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1917 and repeated today were not the base but rather the superstructure of their political stands", but Laclau and Mouffe's inattention to the history of the revolution-from-below compromises their arguments - especially where Laclau and Mouffe's assumptions differ from the (incomparably more scholarly) findings of someone like Lih. Closer to my own area of research, a number of Laclau and Mouffe's statements are sweeping and simplistic: "the monolithic transvestite (!) that Marxism-Leninism presented as the history of Marxism", "the construction of a ghetto where the working class led a self-focused and segregated existence", "a clear separation within the masses between the leading sectors and those which are led", etc. There is a sense that Laclau and Mouffe were happy to take both communist and anti-communist intellectuals at their word, rather than trying to understand the practices of revolutionaries-making-revolution. The overarching historical assumption which justifies their argument, moreover - about the decline of a monolithic politics of class, the growth of new social movements, etc - is also not without problems, and although broadly correct it would probably be challenged by most historians working on those themes. Related to this is the inattention which Laclau and Mouffe pay to revolutions in the periphery - though theoretically important to their argument, there is little engagement with the works of e.g. Fanon - and the almost total dismissal of Mao ("near-to-zero philosophical value") and Maoism, despite quite considerable overlaps of interest and their rather greater political significance.
Without wishing to judge a book by its preface, I suspect these problems feed into the - quite remarkable, given the way Laclau and Mouffe are applauded for prescience - apparent failure to predict (or really understand) any of the developments since the book's original publication. I think, for example, of the comment that "We never thought, though, that discarding the Jacobin friend/enemy model of politics as an adequate paradigm for democratic politics should lead to the adoption of the liberal one" - directly opposite the statement that "there cannot be a radical politics without the definition of an adversary", it feels like a shift has been undergone which the authors won't own up to. At the very least, there should be a recognition that the friend/enemy model needs to be *exploded* and not simply discarded. Similarly, it's extraordinary that Laclau and Mouffe bemoan "the lack in their discourse of any reference to a possible alternative to the present economic order, which is taken as the only feasible one - as if acknowledging the illusory character of a total break with a market economy necessarily precluded the possibility of different modes of regulation of market forces and meant that there was no alternative to a total acceptance of their logics." The point is that this was foreseeable - there are echoes in L&M's comment, in the closing pages of the original, that the 'laicization' of politics had risked "the total expulsion of utopia from the field of the political" - and that the authors should have recognised the damage that the fall of the USSR would do to the Left. Instead, even in the preface, Laclau and Mouffe seem to accept the Cold War narrative of "the triumph of democracy over its communist adversary" - avoiding the consequences of abandoning the struggle for communism for a (whether they like it or not) narrowed politics of democracy.
January 4, 2010
Laclau and Mouffe do a contemporary reading of Gramscian style critical theory. Bringing Marxism into the current, "Post-Marxist" phase as many of the theoretical modes of analysis popularized during the 60's and 70's were simply unable to stop the spread of the Conservative hegemony that dominated the 1980's. Unfortunately, like other fads popularized during the 1980's (Flock of Seagulls haircuts, Bon Jovi, and Stone Washed Jeans) this grandiose style of writing has fallen out of favor. Almost every single tactical point made by L&M has been appropriated by the Right. Remember, this book was published prior to the 24-hour news cycle that currently dominates the cable networks. Namely Fox News as well as AM Radio.
Interestingly enough, one of my favorite parts in this book happens towards the end when they deconstruct Neo-Classical Liberalist Political Theory, by going through various Right-Wing theorists (namely Milton Friedman, Frederick Hayek, and Robert Nozick) and then systematically deconstruct all of these position. This section is poigniant for the simple fact that when this book was published in 1985 the West was at the height of Conservative-Hegemony (Reagan and Thatcherism). So it was, and still is quite timely. Most of the struggles for hegemony were continued during the 90's in the form of the Culture Wars.
