The Marxist influence on contemporary culture studies (from literary studies to Anthropology) is largely an uncritical one: Given the buzzwords, scholars employ them regardless of their origins and history as short hand for elusive concepts -- those very concepts that are the heart of culture. Rather than critically working through our vocabulary, we instead employ these keywords in our studies of transitory interests, only to further obscure our vocabulary, and our intellectual heritage. In the following, the foundational "hegemony" is unpacked to great effect, and with great insight, as Rares Piloiu dicusses Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's reconstruction of the term in light of latter day developments in Marxist thought.

Hegemony: Methods and Hypotheses, A Historical-Comparative Perspective [printable version]

Rares Piloiu

This game, which eludes the concept, does at least have a name: hegemony.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

<1> Recent political thought from the left has re-awoken the interest in Gramscian theory. Even if, pace Louis Althusser or, in America, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci's syntax of ideology as an integral form of relation between individual and society has been quite popular in cultural studies, the notion of hegemony has not enjoyed the same repute. It is therefore Ernesto Laclau's merit to have reintroduced the term in contemporary debates concerning problems of political power, authority, cultural policy and ideology. Hailing from a reinvented Marxist perspective (one that had to account, among others, for the failures of actual existing socialism, and adjust to the newly-posed post-structuralist or neo-liberal challenges of the 1970s and 1980s), Laclau has been associated with a wide variety of intellectuals whose allegiances to the ideology of class have been reinterpreted through various lenses: anarcho-syndicalism (Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort), neo-structuralism (Etienne Balibar), psychoanalysis (Slavoj Zizek). If Laclau's political thinking is constructed around the term hegemony, this is due mostly to his attempt to break away with certain misperceptions of Gramscian theory and to enlarge its conceptual sphere. At least two aspects occupy the core of Laclau's theorization: on the one hand, the extrication of hegemony from the orthodox Marxist theoretical tradition which tended to subordinate its meaning to a teleological narrative of class universality; on the other hand, the re-shaping of hegemony in the context of contemporary post-structuralist theories of identity, society and rights.

<2> The purpose of the present paper is to explore the premises and implication of Laclau's understanding and use of the term hegemony. In this sense, special attention will be devoted to the historical-comparative evolution of the term and to its origins in the mixed lineage of social-democracy, liberalism and cultural critique (in the sense of Kulturkritik). It is one central argument of this study that the notion of hegemony and its conceptual correlatives, articulation and antagonism, share deep affinities with the organicist thought of turn-of-the-century political philosophers and cultural critics, like Giovanni Gentile, Georges Sorel and Friedrich Nietzsche. However, in spite of the correspondences between the theory of hegemony and various anti-modern, decisionist and revolutionary political philosophies, Laclau also fuses elements of the liberal-democratic doctrine, based on the idea of reform and civil rights.

The Marxist Heritage

<3> In the book co-authored with Chantal Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1995), Ernesto Laclau argues against an essentialist -- "economist" -- definition of historical change. In exploring the limitations of this teleological determinist model in social and political theory, Laclau and Mouffe reintroduce the concept of hegemony as an alternative formulated by Gramsci against the prevailing economism of early Marxist thought. Nonetheless, from the point of view of historical Marxism, the term itself (hegemony) is somehow inconsistent with the definition Laclau puts forward: first conceptualized by Georgii V. Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod, hegemony referred strictly to the domination of the social sphere by the working class, which was supposed to reach a "hegemonic" position at the end of the given historical cycle. In Gramsci, however, the term is used for any type of domination (determined by class or not), under the condition that domination is, nevertheless, subject to changes produced by the mass pressures exerted from below.

<4> This change in emphasis is what Laclau & Mouffe find revolutionary in Gramscian theory: unlike the "classist" model popular in Russian social-democracy (Karl Kautsky), according to which the proletariat was supposed to come into power because of the natural antagonizing of the forces of production (as predicted in the 1848 Communist Manifesto), the new hegemonic model affirms the unpredictable character of change and its mass-based component. Hegemony therefore stands in a free relation to class determination; it provides the required closure between the hegemonic group and the state, while at the same time undoes itself continually under the pressure exerted by other groups, organized along lines of popular solidarity. As a consequence, Gramsci enlarges the sphere of applicability of Marxist political theory by replacing class as the agent of history with mass or popular movements.

