Dan Hancox
The Guardian - Monday 9 February 2015
When Ernesto Laclau passed away last April aged 78,
few would have guessed that this Argentinian-born, Oxford-educated
post-Marxist would become the key intellectual figure behind a political
process that exploded into life a mere six weeks later, when Spanish
leftist party Podemos won five seats and 1.2m votes in last May’s European elections.
Throughout his academic career, most of which he spent as professor
of political theory at the University of Essex, Laclau developed a
vocabulary beyond classical Marxist thought, replacing the traditional
analysis of class struggle with a concept of “radical democracy” that
stretched beyond the narrow confines of the ballot box (or the trade
union). Most importantly for Syriza, Podemos and its excitable
sympathisers outside Greece and Spain, he sought to rescue “populism” from its many detractors.
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