Ernesto Laclau (b.1935 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine 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, South America, Western Europe, Australia, and South Africa.

Biography

He was a member of the PSIN (Socialist Party of the National Left) until 1969, when the British historian Eric Hobsbawm supported his entrance to Oxford , Pagina/12, June 5, 2005 . He had close links with Jorge Abelardo Ramos, the founder of the PSIN, although he declared in 2005 that the latter then evolved in a direction he did not appreciate . In the same interview, he stated that he came from a Yrigoyenista family, and that the Socialist politician Arturo Jauretche, a strong opponent of Justo's dictatorship during the Infamous Decade of the 1930s, was a close friend of his father .

Works

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 link 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.

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, 2010)

See also

• list of deconstructionists

• Richard JF Day

• Louis Althusser

• Antonio Gramsci

• Ideology

• Marxism

• Slavoj Žižek