Laclau, Ernesto (1935—2014) Argentine sociologist and political theorist known for his extensive work on the concepts of popular struggle and hegemony. Born in Buenos Aires, he was educated at the University of Buenos Aires and completed a DPhil at Oxford under the supervision of Hobsbawm, Eric. As a student in Argentina, he was an active member of the National Party of the Independent Left, founded by Jorge Abelardo Ramos, and opposed the Onganía dictatorship. Almost alone among his peers on the Argentinian Left he was a supporter of Perón---he later said it was Perón that led him to become interested in anarchism and the concept of hegemony. Although his formal training was in history, from 1973 until his death he taught in the Department of Government at the University of Essex, and it was as a political thinker that he became renowned. His first major book, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), was a critique of Latin American dependency theory. It drew, not uncritically, on the work of the French Marxist Althusser, Louis. Hall, Stuart cited it as an important influence on his own thinking about class and politics. He is best known for the book he co-authored with the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). Adopting a post-structuralism stance, the authors critiqued Marxism and Marxism for being both essentialist and determinist, and argue instead that political thinking needs to grapple with the uncertainty and undecidability of contemporary existence. Against standard positions in Marxism, they argued that ideology does not necessarily correspond to a particular class and economic development does not necessarily lead to socialism. In this and subsequent works, particularly in On Populist Reason (2005), Laclau rejected the notion that class by itself brings about the necessary level of group cohesion to effect political change; similarly, he rejected the notion that group cohesion can only take place along prescribed lines of class and social identification. Hegemony was the concept chosen to problematize and rethink political identity and political commitment. In Laclau’s view, hegemony is the possibility inherent in politics of one group to represent its interests and world view as synonymous with the general interest. Laclau and Mouffe argue that politics is essentially a discursive struggle for the control of meaning and, more particularly, the struggle to construct one’s own position and the position of the Other. On this view, politics is seen as a ‘war of position’ rather than a ‘war of movement’ (Gramsci’s terms for politics that either resists the dominant political power or seeks to overthrow it). Laclau’s later focus on populism and what he called radical democracy is an extension of this position. As influential as this book became, it was not without its critics. Anderson, Perry taxes Laclau in The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (2017) for creating a deracinated vision of politics in which the contingency of populist solidarities is overemphasized. However, it is precisely this contingency, and the sense of hope that change can come from anywhere it engenders, that attracted Laclau’s most high-profile supporter, Podemos’s political strategist Íñigo Errejón. Further Reading: D. Howarth Ernesto Laclau: Post-Marxism, Populism and Critique (2014).