<5> In one of his early works, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1979), Laclau will make use of this shift from a "classist ontology" to a "massist" one in an attempt to enlarge the practical application of the Althusserian notion of interpellation. This alternative frame of interpretation stems from the imperative of considering the actual conditions from which social-political change occurs. By rejecting the doctrinaire theories of history or society (of which classical Marxism was one), Laclau moves toward the idea of a non-mediated intelligibility of history, in which the actuality of events always precedes the attempts at theoretical interpretation. Although rejecting various speculative theories of history (themselves based on a direct, unmediated grasping of the meaning of history), Laclau takes a decisive stand in favor of a phenomenological approach, with far-reaching consequences for his theory of hegemony. In this context, articulation occurs as an all-encompassing term, which designates a non-determined conception of the social, or what Lalcau and Mouffe refer to as "the indeterminacy of the social." In other words, if hegemony is a site of shifting power relations -- all motivated by various popular demands then society itself cannot be conceived as a full-fledged, stable and self-identical unit. The result of this instability is the fact that no pre-determined political or social theory can account for the entire social sphere. Articulation provides, therefore, the index of this instability or cognitive inaccessibility of the social; it precludes any forms of scientific determinism and reduces the interpretative method to the indeterminacy of popular spontaneity [1].

<6> If Plekhanov had adopted a scientific position in relation to the logic of social change, it was, according to Alain Besançon (1981), in response to the prevalent populism of the doctrine of Narodnaia Volia (popular will), espoused in the 19th century by much of the slavophile Russian intelligentsia, which flashed out the mystical, collectivist nature of social aggregation. Dissatisfied with the political sway of these anti-modern and anti-scientific movements, Plekhanov based his theory of history on more than just the will of the "Slavic soul"; he discovered a necessary logic of change, rooted in the very structure of economic laws. Gramsci, on the other hand, emphasized the "mass" character of political change, therefore executing a return to the predominant role of popular spontaneity, which was, in a way, the result of the influence exerted upon him by the spirit of mass mobilization sported under Risorgimento [2] and later under Stato Totalitario [3]. With his delimitation from the classical determinist Marxist narrative of class emancipation, Laclau inherits the anti-positivist, collectivist spirit of Gramsci's thought, calling upon a non-determinist, vitalist (in the sense of pre-conceptual or intuitive) approach to social exegesis.

<7> Laclau traces back in the history of Marxist thought the moments that lead to this understanding of society. One of the pioneering instants was Leon Trotsky's plea for a theory conforming with "lived experience," responding to attempts at a too abstract theorization of the social. Laclau writes: "we are now dealing with circumstances, which belong to an eminently factual order" (Laclau & Mouffe 53) and not with the overdetermining theory of the social present in Russian social democracy. But at an even earlier stage, Georges Sorel's syndicalism provides for Laclau the model for a non-determinist dynamics of political change. Sorel's advocating for "general strike" was motivated by the belief that, due to the flexible nature of bourgeois state and its capacity to adapt to renewed opposition, both historical antagonism and the expected revolutionary action of the proletariat had been forfeited. Immediate action was imperative, in the form of a short-circuiting of state mechanisms.

<8> Georges Sorel is, nonetheless, a source of ambiguity for Laclau's own theorization of the hegemonic. On the one hand, his support for the idea of general strike emphasizes the political character of all change, opposing to the deterministic, teleological view of classical Marxism ("the field of so-called 'objective laws' has lost its character as the rational substratum of the social, becoming instead the ensemble of forms through which a class constitutes itself as a dominant class and imposes its will on the rest of society" -- Laclau and Mouffe 38). In this sense, Sorel frees the political from the economic restraints of "classism," while conceding to its circumstantial character. On the other hand, however, he advocates a purely voluntarist model of action: politics is choice, and choice has to be made in a revolutionary fashion, regardless of the state of prevailing economical or social conditions. The political will has to assert itself, Sorel argues, against all obstacles, since the creation of a proletarian consciousness is the paramount dimension of all future advanced societies. In the same vein, V. I. Lenin's 1902 pamphlet "What Is To Be Done?" would urge for immediate revolutionary action. But this ready-made model of political action (class priorities, "the dictatorship of the proletariat," etc.) proves extremely constraining for the actual existing conditions, which outstep the limitations of any strict political determinism. Lalcau and Mouffe do not seek a resolution for this paradox, but they will ultimately opt for a non-revolutionary, gradual model of change, which, as we shall see, brings them in close vicinity to a Popperian-styled idea of piece-meal reforms.

From Nietzsche to Sorel

<9> Georges Sorel's voluntarist model of action had its roots in the irrationalist philosophical postulations of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, as Laclau and Mouffe acknowledge (38). Full contempt for rational argumentation or for the use of constitutional means of action induced Sorel to a political interpretation of both "will to power" and the "theory of unmediated life." As a result, he motivated violence for decisionist purposes, with the intention of maximizing the political potential of the absolute will. This political intransigence was a symptom of a typically Nietzschean cultural criticism.

