In their groundbreaking Hegemony and socialist strategy (1985), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe develop a new account of radical politics in which the subjective construction of hegemony establishes political conditions, not the objective historical stages and class contexts of traditional Hegelian Marxism. On this basis, they forcefully justify the politics of contemporary women’s, African- American, gay, peace, ecological and working class groups and organisations and oppose both the hegemony of the new right and the ‘classism’ and revolutionary orientation of the radical left. In their later work, they both elaborate this justification of those movements and move in new directions. In On populist reason (2005) and The rhetorical foundations of society (2014), Laclau draws on poststructuralist discourse or rhetoric as well as notions of populism or the masses to show that hegemony involves antagonism, frontiers or we/they oppositions, equivalential logic, and other elements. By contrast, in On the political (2005) and Agonistics: thinking the world politically (with Wagner, 2013), Mouffe elaborates the notion of the fissured subject which, as she and Laclau argued in Hegemony (1985: 122– 34), was constituted by the antagonisms of diverse social movements or the dislocation of social structures; however, her new accounts of the antagonisms or, as she says, ‘agonisms’ dividing the political field forcefully oppose universal norms of rationality or democracy in order to establish a genuine pluralism on a national and a world scale.

Hegemony and socialist strategy

In Rhetorical foundations, Laclau explains the experiences which led him to write Hegemony and socialist strategy in 1985. He says that, in the 1960s, when he was part of the resistance to the Peron government in Argentina and to the military dictatorship which replaced it, the trade unions were allied with the dictatorship, while middle class and student movements opposed it (Laclau, 2014: 1– 4). Although this state of affairs was contrary to Marxist theory, which considers the working class revolutionary, he did not reject Marxism; instead, he, along with Chantal Mouffe, developed alternative accounts of Marxism. For example, he and Mouffe accepted Louis Althusser’s Marxist critique of the Hegelian belief that predetermined historical stages or economic contexts explain social development (see Althusser, 1969).