Ernesto Laclau

Western Philosophy 20th / 21st-century philosophy
Name	Ernesto Laclau
Birth	October 6th, 1935 Buenos Aires, Argentina
School/tradition	Post-Marxism
Main interests	Hegemony · Identity Politics
Influenced by	Hobbes · Machiavelli · Hegel · Marx · Sorel · Gramsci · Ramos · Althusser · Hobsbawn · de Saussure · Wittgenstein · Lacan · Miller · Lefort · Foucault · Derrida
Influenced	Žižek · Butler · Zerilli · Critchley · Marchart

Ernesto Laclau (b.1935 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentinian political theorist often described as post-Marxist. He is a professor at the University of Essex where he holds a chair in Political Theory and was for many years director of the doctoral Programme in Ideology and Discourse Analysis. He has lectured extensively in many universities in North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Australia and South Africa. Currently, he is a professor of political theory at Northwestern University.

Laclau's most important book is 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 join working class and new social movements. They rejected Marxist economic determinism and the notion of class struggle being the crucial antagonism in society. Instead they urged for radical democracy of agonistic pluralism where all antagonisms could be expressed.

[edit] Books

Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (NLB, 1977)
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (with Chantal Mouffe) (Verso, 1985)
New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (Verso, 1990)
The Making of Political Identities (editor) (Verso, 1994)
Emancipation(s) (Verso, 1996)
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (with Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek) (Verso, 2000)
On Populist Reason (Verso, 2005)
Elusive Universality (Routledge, forthcoming 2007)