<10> In Will to Power (1967), Nietzsche formulated the criteria upon which modernity would be construed as decadent and impotent: "lukewarm" democracy, indecision, Christianity, argumentation, instability of political and social values, or what he terms "nihilism": "Disintegration characterizes this time, and thus uncertainty: nothing stands firmly on its feet or on a hard faith in itself..." (40). Nietzsche identifies the origins of this "weakness" of the will in the Christian tradition of charity and, philosophically, in the Socratic tradition of argumentation: "the appearance of the Greek philosophers from Socrates onwards is a symptom of decadence; the anti-Hellenic instincts come to top" (231). For him, the birth of "dialectics" under Socrates marked the beginning of humanity's search for justifications, democracy being one of them. In Nietzschean line of argumentation, democracy is tantamount to indecision, moral justification (proof of weakness), and stultification of politics, or "the rule of the mob." The only reliable alternative ("active force," as he would say, or an alternative motivated by will's natural propensity toward expansion) is a government of the few, "aristocratic" and strong, placed above moral constraints, such as mercy, justice or equality. Nietzsche's view of politics dismisses, therefore, deliberation as a means of reaching decisions, arguing instead for a direct translation of the will into politics. Any mediation, involving institutions, representative bodies or, the whole democratic set of practices, is short-circuited by Nietzsche in favor of pure decisionism [4].

<11> The adoption of Nietzschean anti-"demo-liberalism" was pervasive both in the conservative and revolutionary circles about the turn of the last century. To the right, for integral nationalists, like Charles Maurras and the Action Française [5], Nietzsche was both a symbol of a much loathed "Germanness" and a major influence on the articulation of a political strategy that opposed parliamentarism in the name of the absolute will of the nation. For ultraconservatives, his attacks on Christianity were less important than the anti-modern nature of his thinking: narrative of decay, contempt for modern institution, aristocratic nostalgia, etc. Interestingly enough, they read Nietzsche against the grain of his philosophy of action, proving more eager to place him in the same lineage with reactionary figures like Luis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, or Donoso Cortés, than to acknowledge the contempt he always held for reactive forms of regressive ideology (Taguieff, 1997).

<12> To the left, the influence on Georges Sorel and his disciples concretized in the national-syndicalism of the Proudhon Circle. In this case, Nietzsche's contempt for democracy and for deliberation coupled with the Marxist conflation of liberalism and capitalism. The result was a call to political action that had its ends in Marxism and its means in radical Nietzscheanism. In spite of the contradictions, Sorel and his followers made a clear point about their wholesale rejection of gradual change, democratic institutions and the government according to the majority principle. In the words of Édouard Berth, a foremost disciple of Sorel's, "The power of the mediocre: that is, of democratic mediocrity, bourgeois and liberal (the word used to qualify with dignity all that is mediocre is, as we know and as the same Nietzsche remarked, the word 'liberal')" (qtd. in Taguieff 201).

<13> Noticing the pervasiveness of Nietzschean ideas in traditions of thought as distinct as the ones mentioned above, Pierre-André Taguieff shifts the emphasis from ideology to the commonly held reactionary rhetoric:

The dominant influence of Nietzschean thought will have been not doctrinal, but stylistic: the Nietzschean heritage means, most of all, the radicality of negations, the absoluteness of affirmations, the contemptuous tone, the unconditionality of commitments, and the "heroic" to-the-bitter-end attitude in action (Taguieff 190).

However, the persistence of the same motifs throughout these distinct veins cannot pass for a merely stylistic one: the style is the index of a deep affinity they have with the anti-modern, irrationalist and anti-democratic conceptions that came out of the romantic tradition and an attestation of their sweeping popularity in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

Gramsci and the Italian Tradition

<14> On a different plane, Gramsci himself had not been spared the influence of some irrationalist trends. Mussolini emerged intellectually in the 1920s as a Sorelian, just as Carl Schmitt would in his 1927 The Concept of the Political. This was the time of vast mass mobilizations throughout Europe and various attempts were being made at a theoretical subordination of the autonomous individual to the will of collectivities or of civil society to the state. Hence the resurrection of an organicist political paradigm (first defined in volkisch terms by the German romantics). Giovanni Gentile, although a liberal by formation, succumbed to conceptual pressures of statetism and surrendered the individual will to the will of the state. His argument executed a double movement: on the one hand, the state loses its minimal (liberal) character, augmenting to the point where it encompasses society ("the people is itself the state," as Norberto Bobbio phrases it); on the other, the individual has meaning only insofar as he is integrated, so to speak, "organically" with the rest of society and his will identifies with the collective will expressed by the state. He maintains that there is no "other individual subject of liberty than [the person] who feels pulsing in his own heart the superior interest of the community and the sovereign will of the State" (Gentile qtd. in Bobbio 1995, 127). As a consequence of this shift in the relationship between State and Civil Society, Gentile conceived of an entity that would be able to mediate between individual and collectivity in a harmonious manner, namely the corporation. The corporatist state borrowed the economic corporatist model and extrapolated it at the level of the society as a whole.

<15> Gramsci inherited this organicist outlook in his early conception of the social, in which individuals functioned as "functional units of a greater whole" (Richard Bellamy 1987, 119). His exposure to Gentile and Antonio Labriola cultivated in him a general skepticism toward positivism, as it became obvious during the polemic with N. I. Bukharin, when he attacked Marxist scientism. Laclau's general attempt at extricating Marxist theory from the confines of determinism stems, indirectly, from the same tradition of thought, a tradition that seeks to restore the freedom of choice to the acting subjects.

