Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

Infobox Book
name = Hegemony and Socialist Strategy


image_caption = "Cover to the 2nd Edition"
author = Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau
country = United Kingdom
language = English
cover_artist =
series =
genre = Political Theory
publisher = Verso (New Left)
release_date = 1985 | media_type = Print (hardcover and paperback)
pages = 197 (first edition)
isbn = ISBN 0-860-91796-X (Verso)
preceded_by =
followed_by =

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

Organization

The book is divided into four lengthy chapters (~50 pages each). The first two chapters deal with conceptual developments in the manner of an intellectual history, albeit with much more of an eye to disputation and intervention than traditional intellectual history employs. Specifically, Chapter 1 employs close readings of texts by Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Lenin (among other texts by major thinkers in the Marxist tradition). Chapter 2's lengthy discussion of Gramsci's conception of hegemony is followed by Chapter 3's more politicized development of Laclau and Mouffe's own arguments regarding hegemony's character and constitution. Finally, the fourth chapter argues for the relevance of hegemony as an analytic for the understanding and governance of contemporary politics, political engagement, and self-understanding on the Left.

Contents

Introduction
1. Hegemony: The Genealogy of a Concept
* The Dilemmas of Rosa Luxembourg
* Crisis, Degree Zero
* The First Response to the Crisis: the Formation of Marxist Orthodoxy
* The Second Response to the Crisis: Revisionism
* The Third Response to the Crisis: Revolutionary Syndicalism2. Hegemony: The Difficult Emergence of a New Political Logic
* Combined Logic and the Logic of the Contingent
* 'Class Alliances': Between Democracy and Authoritarianism
* The Gramscian Watershed
* The Last Redoubt of Essentialism: The Economy
* Facing the Consequences3. Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antagonisms and Hegemony
* Social Formation and Overdetermination
* Articulation and Discourse
* The Category of 'Subject'
* Antagonism and Objectivity
* Equivalence and Difference
* Hegemony4. Hegemony and Radical Democracy
* The Democratic Revolution
* Democratic Revolution and New Antagonisms
* The Anti-Democratic Offensive
* Radical Democracy: Alternative for a New Left

Reception

"Hegemony and Socialist Strategy" was greeted with positive reviews and has become a reference point in its field; for example, the interdisciplinary philosopher Slavoj Zizek cited "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy" as a work having had an impact on his first book, "The Sublime Object of Ideology". Furthermore, its resolutely "post-Marxist" self-definition marks it as one of the first major texts associated with this disciplinary development.