For all of the stereotypes about this book being filled with convoluted theory, I found it to be quite readable when I paced myself slowly.
Clearly its major flaws is the over-emphasis on "Discourse," at the expense of what Judith Butler might call, "Bodies that Matter," and material forms of violence, but for what it is worth, this book is quite the masterpiece. Worth reading several times to take in the full effect. Yet, its impossible to gauge the full impact of a book like this because it is squarely indebted to the Western Academy, and has been predominantly read by Left-Leaning intellectuals. Hardly the target audience that needs to hear its message.
Interestingly enough, one of my favorite parts in this book happens towards the end when they deconstruct Neo-Classical Liberalist Political Theory, by going through various Right-Wing theorists (namely Milton Friedman, Frederick Hayek, and Robert Nozick) and then systematically deconstruct all of these position. This section is poigniant for the simple fact that when this book was published in 1985 the West was at the height of Conservative-Hegemony (Reagan and Thatcherism). So it was, and still is quite timely. Most of the struggles for hegemony were continued during the 90's in the form of the Culture Wars.
For all of the stereotypes about this book being filled with convoluted theory, I found it to be quite readable when I paced myself slowly.
Clearly its major flaws is the over-emphasis on "Discourse," at the expense of what Judith Butler might call, "Bodies that Matter," and material forms of violence, but for what it is worth, this book is quite the masterpiece. Worth reading several times to take in the full effect. Yet, its impossible to gauge the full impact of a book like this because it is squarely indebted to the Western Academy, and has been predominantly read by Left-Leaning intellectuals. Hardly the target audience that needs to hear its message.
April 5, 2010
This was ridiculously difficult to read, and essentially presumes you have already read (and fully understood) all of your radical philosophers from Adorno to Althusser and on through the entire alphabet. So I am still thinking it through, and I am still not entirely sure that this is the most useful way to think about hegemony. Probably because I haven't yet quite grasped what the hell they are talking about. Having just read Gramsci seemed to make it even harder to see how their discourse connects to his. But I do think it is a very provocative radical critique of Marxism. While I'm not at all a good Marxist, I still don't know if I'm entirely ready to jettison class all together.
But I found both useful and very important the final chapter on radical and plural democracy, which I fully agree needs to be the centerpiece of a successful left movement. I'd definitely recommend the first half of Mark Purcell's Recapturing Democracy if you have trouble with this, had I not read that I probably wouldn't have had the commitment to see this little book through. Additionally if you don't really care how this fits into and critiques the canon of elite left thinking, you could just read the last chapter and think about democracy, it is the most accessible, though that's not saying a huge amount!
But I found both useful and very important the final chapter on radical and plural democracy, which I fully agree needs to be the centerpiece of a successful left movement. I'd definitely recommend the first half of Mark Purcell's Recapturing Democracy if you have trouble with this, had I not read that I probably wouldn't have had the commitment to see this little book through. Additionally if you don't really care how this fits into and critiques the canon of elite left thinking, you could just read the last chapter and think about democracy, it is the most accessible, though that's not saying a huge amount!
April 5, 2021
Just a conglomerate of things I dislike a lot. The critique of Marxism is reductive, the "radiclaization" of Gramsci is a deradicalization, decisions on what is right are always made on the basis of what the middle way seems to be, concreteness is evil in general, radical democracy still makes no fucking sense since it's just liberalism, but supposedly socialist (the way of achieveing that is only shifting the hegemony apparently), and in general this is a slog to read, filled with more unnecessary jargon than an ambitious Bachelor thesis
July 28, 2019
Although heady, there is a reason why this book approaches (post)Marxist theory the way in which it does.
The basic push this book makes in tracing the history of Marxism is to recognize that formal equivalence creates a meta-formality of position that is not equitable with the content occupied by those positions. When we measure class struggle or lay upon a social field certain lines of oppression, the different intersections of these lines create nodes that are formally equal but actually different.
