Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

The hegemony debate: a defense of Stuart Hall
The term, “hegemony,” is often read as a synonym for “domination.” Theorists
working in the Gramscian tradition, however, take Gramsci’s “centaur” metaphor
(1971:169–70) as their starting point. According to Gramsci, political authority
in contemporary societies has two dimensions, force and the organization of
consent. The organization of consent refers to the cultural dimension that is present
in every political project, namely its promotion of popular identifications in terms
of its corresponding imaginary. Again, Althusser holds that in a social formation
that is structured by domination, a functional relationship will ultimately be
established between the “repressive State apparatus” and the “Ideological State
Apparatuses” (1971:150). Laclau and Mouffe would argue, by contrast, that social
formations are never perfectly sutured together such that this sort of functional fit

---

P OW E R A N D H E G E M O N Y
163
is obtained.
6
We will never find, for example, a perfect fit between governmental
policies in the public education system and the goals of the global multi-media
corporations. Private corporations can gain a marketing foothold in the classroom
by sponsoring internet instruction. But, at the same time, students using the internet
may get access to information about homosexuality, feminism, safer sex education
and anti-corporate environmental activism that would have been otherwise
difficult for them to obtain. Further, the disciplinary and cultural aspects of power
are never neatly segregated in distinct institutions. There is, for example, a cultural
moment in policing and a violent exclusionary moment in popular culture.
While Foucault developed a highly sophisticated theory of disciplinary bio-
power relations—which is in some ways remarkably similar to Gramsci’s conception
of the organization of consent—he failed to give adequate attention to the presence
of subtractive strategies within contemporary disciplinary regimes. Although
Foucault asserts that bio-power fully displaced sovereign power during the early
modern period, we are now witnessing the deployment of new forms of brutal
subtractive power in key points within complex Western societies. When police
and immigration officials brutally beat blacks, Latinos and Latinas only a few miles
away from Los Angeles’ financial district, when it is revealed that that violence
has become a systemic aspect of inner-city post-colonial policing, and when
capitalist greed promises to produce increasingly large “surplus populations,” we
can expect more and more complex articulations of brutal violence with disciplinary
modes of social control. Instead of seeing power in terms of an either/or model—
either brute subtractive domination or sophisticated productive bio-power
normalization—we should think instead in terms of hybrid formations in which
subtractive modes—domination, exclusion, genocide and so on—are combined
with productive modes—the organization of consent.
Hall’s interpretation of Thatcherism as a hegemonic formation (1988a) has
been the subject of numerous debates. His critics claim that he portrayed
Thatcherism as a dominant regime that had successfully incited the normalization
and acceptance of its basic values (Jessop et al. 1988; Hirst 1989; Crewe 1988).
However, when they point to opinion polls that apparently show that many of the
people who voted for Thatcher actually disliked her policies, they miss the most
innovative aspect of Hall’s argument. Hall did not actually claim that the
Conservative Party had turned a majority of British voters into a camp of
enthusiastic Thatcherites. He held that Thatcherism engaged in a hegemonic
struggle in the following sense: it disorganized the prevailing political formation,
namely the post-war bi-partisan consensus; it waged a cultural war to redefine key
values in different spheres of the social: the economy, civil society, intellectual
and moral life; it deployed a large and highly differentiated set of strategies; and it
neutralized the opposition while creating a small group of fervent supporters who
could synecdochically stand in for the whole electorate (1988a:7).
It is of course true that the “pocket-book” strategy was one of the factors that
contributed to Thatcher’s electoral success. Some key sectors of the voting
population gained substantially from Thatcherite policies such as the deregulation

---

P OW E R A N D H E G E M O N Y
164
of the private sector, tax-cutting schemes and the sale of council housing. But
“pocket-book” politics cannot explain why the numbers of Thatcherite voters
vastly exceeded the numbers of economic gainers, or why Thatcherism enjoyed
substantial success in its bid to transform the entire political agenda and political
culture. Hall usefully insists that “elections are not won or lost on so-called ‘real’
majorities, but on (equally real) ‘symbolic majorities’” (1988a:262). There is in
fact substantial evidence that many voters supported Thatcher in spite of their
dislike for her actual policies because she seemed to be a “strong leader,” and she
made them feel “good to be British again.” Her success is also due in part to the
fact that the Conservatives stigmatized the Labour Party by effectively associating
it with unpopular groups such as militant trade unions, radical blacks and lesbians
and gays (Smith 1994b:28–69). Only an analysis that combines the measurement
of “pocket-book” politics with the study of political symbols and their material
effects can adequately explain the paradoxical success of formations such as
Thatcherism.