Works
Laclau's early work was influenced by Althusserian Marxism and focused on issues debated within Neo-Marxist circles in the 1970s, including the role of the state, the dynamics of capitalism beyond reductionist models, the importance of Gramsci's theory of hegemony, etc. Laclau's most important book is arguably Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which he co-authored with Chantal Mouffe. Their thought is usually described as post-Marxist as they were both politically active in the social and student movements of the 1960s and thus tried to link new emerging political identities with a democratic socialist imaginary. They rejected Marxist economic determinism and the notion of class struggle being the only determining antagonism in society. Instead, on the basis of recognising the plurality of antagonisms operating in society, they put forward a project of "radical and plural democracy". In his more recent work and under the increasing influence of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Laclau has returned to a topic preoccupying him from his early years, that of populism. His latest views were well reflected in an interview given to Intellectum journal in 2008.
Read more about this topic: Ernesto Laclau
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)
“My first childish doubt as to whether God could really be a good Protestant was suggested by my observation of the deplorable fact that the best voices available for combination with my mother’s in the works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed to Roman Catholics.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Separatism of any kind promotes marginalization of those unwilling to grapple with the whole body of knowledge and creative works available to others. This is true of black students who do not want to read works by white writers, of female students of any race who do not want to read books by men, and of white students who only want to read works by white writers.”
—bell hooks (b. 1955)