This concept relates directly to the recent rise in feminism of "intersectionality" in which different lines of oppression create localized views that cannot cohere. In other words in terms of feminism, a white woman that grew up in the 50s will have a different concept of feminism than a young middle eastern woman in college in the 2010s than a young white professional woman working in a corporate office in her 30s in the late 1990s. Each of the different social pressures create specific contexts that are inherently unstable. While our need to speak of these different pressures (for Mouffe and Laclau, in a Marxist context) in order to name them and specify how they operate the very act of nominalizing those positions will shift the field so that the context will be subtly different through its articulation. This correlates with the fact that oppression and nominalization are both social practices that operate through the articulatory process.
Much of the book seeks to introduce us to this quandary.
The concept of hegemony arises because of this need to cohere. In a way, Mouffe and Laclau introduce a Kantian-like transcendentalism in order to force a cohesion of the mass of these inarticulations. While each localization "sees" its context from its own absoluteness, one that necessarily shifts in relation to other points of view, Mouffe and Laclau force coherency by constantly referencing an unchanging signification through the figure of Hegemony.
Liberalism is often characterized as a calibration of the state to its individuals. Social programs and welfare all engender individual optimization through the administration of the commons. The concept of Hegemony turns this around because in this view identity for each node is calibrated in relation to Hegemony so that each oppressive struggle can be indirectly relatable for each. A transcendental domain is necessary to enforce each node as coexisting with the others. In theory this appears to be the same worldview that most political groups have; but in truth most political views do not necessarily acknowledge the others as being viable views if a given local view supercedes the others'. Hegemony is meant to eliminate this problem of localization so that we get, as with Negri and Hardt a kind of "multitude". While Multitude is written later, in the 2000s, it does share some features with Hegemony, although the concept of multitude is more a cacophony of incoherency and in that sense less "modernist" than Hegemony.
This "modernist" calibration to Hegemony as a teleological formation of each localization does however, run the risk of creating a fascism. As seen from the view of Hegemony, as Lauclau and Mouffe acknowledge, a revolution is merely only one minority becoming the State, so that its logic (its view) becomes the primary deployment of what everything is. Hegemony does always risk this problem of a minority of One, just as Hegemony runs the risk that a minority may retain power because all the other majorities do not want their peers to attain a more powerful position.
In this sense, while a short book, this is a highly theoretical exercise, one that becomes unclear in regards to practice. While logically sound, its rationalization is founded on a redeployment of the terms of engagement for progress of minority rights, one that would further highlight the relative instability of maintaining any coherent fairness as any expressible localization will shift through the very act of nominalization. While I do not believe they are incorrect, it is difficult to ascertain the pragmatic application of Hegemony in practice. In a way, this calibration of identity towards its others suggest a kind of Heidiggerian stance of dasein to mitdasien, although Mouffe and Lauclau do not make the same error of class equivalency that Heidigger, like Marx, also made.
The basic push this book makes in tracing the history of Marxism is to recognize that formal equivalence creates a meta-formality of position that is not equitable with the content occupied by those positions. When we measure class struggle or lay upon a social field certain lines of oppression, the different intersections of these lines create nodes that are formally equal but actually different.
This concept relates directly to the recent rise in feminism of "intersectionality" in which different lines of oppression create localized views that cannot cohere. In other words in terms of feminism, a white woman that grew up in the 50s will have a different concept of feminism than a young middle eastern woman in college in the 2010s than a young white professional woman working in a corporate office in her 30s in the late 1990s. Each of the different social pressures create specific contexts that are inherently unstable. While our need to speak of these different pressures (for Mouffe and Laclau, in a Marxist context) in order to name them and specify how they operate the very act of nominalizing those positions will shift the field so that the context will be subtly different through its articulation. This correlates with the fact that oppression and nominalization are both social practices that operate through the articulatory process.
Much of the book seeks to introduce us to this quandary.