<16> Gramsci's indebtedness to Sorel (and Lenin) is evident in his interpretation of the causes of political change. Agreeing on the fact that "change could not come about by waiting for economic laws to 'bring about palingenetic events'" (Bellamy 127), Gramsci strongly advocated a voluntarist approach to politics. However, Gramsci was also a follower of Benedetto Croce's idealism, and he learned from him to distrust any oracular political vocabulary just as much as he inherited the same reluctance toward revolutionary and abstract political ideals, source from which he derived his political moderation. Ideology had to prevail through political means, but these means had to be realistic and practical. In this sense, it is indicative that he always conceived of the political power as a combination of voluntary and constrictive actions. By believing that a political regime was successful only when it managed to impose itself on the people as if it were emerging from the people, Gramsci would concede to the Machiavellian tradition and, more largely, to a Roman political tradition in which rhetoric was understood as being one with domination or power, like in the case of Cicero [6]. The "integral state" thus represents, for Gramsci, that ideal ratio of state intervention and civil society spontaneity in which the two are functioning harmoniously together, not unlike either the fascist totalitarian utopia or the communist ideal of the civil society incorporating the state. Ironically enough, in Gramsci "the extremes meet," confirming the overlapping lineage of both left and right ideologies.

<17> Gramsci constantly re-emphasized the pervasiveness of mass mobilizations and the lived, "authentic" character of ideologies, in an attempt to temper the imposition "from above" of a model that would be alien from the realities of civil society. In this respect, his approach could be termed "pragmatic": any theory proved its validity insofar as it was successful with the masses. And, consequently, the ideology that managed to cover the whole social body would prove to be the right one -- the one corresponding to the actual social conditions of what he termed "historical block." This conclusion, nonetheless, brings Gramsci in close vicinity to his fascist enemies again, due to the fact that, in his view, the participation of the masses in the "right" ideology had to be total, a feature much stressed by Duke Mussolini and his followers.

<18> However, Gramsci comes closest to the fascist "totalitarian" ideology in two of his most important aspects: the role of the intellectuals and the definition of hegemony. First, with his distinction between "traditional" intellectuals and "organic" intellectuals, Gramsci returns to a romantic view of the messianic thinker, who assumes the role of coagulator for the dispersed will of the people and plays a double role: educator of the masses and exponent of them. Even if, to the left, Lenin had conceived of a similar role for the communist avant-garde, or "progressive" intelligentsia, the right-wing sociology of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto had written about political elites in comparable terms, substantiating thus the thesis that Gramsci's political theory was always on a narrow line between left and right. Secondly, his conception of hegemony as cement between civil society and ideology (with the eventual "total" expansion of "civil society" into the sphere of "political society") is not at a remove from the contemporary theorizations of the corporatist state. In "his insistence that hegemony must be total -- a complete union of theory and practice -- he approached the spirit of Gentile" (Bellamy, 133). With the desire, on the one hand, to free human agents from the constraints of various determinisms, and the intention, on the other, to provide a unified political theory for the entire social body, Gramsci appears caught in an aporia.

<19> Laclau tries to overcome this difficulty by conceiving a definition of society which can resolve the problem of formal oppositions between collective and individual will. In order to do that, Laclau and Mouffe appeal to the post-structuralist lexicon, more specifically to the joint theory of (non)identity and community. Their argument branches out in two directions: first, the delegitimation of the philosophical foundations of individualism, or subjectivism; secondly, the predication of a version of community, or collectivity, that is never self-identical and continuously changing. By this theoretical turn, the hard-wired oppositions between individual and collectivity, part and whole will be rendered illusory and the Gramscian aporia of individual liberty through total integration of civil society and state will be resolved.

Philosophy of Science and the Problem of Antagonism: Agreements and Disagreements with the Liberal Method

<20> A third term is introduced by Laclau and Mouffe in order to define the realm of possibility for a functional theory of hegemony: antagonism. Its function is to create the political climate necessary for a translation of the field of indeterminacy (articulation) into one of determinacy (hegemony). By simplifying the demonstration, one could say that significant (political or social) change is possible only in the conditions in which elements of the prior order are contradicted and a crisis insinuates, strong enough to call into question some of the premises of the social formation. This change, nonetheless, is never external to the systemic conditions of the whole, in the sense of revolutionary or decisionist change.

<21> This approach to the problem of change has also been addressed in a relatively comparable way by modern philosophy of science. Karl Popper's "trial and error" method argued that the logic of scientific progress is based on the model of conjecture and its refutation. The contradiction of the premises is, evidently, an unpredictable event, so change occurs accidentally, but it always involves gradual transformation; it cannot break totally with the tradition upon which it built. Accordingly, the scientific method is the result of a set of premises and contradictions that grow on top of each other, and test each other out with every new conjecture. This model, also adopted in hermeneutics, favors gradual transformation (each question is the answer to a previous question) to epistemological relativism, operating with universally testable categories, which try to approximate the right answer with every new trial rather than with "incommensurable" paradigms that each test out their truth according to a different system of reference. In the case of the latter, cross-paradigmatic changes are always revolutionary, since they are rooted in completely incommensurable systems.

