Ernesto Laclau

Formation in Argentina

Ernesto Laclau was born on October 6, 1935, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied history at the University of Buenos Aires, graduating in 1964, and was politically active in Argentine left-wing politics, moving between Peronism and socialism in the complex terrain of Argentine political culture. He worked as a teacher and political activist before pursuing graduate studies in Britain.

Laclau went to the University of Essex in 1969, where he began his doctoral work under Eric Hobsbawm's nominal supervision and developed his theoretical interests in Althusserian Marxism and Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Essex would become the institutional home for the rest of his academic career; he eventually became Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Politics and Ideology: The Althusserian Phase

Laclau's first major work, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), engaged the theoretical debates within Althusserian Marxism about the articulation of social formations. His distinctive contribution was to challenge the thesis that political ideologies can be 'read off' from class positions — the assumption that there is a necessary correspondence between class location and ideological content. Drawing on historical analysis of populism and fascism, Laclau argued that ideological elements (like nationalism or democracy) are not inherently class-specific but are floating signifiers that can be articulated into radically different political projects by different class forces. This argument anticipated the central claims of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), co-authored with Chantal Mouffe, is one of the most important works in political philosophy of the late twentieth century. Its argument has several interconnected dimensions.

First, a genealogical argument: drawing on an intellectual history of the Marxist tradition from the Second International through Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe trace the concept of hegemony from its emergence as a strategic concept in the face of the non-fulfillment of Marxist predictions about class consciousness. The concept of hegemony — the construction of political alliances across class lines around common projects — developed precisely because the logic of history was not delivering the unified revolutionary class subject that historical materialism predicted.

Second, a theoretical argument: following Derrida's deconstruction and Lacan's theory of the impossibility of a fully closed subject, Laclau and Mouffe argue that social identities are never fully constituted or sutured. Every social identity is marked by constitutive antagonisms — threats from the outside that prevent the identity from becoming fully positive. And the 'social' itself — the totality of social relations — cannot be sutured into a closed system; its 'fullness' is always promised by a nodal point or empty signifier that represents the impossible completeness of the social without ever achieving it.

Third, a political argument: the concept of radical democracy — their positive political proposal — rejects both the socialist dream of a transparent, fully reconciled social order (which requires the subordination of all antagonisms to the master contradiction of class) and liberal pluralism's reduction of politics to bargaining among given interests. Instead, radical democracy involves the proliferation and democratic articulation of social antagonisms — extending the logic of democratic equivalence to gender, race, sexuality, ecology, and other sites of subordination.

The book provoked intense controversy on the left: it was read as a capitulation to postmodernism and liberalism. The rejoinder from Laclau and Mouffe — that the left's insistence on the primacy of class was itself a form of essentialism that had been the theoretical basis for its consistent political failures — defined a major debate in left political theory for two decades.

Discourse Theory and the Logic of the Empty Signifier

Laclau's theoretical development through the 1990s systematized the post-structuralist elements of Hegemony. His essay 'The Impossibility of Society' (1983) and the collection New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1990) developed the concept of dislocation — the partial disruption of structural determinations by contingent events — as the opening through which hegemonic rearticulation becomes possible.

His essay 'Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?' (1994) developed the concept of the empty signifier — a signifier that signifies the fullness or completeness of the community, whose very emptiness (lack of determinate content) allows it to function as the nodal point of hegemonic articulation. 'Democracy,' 'justice,' 'the people' — these function as empty signifiers in specific political conjunctures, condensing a variety of demands into an equivalential chain without specifying which demands have priority.

On Populist Reason

Laclau's final major work, On Populist Reason (2005), applied the discourse theory to a general analysis of populism. Against the standard dismissal of populism as an irrational, manipulative, or merely rhetorical phenomenon, Laclau argued that populism is in fact the form that the political itself takes when heterogeneous social demands fail to be satisfied through existing institutional channels and begin to form equivalential chains, crystallizing a popular identity against a bloc in power.

The argument implies that the distinction between 'genuine' politics and 'mere populism' is ideological: it is always made from the standpoint of those whose demands are being satisfied by existing institutions and who wish to delegitimize those whose demands are not. Populism, for Laclau, is not a pathology of democracy but its constitutive possibility.

Laclau died on April 13, 2014, in Seville, Spain. His work has been enormously influential in political theory, cultural studies, and the practical political strategies of Latin American left-wing movements, including those of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Kirchnerism in Argentina.