Radical Democracy and Its Lost Treasure. An Intellectual Itinerary of Ernesto Laclau

Abstract

This article reconstructs, in chronological terms, the fundamental milestones in the work of the Argentine political theorist, Ernesto Laclau. We explore the way in which his interest on the autonomy of the political drives him to a final reformulation of the gramscian hegemony theory. In our perspective, Laclau’s concern about the specific forms of political identities constitution, and his concept of populism, led him to a revision process on the central principles that sustained the idea of radical democracy.