<22> The evolutionary/revolutionary puzzle in the philosophy of science has not been resolved by Thomas Kuhn either, in spite of his resolute emphasis on revolutionary change in the structure of paradigmatic shifts in the history of science (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962). The dynamics of change in his case also conforms to a model of gradual consensus building around the inappropriateness of a method of interpretation, the break being realized on commonly held verifiable assumptions, while in stark contrast with the initial underlying hypothesis. Although the shift has been "revolutionary," the process is highly "evolutionary." Besides, as Kuhn himself somewhere else showed (The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought, 1957), the very shift marked by the Copernican revolution had been intuited and prefaced by previous hypotheses and conjectures (Iggers, 1990).

<23> The dynamic of change in the case of the theory of hegemony functions in a sensibly comparable way: hegemony is possible only in conditions of antagonism. In other words, articulation, as sum-total of processes immanent to the social sphere (frequently referred to as "civil society"), is politically neutral (bureaucracy would be a good example) unless a contradiction insinuates itself into the articulatory processes in order to create the "critical mass" necessary for a qualitative jump.

<24> Contradiction or refutation is, for Popper, incidental, but circumscribed to the cognitive horizon in which it occurs -- any change that exceeded that horizon would otherwise go unnoticed. Similarly, antagonism functions as an autonomous category, situated in a free relation to the ensemble of articulatory practices, but yet immanent to them:

it is impossible to specify a priori surfaces of emergence of antagonisms, as there is no surface which is not constantly subverted by the overdetermining effects of others, and because there is, in consequence, a constant displacement of the social logics characteristic of certain spheres towards other spheres (Laclau & Mouffe, 180).

Therefore change occurs, for both Laclau and Popper, within the "horizon" of pre-existent conditions, but in an unpredictable manner; the horizon represents, in the case of Laclau and Mouffe, articulation (ontological condition of hegemony), whereas for Popper it represents the history, or tradition, of scientific knowledge.

<25> In spite of the agreement of both methods on the necessity of contradiction for any kind of meaningful change in the organization of the system (science or society), this problem also marks a major point of divergence between them. Each theory draws different conclusions from the necessity of contradiction, conclusions conform with the dissimilar methodologies they adopt. Thus, philosophy of science can only conceive of contradiction in a positive definition of epistemology. Hegemony theory, due to Lalcau and Mouffe's post-structuralist approach, advances an understanding of antagonism that presupposes a negative definition of epistemology. What are the far-reaching consequences of this contrast?

<26> In order to understand better what a positive definition of epistemology is, we should return to Karl Popper's "trial and error" method. According to this method, novelty (in Popper's case, "scientific novelty") is possible only through the formulation of a hypothesis and its experimental trial. Failure of the experiment is the only instance which sheds light on the mistakes of the hypothesis, helping in a better approximation of the scientific truth. The unpredictability of change (a theme common to Laclau) precludes social determinism or various oracular political philosophies.

<27> Popper writes: "The future is open. It is not predetermined and thus cannot be predicted -- except by accident. The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite" (The Myth of the Framework xiii). This approach explicitly favors piece meal reforms to wholesome revolutionary change or, if applied to political action, the vocabulary of the Frankfurt School would associate it with "immanent critique" instead of "total critique." In the realm of politics, this would be tantamount to a selective use of already existing institutions and the acceptance of what Norberto Bobbio terms "the rules of the political game" [7]. On the problem of revolution, Popper (1994) explains: "...there can be better or worse revolutionaries (as we all know from history), and the problem is not to do too badly"(74). Since truth itself is a matter of approximation (which does not, however, disqualify the scientific character of the method), only the proliferation of conjectures can select those answers which, in their turn, will formulate the next question. Thus, the rational participation of competing answers can approximate the truth of a problem: "…theories are steps in our search for truth-or to be more explicit and more modest, in our search for better and better solutions of deeper and deeper problems (where 'better and better' means, as we shall see, 'nearer and nearer to the truth')" (Popper, 155).

<28> This evolutionary model is, therefore, firmly entrenched in a pattern of competition among conjectures, which presupposes the objective, sutured, self-identical character of the competing theories. The fact that evolution does not follow entirely in the line of one interpretative model does not disqualify the unity of the cognitive field, or the operative character of clearly defined concepts. In this sense, knowledge is always a knowledge of something objectively present and describable in positive terms.

