TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION - 1 May 2014
A leading Argentine political theorist and advocate of “radical democracy”, long based at the University of Essex, has died
Ernesto Laclau was born on 6 October 1935 and studied history at the
University of Buenos Aires, graduating in 1964. His initial political
experiences, he once told an interviewer, were “in the student movements
and in the political struggles of the 1960s in Argentina. At that
moment, these were the years immediately after the Cuban Revolution,
when there was a radicalisation of the student movement all over Latin
America, and I was very active in it. I was a student representative to
the Central Council of the University of Buenos Aires [and later] part
of the leadership of the Socialist Party of the National Left, which was
very active in Argentina in the 1960s.”Witnessing the impact of the Perónist movement in Argentina led Professor Laclau to a fascination with populism. He wrote a celebrated essay on the subject in the 1970s and then a full-length book, On Populist Reason (2005), looking at the rise of leftist politicians such as Hugo Chávez across much of Latin America. Both the current president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and her late husband and predecessor Néstor Kirchner, are said to have been great admirers of his work.
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