My own engagement with Ernesto Laclau goes back to the mid-1970s in the UK when he was for a time my PhD supervisor at Essex, after I had arrived from Argentina some years after he had. I thought then that he was forsaking Marxism for some illusory post-structuralist politics that would take him far away from socialism. In the years since, I have taken his work, on his own, and of course the landmark Hegemony and socialist strategy with Chantal Mouffe (1985), as basic building blocks for any reconstruction of democratic socialism after the collapse of its actually existing and most alternative variants. I will not comment here on Mouffe’s work insofar as she developed a quite distinct theory of democracy, in my opinion, after this joint work. Mark Purcell’s chapter represents a heterodox account of democracy and, in certain respects, Laclau’s work. His statement that ‘hegemonic politics and radical democracy are at odds’ and that ‘it is not possible to engage in a hegemonic project for democracy’ seemed, in fact, quite at odds with the underlying political intent of Hegemony and socialist strategy and Laclau’s work since.

Lest there be any doubt, Laclau consistently advocated a liberaldemocratic-socialist society, as he put it, and a democratic revolution, in which the principle of equality pervades all dimensions of social life and erases the distinction in liberal theory between the public and private spheres. As to the concept of hegemony that Laclau articulates, it is anything but in contradiction with democracy. Rather, hegemony is the key concept around which to think strategically about how we might implement the democratic revolution. It is not a process of imposing anything on anyone as Purcell argues, but something that emerges from the political interaction of different social groups in a process of ongoing struggle that constitutes the social. There is no construction of democracy without a strategy for hegemony.

Purcell’s alternative to Laclau’s perspective is that ‘in democracy people rouse themselves and decide to take on the project of governing themselves’ and that this ‘mobilisation does not turn its face towards the Party or the State and seek to appropriate their power’.