Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemonic Project: The Story So Far

This paper seeks to do two things: first, to map out in a broad way Laclau and Mouffe's intellectual development, since the publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in 1985, and how they have created a following within academia; and second, to evaluate their ‘hegemonic’ endeavours so far. I argue that there is a place for a post-structuralist approach to the study of political ideologies and the ‘political’, but that the project as a whole is unlikely to achieve its intellectual and political ambitions.