L’egemonia dentro l’economia o l’economia fuori dell’egemonia? Note per una rilettura di “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy” di E. Laclau e C. Mouffe

The article proposes a re-assessment of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), with an emphasis on the historicity of hegemony and its relationship with capitalist modernity. It is argued that the emergence of hegemony is for Laclau and Mouffe the análogon of the establishment of capitalism, and that the latter is seen as a process of dissolution of traditional bonds and therefore as a liberation of individuality. In this sense, we can say that the book contains a philosophy of history just of the kind the authors themselves criticise Marxism for. To this philosophy of history is due Laclau’s interpretation of hegemony as a theoretical concept detached from the concrete circumstances that it should help decipher, as well as his never realised promise of extending hegemony analysis to the sphere of economy.