<29> Laclau and Mouffe's definition of the social (as articulation) opens up in a different direction altogether. As we mentioned earlier, their conception of the social body is as a non-sutured, always incomplete, non-self-identical system. In this sense, "society," understood in the traditional sense, as a fully determined, permanently self-identical entity, becomes impossible: "'Society' is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing -- and hence constituting -- the whole field of differences" (Lalcau & Mouffe 111). As a substitute for it, the social describes the "floating" character of any social aggregation: "The social is articulation insofar as 'society' is impossible" (Laclau & Mouffe 114). The authors of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) employ, for the facilitation of understanding, the Lacanian notion of signifiers. In Jacques Lacan's theoretical syntax, the signifier stands in a relation of mediation between the precariousness of the Real and the self-identity of the Symbolic. The signifier works like a bridge which the subject uses to come into existence, crossing the gap (expressed in the ontological "lack") between the order of absence and the order of identity. In conclusion, the signifier plays a double role: indicator of the lack and substitute for the lack. Laclau & Mouffe place the concept of hegemony in the order of the signifier: it both indicates the non-sutured nature of the social, and guarantees its suturing-the social is "a 'non-place', the symbol of its own impossibility" (191).

<29> In a different order of argumentation, the two authors invoke Jacques Derrida's negative definition of identity, which he extrapolates from the negative definition of linguistic identity in Ferdinand de Saussure. According to Derrida's interpretation, language is not a sutured system, made up of positively describable elements. Instead, each word has meaning only in relation to other words, identity undergoing a double process of differentiation and deferral. Differentiation insofar as one word is what others are not, and deferral insofar as the meaning is not immediately accessible, in an unmediated form. Thus, the problem of identity determination is a matter of perpetual regression: A is non-B, B is non-C, etc., hence the negative definition of epistemology. In this context, Laclau and Mouffe re-interpret an older concept, "overdetermination," in the sense of an "infinite regression of the social." If in classical Marxist theory "overdetermination" described the process by which the base controlled the superstructure, in their case "overdetermination" represents the process by which every social event is determined by immanent social causes, which themselves are subject to determination in different historical blocks. As a consequence, society is always possible insofar as it is not socially possible, so to speak, an idea not unlike other (post)structuralist conceptions of community as self-destitute, incomplete, "inoperative" (or, better put, operative insofar as it is inoperative).

<30> Interestingly enough, the introduction of post-structuralist arguments in support of a negative definition of society, as a non-conceptualizable, non-sutured, "becoming" whole, links the overall argument back to the irrationalist Romantic tradition which starts with Schelling's infinite regression of reflection and ends with the Nietzschean critique of the philosophy of origin and Bergson's rejection of stable actualities. Derrida's negative epistemology is tributary, according to Peter Dews (1995), to an early Romantic exchange on the Cartesian problem of reflection between Schelling and Fichte. If Fichte postulated the existence of a transcendental subject (somehow prefacing Husserl's transcendentalism) as the cornerstone of processes of reflection and understanding ("I think, therefore I am. But I think only insofar as I already exist, which also is possible because I think, etc. The regression must therefore stop somewhere."), Schelling would instead prefer the suspension of any positive determination of understanding or subjectivity. What Derrida inherits from this tradition is the Romantic dismissal of reason as the ultimate ground of knowledge and subjectivity as the foundation of rational discourse. On the other hand, Nietzsche and Bergson's anti-positivism and anti-foundationalism translated in Sorel or Gramsci as decisionism and anti-rationalism. If the positive Cartesian philosophy of the subject had proved the theoretical pendant of individualism, liberalism and democracy, both Sorel and Gramsci (the latter partially, nonetheless) inverted the terms of political discourse, employing instead irrationalist means of action (decision against deliberation), the rule of the elite (against the "rule of the mob") and collectivism (against fragmentary individualism).

<31> Laclau and Mouffe's argumentation in favor of a hegemonic radical democracy feeds, indirectly, on many of the same assumptions: the individual does not constitute the base of civil society, rational means of comprehension of politics and society fall short of the actuality of political and social processes, society itself is subjected to processes beyond our capacity of ratiocination, the state cannot base its independence from civil society on any doctrinaire political philosophy. On all of these points, the theory of hegemony strays considerably from the liberal-humanist assumptions of political action: the freedom of the individual to extricate himself from the claims of collectivity, tradition or history; the autonomy of the state vis-à-vis popular pressures; the separation of civil society and political society; the rational accountability of the state and the political sphere writ large.