The concept of hegemony arises because of this need to cohere. In a way, Mouffe and Laclau introduce a Kantian-like transcendentalism in order to force a cohesion of the mass of these inarticulations. While each localization "sees" its context from its own absoluteness, one that necessarily shifts in relation to other points of view, Mouffe and Laclau force coherency by constantly referencing an unchanging signification through the figure of Hegemony.
Liberalism is often characterized as a calibration of the state to its individuals. Social programs and welfare all engender individual optimization through the administration of the commons. The concept of Hegemony turns this around because in this view identity for each node is calibrated in relation to Hegemony so that each oppressive struggle can be indirectly relatable for each. A transcendental domain is necessary to enforce each node as coexisting with the others. In theory this appears to be the same worldview that most political groups have; but in truth most political views do not necessarily acknowledge the others as being viable views if a given local view supercedes the others'. Hegemony is meant to eliminate this problem of localization so that we get, as with Negri and Hardt a kind of "multitude". While Multitude is written later, in the 2000s, it does share some features with Hegemony, although the concept of multitude is more a cacophony of incoherency and in that sense less "modernist" than Hegemony.
This "modernist" calibration to Hegemony as a teleological formation of each localization does however, run the risk of creating a fascism. As seen from the view of Hegemony, as Lauclau and Mouffe acknowledge, a revolution is merely only one minority becoming the State, so that its logic (its view) becomes the primary deployment of what everything is. Hegemony does always risk this problem of a minority of One, just as Hegemony runs the risk that a minority may retain power because all the other majorities do not want their peers to attain a more powerful position.
In this sense, while a short book, this is a highly theoretical exercise, one that becomes unclear in regards to practice. While logically sound, its rationalization is founded on a redeployment of the terms of engagement for progress of minority rights, one that would further highlight the relative instability of maintaining any coherent fairness as any expressible localization will shift through the very act of nominalization. While I do not believe they are incorrect, it is difficult to ascertain the pragmatic application of Hegemony in practice. In a way, this calibration of identity towards its others suggest a kind of Heidiggerian stance of dasein to mitdasien, although Mouffe and Lauclau do not make the same error of class equivalency that Heidigger, like Marx, also made.
October 10, 2019
Debe ser uno de los libros que más tiempo y trabajo me llevó. Mientras lo leía miraba algunas entrevistas a los autores por youtube para intentar entenderlo un poco mejor. Una de las frases que le decía Pablo Iglesias a Chantal Mouffe, en una de esas entrevistas a las que refiero, es lo que mejor describe a este libro escrito en 1985: "Es un libro que ha envejecido muy bien".
Para los que no somos entendidos en la extensa literatura marxista, es realmente complicado de leer, sobre todo porque el nivel de abstracción es alto y los autores no realizan un ida y vuelta con ejemplos históricos. Los párrafos son largos y cada uno de ellos es muy intenso conceptualmente. Si uno pretende darle una leída no muy detenida se va a frustrar con rapidez. Asimismo, el libro no solo revisa literatura marxista sino que también toma conceptos de la teoría de Lacan, de Wittgenstein y de Derrida, entre otros, para refutarla. Para aquellos que no desean entrar con mucho detenimiento en la parte más teórica del libro, recomiendo leer únicamente el último capítulo y utilizar un poco el google; esta es la parte más accesible del libro en términos de lectura.
A priori uno podría pensar que es un mero libro de izquierda o que incluso es un libro programático destinado a derribar al capitalismo. La realidad es que el libro toma la literatura marxista más ortodoxa, la critica, pero al mismo tiempo describe teóricamente una sociedad totalmente distinta a la que describían y proponían aquellos autores. Lo curioso es que muchas de esas cosas que los autores describían fueron profundizándose con el correr del tiempo y se pueden verificar en la realidad.
