In the dark days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s political supremacy, when post-structuralist theory was at the peak of its intellectual influence, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe developed a novel conception of “hegemony” intended to overcome the crisis of left-wing politics. The roots of that crisis, they argued, lay in an “essentialism” that was endemic to the Left’s Marxist heritage.

Laclau and Mouffe’s “post-Marxism” defined contingent, discursive procedures of identity formation as the foundation of political agency. In this framework, the political became the contingent structuring principle of the social, divorcing political identities from any grounding in collective interests, social antagonisms, or tendencies inherent to the class structure of capitalist societies.

If this abandonment of “class politics” seemed to offer a way to knit together the demands of emerging social movements in the 1980s, from ecology to feminism, two decades later Laclau and Mouffe would offer the same approach as a model of “populist reason,” articulating the internal logic of new electoral forces in Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere. In the process, a theoretical conception that might have seemed all too discursive took on new elements of political concreteness: the construction of a “people” through the discourses articulated by parties and leaders and their entry into the state through electoral victories.