<32> Three main consequences emerge from Laclau and Mouffe's theorization of the social-political that bear relevance to: 1) the rights of the individual; 2) the category of (political) subject; 3) the legitimacy of political rights. Although all three points are tightly connected, we shall discuss them separately. 1) The universality of individual rights is rendered illicit by the concept of hegemony, as an imposition "from above," orchestrated in the spirit of rational generalizations, oblivious of the actual conditions determining each society and of its own emergence out of the mindset of Enlightenment. "It is never possible for individual rights to be defined in isolation, but only in the context of social relations which define determinate subject positions"(Laclau & Mouffe 184). Political contractualism (Locke's "contractual citizenship") is thus eliminated as a possibility of defining rights in terms of a) individual choice and b) compromise between state and individuals. 2) "We are confronted with the emergence of a plurality of subjects, whose forms of constitution and diversity it is only possible to think if we relinquish the category of 'subject' as a unified and unifying essence" (Laclau & Mouffe 181). This representation of political subjectivity, in spite of its well-intended desire to do justice to particularity, deprives the individual political subject of the indisputable right to independent representation. Instead, it sets up a model of collective authority, which preempts any individual claims. 3) The political rights are subjected, in the program of a democratic hegemonic politics, to continual change. By questioning the political legitimacy of any essence, their permanent validity is not acknowledged, creating thus the premises for their modification in accordance to collective pronouncements on their righteousness or invalidity. "Society and social agents lack any essence, and their regularities merely consist of the relative and precarious forms of fixation which accompany the establishment of a certain order" (Laclau & Mouffe 98).

<33> However, one major point of consent between Laclau and the liberal tradition to which philosophy of science belongs (pattern of competing forms that succeed each other, belief in the objective premises of science) is the idea of change as a gradual process, in that they both conceive of change within the frame of a critical revision of the past, which nonetheless ensures the systemic continuity. Revolutionary change would fall prey to a methodological misperception, which tends to conflate true sentences with the truth, or conceive of the truth as an object in the possession of which one can get through the right method. Both Popper and Laclau consider this reasoning unconvincing, and adopt instead formulas which -- albeit different methodologically -- advocate reforms over total solutions. In support of this hypothesis, it is relevant mentioning the distinction which Laclau and Mouffe make between societies guided by antagonism (profound social contradictions) but without a remarkable degree of articulation (undeveloped civil society) and the societies where antagonism comes on top of a rich articulatory background. In their opinion, only the latter is capable of executing a gradual, democratic reform, while the former is caught in a quasi-totalitarian form of revolutionary pressure. On the project for a radical democracy, Laclau is not far from Popper's piecemeal reforms: "This cannot consist of the affirmation, from positions of marginality, of a set of anti-system demands" (189). This moderate political contention removes Laclau from the vicinity of revolutionary decisionism, such as Sorel's "general strike" or Carl Schmitt's "perpetual state of emergency" (as formulated in his 1927 The Concept of the Political), making room for a more liberal, reform-oriented theory of hegemony.

State or Civil Society?

<34> The opposition between state and civil society is argued against in Marxist theory as well as in other collectivist ideologies, which all envision an organic reunification of the state and its citizens. As a result, Gramsci dreamed about the disappearance of the state under the universalization of civil society, which lead him to the conception of organic democracy. Laclau himself also tends to downplay the function of the state, while focusing almost exclusively on forms of social collective aggregation (for him, nonetheless, these forms are hegemonic insofar as they are never thorough, providing, thus, the conditions for democratic opposition). In Laclau's political philosophy and in opposition to the liberal tradition, the state has interventionist powers ("strong state on the inside") exactly because it is an appendix to the "collective will" -- civil society becomes the state through the process of hegemonic substitution. On the other hand, he maintains the autonomy of the state against the authority of the collective will, with the purpose of deterring the total authority of the will -- in this respect he is closer to the skeptic-liberals, like Alexis de Tocqueville, than to Gramsci.

<35> In the liberal-democratic tradition, the state has always been opposed to society, from John Locke's formulation of majority's right to representation (the state tries to confine the majority's pursuit of its private interests, who in turn has the right to limit the state's power of coercion) to Rousseau and Jefferson's insistence that the common interest has to prevail (in this understanding, civil society designates the common interest, while the State represents only partial interests-one party). The result of this clear dichotomy between society and the state is telescoped in recent political thought in a pluralist definition of civil society, as in Ernest Gellner's Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals (1994).

<36> For Gellner, civil society is "based on the separation of the polity from economic and social life" (Gellner 1994, 212), i.e. civil society cannot be conceived within a political system that tends to conflate it with the state. In Leszek Kolakowki's view, this tendency is totalitarian and regressive: it expresses nostalgia for the closed collectivist agrarian societies. It is therefore consequential that Marx tried to project into the future this nostalgia for the lost bond between the spheres of society and the state, unjustly disunited in liberal-bourgeois societies. Marx consequently embarked upon a holistic critique of the capitalist economy in order to reveal the roots of alienation and inequity; by subordinating economy to the political, Marx believed he would reach the desired identity of state and collective will, or civil society. The result of this reunification lead, however, to "the kind of tyranny which has in fact pervasively, and without any exception, characterized Communism" (Gellner, 59).