La pregunta que uno puede hacerse, luego de leído el libro, es si los autores estaban solamente generando un libro teórico o si estaban dando herramientas "psicológico-políticas" para que se fortalezcan ciertos movimientos políticos en distintos países, o para manipular a la sociedad. En este sentido, el libro puede resultar hasta perverso en ciertos pasajes. Tal vez esto pueda corroborarse en otras lecturas de los autores que yo no haya leído hasta el momento.
A mi humilde entender, uno puede no coincidir o intentar alguna suerte de crítica sobre ciertos conceptos, pero el libro es seguramente un clásico.
Para los que no somos entendidos en la extensa literatura marxista, es realmente complicado de leer, sobre todo porque el nivel de abstracción es alto y los autores no realizan un ida y vuelta con ejemplos históricos. Los párrafos son largos y cada uno de ellos es muy intenso conceptualmente. Si uno pretende darle una leída no muy detenida se va a frustrar con rapidez. Asimismo, el libro no solo revisa literatura marxista sino que también toma conceptos de la teoría de Lacan, de Wittgenstein y de Derrida, entre otros, para refutarla. Para aquellos que no desean entrar con mucho detenimiento en la parte más teórica del libro, recomiendo leer únicamente el último capítulo y utilizar un poco el google; esta es la parte más accesible del libro en términos de lectura.
A priori uno podría pensar que es un mero libro de izquierda o que incluso es un libro programático destinado a derribar al capitalismo. La realidad es que el libro toma la literatura marxista más ortodoxa, la critica, pero al mismo tiempo describe teóricamente una sociedad totalmente distinta a la que describían y proponían aquellos autores. Lo curioso es que muchas de esas cosas que los autores describían fueron profundizándose con el correr del tiempo y se pueden verificar en la realidad.
La pregunta que uno puede hacerse, luego de leído el libro, es si los autores estaban solamente generando un libro teórico o si estaban dando herramientas "psicológico-políticas" para que se fortalezcan ciertos movimientos políticos en distintos países, o para manipular a la sociedad. En este sentido, el libro puede resultar hasta perverso en ciertos pasajes. Tal vez esto pueda corroborarse en otras lecturas de los autores que yo no haya leído hasta el momento.
A mi humilde entender, uno puede no coincidir o intentar alguna suerte de crítica sobre ciertos conceptos, pero el libro es seguramente un clásico.
August 6, 2020
Contrary to popular opinion, I found this admittedly dense work a lucid read. Supposed to be against privileging of 'a priori' essences, predetermined processes, and reductionisms -- but in fact tends towards the very thing they're supposedly arguing against: essentializing of identity and "liberal" democratic politics, and reducing antagonism as inherently external to class / productive relations, unsubstantiated dismissals, for instance, of "Mao's zero-philosophical value".
May 20, 2023
Like many theory books, the language is way more complicated than it needs to be, but there are a lot of informative thoughts in this book. It is a staple of post-Marxist thought for a reason.
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December 10, 2009I really wanted to like this... I don't want to define myself, but post-Marxist is a pretty accurate descriptor, and this is the movement's premier manifesto. It seems that when Laclau and Mouffe try to forge a post-Marxist path, one that strays from the dogmas and orthodoxies of Marxism-Leninism, they feel the need to maintain a structural and aesthetic kinship with the Marxist writers they're critiquing. Which is annoying, especially when you consider that the sort of inclusive, multifaceted Marxist scholarship they're promoting has been the norm in the academy for the past 20 years. And I hate to complain about style, but it was written in 1985, during the golden age of high theory, with all the obnoxiousness that implies.
In the last chapter, however, Laclau and Mouffe actually do say something. They start to incorporate (God forbid!) historical evidence into their argument, and rather than subtle analyses of the nature of superstructure, we get something resembling a post-Marxist call to arms. Good show.
In the last chapter, however, Laclau and Mouffe actually do say something. They start to incorporate (God forbid!) historical evidence into their argument, and rather than subtle analyses of the nature of superstructure, we get something resembling a post-Marxist call to arms. Good show.
