Democracy without Hegemony: A Reply to Mark Purcell

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.