<37> Ernest Gellner rejects the monolithic, organic societies, based on consensus and an overdetermining political credo. To him, only dissent and functional opposition between the state and society, economy and politics can guarantee the autonomous existence of civil society. In this sense, pluralism is crucial. However, his pluralism means something different from Laclau's, who defines it in terms of the impossibility of complete suturing of identities (the post-structuralist definition of identity); for Gellner, pluralism is conceived in terms of competition between fully formed identities. In addition, Gellner credits the autonomous economic sphere with providing the conditions for this diversity in the conditions in which politics tends to run in opposite direction, toward consensus, under the unifying pressure of the political credo: "Economic pluralism, far from total, is compatible with political control over strategic economic issues..., but so as to provide pluralism with a social base which it cannot any longer find anywhere else" (Gellner, 212). As a result, Gellner re-formulates the economic liberal thesis of non-interventionism in its double capacity of guarantor of prosperity and liberties. Reaching this conclusion, Gellner enters the tradition of Locke, who viewed liberty in terms of liberty of individual economic pursuit.

<38> An ethical relativist, Gellner brings civil society in a position of sovereignty and total independence from democracy. If Laclau has an ethical-juridical problem with the idea of total autonomy of civil society (in the Gramscian "massist" tradition), manifested in his emphasis on the role of the state in the control over minority issues (gay rights, ethnic representation, etc.), Gellner rejects any non-popular, democratic-"universalist" interventions of the state. In this respect, Laclau shows more consideration for the individual and the state's role in defending the rights of the individual than Gellner does.

Conclusion

<39> This comparative analysis of the historical evolution of the term hegemony has revealed a multitude of aspects that concern problems of political theory and philosophy. Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy provided us with two important elements in the analysis of the concept: historical background and the formulation of a theory of radical democratic politics. Their study managed to both clarify the genealogy of the notion (and Gramsci's use of it) and enlarge its compass by its reformulation in the context of contemporary post-structuralist philosophy. In this context, an analysis of the intellectual origins of hegemony has revealed tight affinities between the Romantic tradition of thought that spans from Shelling's questioning of rational understanding to Herder's collectivist undertones of his notion of Volksgeist and the anti-rational, anti-modern political strands descending from Nietzsche. A review of the Italian political thought of the 1920s also discloses deep associations between a rightist voluntarist model (such as Gentile's) and a leftist organicist ideology of the social (such as Gramsci's).

<40> The translation of the anti-liberal, irrationalist ideas of the inter-war European social theory into the anti-humanist idiom of the French philosophy of the 1960s, and leading into post-structuralism (French or American), also revealed a profound continuity among traditions of thought so distant in time and so politically opposed. The persistence of these motifs and theories occasioned the bracketing of Laclau and Mouffe's concept of hegemony in a comparative-historical manner. Their re-conceptualization of the term hegemony also shares many affinities with a liberal stream of anti-dogmatic, anti-Stalinist Marxism. It was this wager with the Marxist tradition that motivated their adoption of a neo-Gramscian approach to the problem of society and politics. In this sense, their emphasis on gradual reforms and the relativization of political struggle gives a leeway to the persistence of democratic, pluralist institutions that were wholesomely rejected in the Marxist "Jacobine" tradition. Hegemony emerges therefore as a complex notion, underwritten by different direction of thought, whether to the right or to the left (insofar as we can make a distinction by using classical political theory categorizations), with a remarkable past and a strong impact on contemporary theorization of the political.

Notes:

[1] To demonstrate the phenomenological roots of the concept of articulation, it suffices to compare it with the acquisition of consciousness in phenomenology: as it is consciously impossible for consciousness to found itself, so is political consciousness' conscious self-availability never possible (political teleology or, determinism); instead, this consciousness is always prefaced by the phenomenal (pre-theoretical) status of articulation. Therefore one invariably starts from articulation, which is non-pre-determined conceptually, regardless of the degree of theorization -- in this sense, the Leninist imperative of ideological training for propagandists loses its meaning. By this token, articulation acquires an ontological status for the theory of hegemony. [^]

[2] The 19th century Italian romantic nationalist movement which led to the first modern unification of Italy. [^]

[3] The adjective "totalitarian" was adopted in the official title of the Italian fascist state in 1925. For Mussolini, "totalitarian" was an attribute denoting total identification of the state with its society, unity of purpose and action at both political and social levels. [^]

[4] In the spirit of a similar break with the tradition of political deliberation, Mikhail Bakunin had proposed the term maximalism as a theoretical standard-bearer for anarchism, itself the result of an intellectual coupling of Russian populism and sectarian Hegelianism. Bakunin could be read, in this regard, as an initiator of "decisionism." [^]

[5] Nationalist French movement born in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, under whose banner many anti-Semite and xenophobe intellectuals would find support in the first part of the 20th century. [^]

[6] Benedetto Fontana, "Logos and Kratos: Gramsci and the Ancients on Hegemony" Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000). [^]

[7] It is indicative of the anti-liberal character of Leninism why a "revisionist" approach to Marxist theory like Eduard Bernstein's was immediately accused of liberal contamination and condemned by revolutionaries such as Lenin on grounds that it accepted to play the political game within the given rules. [^]

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