August 12, 2019
Honestly, this book was a lot better than I expected. Lots of interesting and useful stuff about the "new social movements", essentialism around class, etc. I think the concept of historical bloc (which of course comes from Gramsci) incredibly useful.
But the book really tapers off in the second half. Ironically I think they harbor a lot of illusions about liberal democracy and in that sense commit their own form of essentialism. I also think their case against the Marxian critique of political economy is way overstated. We hardly have to abandon an analysis of Capital to abandon crude articulations of base/superstructure, etc.
But the book really tapers off in the second half. Ironically I think they harbor a lot of illusions about liberal democracy and in that sense commit their own form of essentialism. I also think their case against the Marxian critique of political economy is way overstated. We hardly have to abandon an analysis of Capital to abandon crude articulations of base/superstructure, etc.
November 19, 2022
Para hacerle justicia hay que reconocer que su crítica a los distintos marxismos esencialistas (y no ya ortodoxos, porque hasta Gramsci o Althusser colearían en algún punto a este respecto) es legítima y necesaria. Y sin duda el desarrollo postestructuralista de conceptos como el de sujeto o hegemonía sirve para interpretar el lugar y la forma que han tomado las luchas políticas en el capitalismo tardío. La defensa implícita de cierto populismo también sitúa a ambos autores en un paradigma realista en el que me siento cómodo. Sin embargo no basta con dar cuenta del carácter material de los discursos para escapar a la acusación de idealismo. Una cosa es rechazar todo esencialismo y otra muy distinta hacer depender el cambio político del establecimiento de cadenas de equivalencias que construyen antagonismos, al fin y al cabo, a partir de interpretaciones que motivan una articulación hegemónica u otra. No hay que ser esencialista para reconocer que hay distintas clases de factores que producen distintas clases de cambios, que determinan probabilísticamente en mayor o menor medida. En resumen que les falta Marvin Harris y Gustavo Bueno y les sobra Lacan
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February 20, 2025Talk about a slow burn
November 11, 2019
El presente libro plantea una de las perspectivas mas originales para comprender la crisis del marxismo y la imposibilidad de la izquierda de construir un proyecto alternativo al orden establecido a finales del siglo XX. Los autores de la obra se plantean la tarea de resignificar conceptos de la teoría marxista y del liberalismo como herramientas de análisis y comprensión de lo que sucede en el lo social a partir de la revolución democrática y del advenimiento del neoliberalismo como estructuras discursivas en proceso de tensión, acoplamiento, ruptura y sutura. Hegemonía, antagonismos, sistema de equivalencias, diversidad, pluralidad, posiciones del sujeto, apertura de lo real, así como la crítica al universalismo, la totalidad, esencialismo, sujeto trascendental, son los principales aspectos discursivos que presentan los autores como herramientas para expandir el sentido de lo político que permita a los sujetos sociales, desde una radicalización de la democracia, construir un nuevo orden social, una utopía como imaginario radical y equilibrio inestable.
February 18, 2023
Una obra que tiene una fama inmerecidisima como supuesta lectura "heterodoxa" del marxismo y "renovadora" del pensamiento de izquierda. Si el marxismo se ganó sus charreteras "deconstruyendo" al capitalismo y demostrando que, a pesar de lo que lo que dicen los capitalistas de sí mismos, la sociedad se ordena en clases sociales y que la política no es "el interés general" sino que está cruzada por intereses de clase, Laclau y Mouffe se dedican, por el contrario, a "deconstruir" el marxismo para restaurar la idea de que pensar en términos de clases sociales es una construcción discursiva cono cualquier otra, que la clase obrera es un mito y que la política por lo tanto no se mueve según intereses de clase. Dicho de otra manera, Laclau y Mouffe consideran que la forma en que la política del bloque dominante se describe a sí misma es la pura realidad. Son parte del espíritu de época posmoderno y de resignación a la miseria de lo posible.
