Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
Cover to the 2nd Edition
AuthorsChantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau
LanguageEnglish
SubjectPolitical theory
PublisherVerso (New Left)
Publication date
1985
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint (hardcover and paperback)
Pages197 (first edition)
ISBN0860910679 (Verso)
OCLC67440480

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics is a 1985 work of political theory in the post-Marxist tradition by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Developing several sharp divergences from the tenets of canonical Marxist thought, the authors begin by tracing historically varied discursive constitutions of class, political identity, and social self-understanding, and then tie these to the contemporary importance of hegemony as a destabilized analytic which avoids the traps of various procedures Mouffe and Laclau feel constitute a foundational flaw in Marxist thought: essentializations of class identity, the use of a priori interpretative paradigms with respect to history and contextualization, the privileging of the base/superstructure binary above other explicative models.