Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Recent political thought from the left has re-awoken the interest in Gramscian theory. Even if, pace Louis Althusser or, in America, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci's syntax of ideology as an integral form of relation between individual and society has been quite popular in cultural studies, the notion of hegemony has not enjoyed the same repute. It is therefore Ernesto Laclau's merit to have reintroduced the term in contemporary debates concerning problems of political power, authority, cultural policy and ideology. Hailing from a reinvented Marxist perspective (one that had to account, among others, for the failures of actual existing socialism, and adjust to the newly-posed post-structuralist or neo-liberal challenges of the 1970s and 1980s), Laclau has been associated with a wide variety of intellectuals whose allegiances to the ideology of class have been reinterpreted through various lenses: anarcho-syndicalism (Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort), neo-structuralism (Etienne Balibar), psychoanalysis (Slavoj Zizek). If Laclau's political thinking is constructed around the term hegemony, this is due mostly to his attempt to break away with certain misperceptions of Gramscian theory and to enlarge its conceptual sphere. At least two aspects occupy the core of Laclau's theorization: on the one hand, the extrication of hegemony from the orthodox Marxist theoretical tradition which tended to subordinate its meaning to a teleological narrative of class universality; on the other hand, the re-shaping of hegemony in the context of contemporary post-structuralist theories of identity, society and rights.
Repository Citation
Piloiu, Rares. "Hegemony: Methods and Hypotheses." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 2, 2002, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss2/5