Introduction

The figure and legacy of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (1891– 1937), was indisputably central to Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) radical reworking of the theory of hegemony. Without Gramsci’s prison writings of the 1920s and 1930s (see Gramsci, 1971, 1995), their claim to be unveiling a new, ‘post-Marxist’ (rather than a non-or even anti-Marxist) mode of thinking would have lacked one its key foundations. More than most other Marxist thinkers, Gramsci offered insights that remained engaged with the classical Marxist concerns of political struggle and revolutionary advance and yet avoided being assimilated to its cruder, deterministic formulations. Moreover, his early death following imprisonment by Mussolini’s Fascist regime prevented him from being neutralised by Stalinism and allowed his posthumous memory to be associated, instead, with a radical anti-Fascist tradition in Italy that distanced him from other, sectarian variants of Communism. Gramsci’s apparent political and intellectual independence therefore enhanced his post-war reception among radical and left-wing intellectuals of various persuasions. But this was achieved largely by separating his theoretical innovations from his immediate political preoccupations and commitments.

In key respects, Laclau and Mouffe’s account of hegemony and their appeal to a Gramscian tradition of political theorising extended the decontextualisation of Gramsci’s legacy. For them, his innovations around hegemony signified an abstract ‘logic’ of social constitution more than it did a framework for examining concrete entities such as the state, civil society, intellectuals or revolutionary agency. Hegemony was elevated in their work to a principle of societal articulation – that is, it describes the contingent, global formation of the space and limits of political contests as such – rather than a theory of specifically capitalist domination or class politics. This post-Marxist account of hegemony, which endorsed a pluralistic understanding of domination that fitted with the diversity of struggles under ‘late capitalism’, converged with the then ascendant ‘post-structuralist’ philosophies and theories of ‘discourse’ that affirmed the intrinsically multiple and malleable character of power relations. Although Gramsci was not himself aligned to this form of theorising, Laclau and Mouffe’s view of his work as tendentially amenable to it presented him as a kind of double agent in the Marxist camp whose overt commitments were secretly incompatible with the implicitly deconstructive logic of his thought.