You are on page 1of 4

Ernesto Laclau obituary

Argentinian philosopher whose ideas influenced politicians from Latin America's


new left
Ernesto Laclau believed that the European left had a lot to learn from Latin
America. Photograph: Chantal Mouffe
Ernesto Laclau, who has died aged 78, was a renowned Argentinian political
philosopher whose ideas about "radical democracy" and populism influenced
politicians from Latin America's new left as well as activists around the world. His
highly original essays and books drew on the work of Antonio Gramsci to probe
the assumptions of Marxism, and to illuminate the modern history of Latin
America.
With collaborators including his wife, Chantal Mouffe, and the cultural theorist
Stuart Hall
[1]
, Laclau played a key role in reformulating Marxist theory in the light
of the collapse of communism and failure of social democracy. His "post-Marxist"
manifesto Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), written with Mouffe, was
translated into 30 languages, and sales ran into six figures. The book argued that
the class conflict identified by Marx was being superseded by new forms of
identity and social awareness. This worried some on the left, including Laclau's
friend Ralph Miliband, who feared that he had lost touch with the mundane
reality of class division and conflict, but his criticisms of Marx and Marxism were
always made in a constructive spirit.
Political populism was an enduring fascination for Laclau. His first book, Politics
and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), offered a polite but devastating critique of
the conventional discourse on Latin America at the time. This "dependency"
approach tended to see the large landowners latifundistas as semi-feudal and
pre-capitalist, while Laclau showed them to be part and parcel of Latin American
capitalism which fostered enormous wealth and desperate poverty. Inequality in
Latin America was greater than in any other region of the globe around the year
2000, and is now a little alleviated thanks to the "new left" governments. He
rejected the view of some "dependency" theorists such as Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, president of Brazil until 2003 that Latin America needed more
capitalism rather than less.
In 2005, he returned to the theme with On Populist Reason, which helped to
explain the rise of the new leftist sentiment sweeping Latin America with the
repeated electoral victories of Hugo Chvez
[2]
in Venezuela, Nstor Kirchner
[3]
and his wife Cristina Fernndez
[4]
in Argentina, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador,
among others. Laclau came to be seen as a key influence on Kirchner
[5]
, with the
Argentinian newspaper La Nacin reporting breathlessly that the president "made
no decision of importance" without first consulting him. While this was a great
exaggeration, Kirchner, elected president in 2003, valued Laclau's support in
reaching out beyond his Peronista base to the grassroots activists who had been
occupying hundreds of factories following the collapse and devaluation of
2001-02. Laclau's sympathy for the Latin American new left was most unwelcome
to those who were alarmed by the mobilisation of the poor and excluded.
Indeed, Laclau believed that the European left had much to learn from Latin
America, with its spirit of self-criticism and innovation. He argued that the left
should not be embarrassed by charges of populism, whether directed at Chvez or
at the Greek leftwing party Syriza. It was crucial to distinguish between rightwing
populism for example, Margaret Thatcher
[6]
's sale of council housing and
policies such as Chvez's gift to shanty-town dwellers of ownership of the land on
which they had built. While Thatcherism was mounting a programme of
far-reaching privatisation, Chvez was pursuing a plan of "urbanisation" that
introduced water and electricity, schools and clinics to the poorest areas,
combining self-government with help from tens of thousands of Cuban doctors
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/10/stuart-hall 1.
and teachers.
Born in Buenos Aires, the son of a lawyer and diplomat, also named Ernesto
Laclau, and Maria Elena Gastelou, Ernesto studied history at the University of
Buenos Aires. He came to Britain in the early 1970s after winning a scholarship to
study at Oxford, supported by the historian Eric Hobsbawm
[7]
. In 1973, he was
appointed lecturer in politics at the University of Essex , and it was there that he
met Mouffe, whom he married in 1975. The couple pursued their own work but
also collaborated on projects, including the series Phronesis, which they
co-edited. Mouffe brought to their joint work her own experience with social
movements, especially the women's movement.
From 1990 to 1997, Laclau was director of the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the
Humanities and Social Sciences at Essex, and he became emeritus professor in
2003. He also taught in leading universities in the US, Europe, Scandinavia,
Australia, South Africa and Latin America.
In recent years, Laclau contributed frequently to the Argentinian newspaper
Pgina/12, and hosted an interview series for Argentinian TV, Dilogos con
Laclau. His quizzical style made him a good interrogator; if a subject said
something stupid he would simply repeat it deadpan, perhaps raising an eyebrow.
He is survived by Chantal and three children Santiago, Soledad and Natalia
from a previous relationship.
Ernesto Laclau, political philosopher, born 6 October 1935; died 13 April 2014
Get the Guardian book club email
Hosted by John Mullan, be the first to find out about forthcoming events and
featured authors.
Sign up for the Guardian book club email
[8]
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/05/hugo-chavez 2.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/28/nestor-kirchner-obituary 3.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/cristina-fernandez-de-kirchner 4.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/28/nestor-kirchner-obituary 5.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-political-
phenomenon-dies
6.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm 7.
https://id.theguardian.com/email/subscribe?emailListId=131 8.

You might also like