Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

differentiae sp[ecificae]’” (Hall 1980:322).
In this early text, Hall contends that empirical research ought to be guided
by both premises. In a more recent work, he adopts a post-Marxist view and
rejects the conception that the political is determined by the economic base
(Hall 1988a, 1990). For my purposes here, however, it should be noted that the
conception of “difference” in the passages cited above is entirely compatible
with essentialist closures. Retaining the logic of the materialist premise within
his “historical premise,” Marx reduces differences to “variations and gradations”
in the “appearance” of economic formations whose “main conditions” remain
basically “the same.” Marx’s call for attention to difference is, in these passages
at least, a very weak one that is already subordinated to economic reductionism
in the very moment of its articulation. For Laclau and Mouffe, economistic
reductionism is highly problematic because it assumes that the economic is a
self-regulating sphere that determines the rest of the social. Economic
reductionists may admit that the political influences the economic, but they
would only say that the political does this after it was determined by the economic
in the first place.
Laclau and Mouffe find traces of economism in some of the most promising
Marxist theories. After underlining the tremendous democratic potential in

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Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, for example, they point to his return to class
reductionism.
For Gramsci, even though the diverse social elements have a merely
relational identity—achieved through articulatory practices—there must
always be a single unifying principle in every hegemonic formation, and
this can only be a fundamental class.
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985:67)
In other words, for all his emphases on the contingency of political struggles,
Gramsci attempts to preserve Marx’s idea that identity will ultimately have a class
principle. For all his sophistication, Gramsci ultimately thinks of politics in terms
of a binary struggle between two “natural” subjects: the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie.
Althusser’s discourse also juxtaposes anti-essentialism with essentialism.
Laclau and Mouffe regard Althusser’s theory of overdetermination as an
extremely useful analogy for the conceptualization of identity. The theory of
overdetermination suggests that identity is constructed exclusively on a symbolic
terrain; like Saussure’s rejection of a referential theory of meaning,
overdetermination implies that there is no underlying plane of literal meanings
that imposes an external necessity upon the constitutive relations within the
symbolic order (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:97–8; Žižek 1994:52; Laclau 1977:51–
80). Althusser nevertheless restricts the anti-essentialist possibilities that are
inherent in this theory with his insistence that the political is determined in the
last instance by the economic (1971). For Laclau and Mouffe, the Althusserian
conception of the “relative autonomy” of the political does not in the end offer
a decisive alternative to theories of strict determination.