Hegemonie a socialistická strategie

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is available to Czech readers almost thirty years after its first publication in 1985. Left-wing thought, as the scholars claim, found itself at the crossroads and required a reevaluation of its key notions: the idea of economic determinism, proletariat as the privileged participant in history, revolution, antagonism, and the meaning of fortuity. Following an extensive exposition on the historical transformations of the notion of hegemony and the deconstruction of the above Marxist categories, Ernst Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxism offers a robust anti-essentialist concept of social logic and politics, based primarily on Antonio Gramsci’s work.

"To think in terms of hegemonic relations is to break with such fallacies. Indeed, scrutinizing the so-called ‘globalized world’ through the category of hegemony elaborated in this book can help us to understand that the present conjuncture, far from being the only natural or possible societal order, is the expression of a certain configuration of power relations. It is the result of hegemonic moves on the part of specific social forces which have been able to implement a profound transformation in the relations between capitalist corporations and the nation-states. This hegemony can be challenged. The Left should start elaborating a credible alternative to the neo-liberal order, instead of simply trying to manage it in a more humane way. This, of course, requires drawing new political frontiers and acknowledging that there cannot be a radical politics without the definition of an adversary. This is to say, it requires the acceptance of the ineradicability of antagonism."
- from the "Preface to the Second Edition" (2000)

ERNESTO LACLAU (1935–2014)
was a professor of political theory at the University of Essex, Great Britain. He wrote Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, Emancipation(s), The Making of Political Identities and, in collaboration with Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek, also Contingency, Hegemony and Universality.

CHANTAL MOUFFE (* 1943) is a professor of political theory at Westminster University in London. She wrote The Return of the Political, The Dimension of Radical Democracy, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, The Democratic Paradox, among other books.