March 6, 2015
pomo gramsci. probably a useful project would be to run this text through the meatgrinders presented by Harvey (The Condition of Postmodernity) and Jameson (Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism), to determine how the water-down version of a perfectly good gramscian concept was produced by the processes of alleged postmodernism. this is not to accuse L&M of left deviationism or opportunism or anything of the sort (which accusation would of course broadly confirm their critique otherwise of braindead Stalinism).
May 4, 2010
Another call for the left to get itself some more imagination. Perhaps L & M make too great a concession to the postmodern, post-Marxist moment in which they were writing, insisting that one could start with any discourse and end with their deconstructionist and Lacanian inflected conclusions. I like the call for a politics of endless antagonism, endless debate. Habermasian without the goal of resolution. Also certainly without the myth of transparent language and communication: "Literality is the first metaphor."
abandoned
September 8, 2018Life is too short. If somebody will please let me know when the cartoon version of this is released, maybe then I'll take another run at it.
"Whatever conception one might have of a relation of articulation, this must include a system of differential positions; and, given that this system constitutes a configuration, the problem necessarily arises of the relational or non-relational character of the identity of the elements involved. "
The preceding quote is meant solely as a reminder to myself, in case I am ever tempted to spend more time reading this book.
"Whatever conception one might have of a relation of articulation, this must include a system of differential positions; and, given that this system constitutes a configuration, the problem necessarily arises of the relational or non-relational character of the identity of the elements involved. "
The preceding quote is meant solely as a reminder to myself, in case I am ever tempted to spend more time reading this book.
March 10, 2007
A difficult book to get through, especially if you're not fluent in the jargon of late 20th-century "continental" philosophy. Still, I thought that it was quite interesting, though there's no way I could appraise this book on any scholarly or critical level. I'm just not qualified.
January 15, 2023
An extremely dense, theoretical, and exceedingly obtuse book on many levels. I was expecting different and therefore struggled mightily to get my brain sufficiently in order to follow the ideas, concepts, and references, which are presented one after the next with few, if any, real world examples for additional clarification. This book is assuredly not for the casual reader, by any means. It requires a strong base in several disciplines, Marxism being only the most obvious, but economics, structuralism, linguistics, history, and politics are but a few of the others. By the time the authors had prefaced their main points - in excruciating detail - there was so much information already in play it was hard to understand why they felt the need to overcomplicate their ultimate position, and to such a length. I won't even attempt a summary, I am sure most readers will find their own enjoyment, befuddlement, or epiphany in between the covers.
I am now on to reading Butler, Laclau, and Žižek's "Contingency, Hegemony, Universality", a book I had started by noticed in the Preface was based on this particular book by Laclau and Mouffe.
I am now on to reading Butler, Laclau, and Žižek's "Contingency, Hegemony, Universality", a book I had started by noticed in the Preface was based on this particular book by Laclau and Mouffe.
August 20, 2024
I won’t be able to articulate any useful commentary on this book. I know many Marxist critics have deep problems with their project, especially with how it takes up post-structuralist theories of the subject and the openness of the social. I am interested in how negativity and antagonism become central to their understanding of politics. What this looks like in practice is very elusive to me. It’s not clear to me what a hegemonic articulation looks like (even when they try to give examples; they seem to argue that the rise and convergences of neoliberal and neoconservative discourses are one example).
The first two chapters gave a useful overview and critique of an early moment in Marxist discourse. The core of their project is found in chapters 3 &4. I plan to assign one or both of these to my undergrads in the spring. We’ll see what we can make of it.
The first two chapters gave a useful overview and critique of an early moment in Marxist discourse. The core of their project is found in chapters 3 &4. I plan to assign one or both of these to my undergrads in the spring. We’ll see what we can make of it.
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June 18, 2023Snakkes aldri Laclau & Mouffe!!!!
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October 26, 2025thesis turning me into a frickin’ communist
February 16, 2025
Plutôt une chouette compilation d’explications de théories politiques
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