Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist analysis pushed Gramsci’s anti-determinism to its limits, embracing a post-structuralist, discourse-centred politics. Mouffe’s subsequent programme for radical democracy has sought a renewed democratic left project. While radical democracy’s post-structuralism enables important insights into political subjectivity and antagonism in contemporary democracies, it also weakens its own critical and strategic capacity. By recuperating its Gramscian heritage, radical democracy could be more theoretically and politically effective. In contrast to discourses operating in an entirely open and contingent political (...) field, Gramscian theory offers a more realist – but non-determinist – account of the structural, enabling and constraining properties of ideologies. It also allows for a distinctive institutional space for society. Society is the site upon which political identities are articulated, and from which existing power relations are challenged. But a conception of society also points to the institutional limits to politics, notable by their absence in post-structuralism and radical democracy. (shrink)

The work and ideas of Antonio Gramsci continue to attract serious and sustained scholarly attention. This review essay, which might be viewed as an appendage to the earlier, 2016 Thesis Eleven essay ‘From Marx to Gramsci’, develops some of the lines of curiosity indicated there. Does the globalization of Gramsci occur at the expense of the recognition of the particularity of his thought, its specific time and place, and its clearly revolutionary intention? What do these phenomena signify, almost a century (...) after? (shrink)