Two Theories of Hegemony: Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau in Conversation

• Published date: 01 April 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211019392
• Author: Gianmaria Colpani
• Date: 01 April 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211019392

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(2) 221 –246

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211019392

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Article

Two Theories of

Hegemony: Stuart Hall

and Ernesto Laclau in

Conversation

Gianmaria Colpani1

Abstract

This essay stages a critical conversation between Stuart Hall and Ernesto

Laclau, comparing their different appropriations of Antonio Gramsci’s

theory of hegemony. In the 1980s, Hall and Laclau engaged with Gramsci

and with one another in order to conceptualize what they regarded as a

triangular relation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the Left,

and the emergence of new social movements. While many of their readers

emphasize the undeniable similarities and mutual influences that exist

between Hall and Laclau, this essay focuses on the differences between their

theories of hegemony and locates the starkest contrast between them at

the level of theoretical practice. While the main lesson that Hall drew from

Gramsci was the privileging of conjunctural analysis, Laclau proceeded to

locate the concept of hegemony at a higher level of abstraction, developing

a political ontology increasingly indifferent to any specific conjuncture.

The essay argues that this difference between conjunctural analysis and

political ontology has a significant impact on Hall’s and Laclau’s respective

understandings of two key political formations: populism and identity politics.

Thus by focusing on these two formations, the essay argues that Hall’s

work should not be read as a derivative or even undertheorized version of

Laclau’s, for this tendency obscures substantial differences between their

1Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Gianmaria Colpani, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, Muntstraat

2A, Utrecht, 3512 EV, the Netherlands.

Email: g.colpani@uu.nl

1019392PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211019392Political TheoryColpani

research-article2021

222 Political Theory 50(2)

interventions as well as the fact that Hall’s theory of hegemony, as a theory

of the conjuncture, ultimately possesses stronger explanatory power than

Laclau’s political ontology.

Keywords

Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, hegemony, populism, identity politics,

Thatcherism

Introduction

In the summer of 2016, in the midst of the election that would make Donald

Trump the forty-fifth president of the United States, historians N. D. B.

Connolly and Keisha N. Blain assembled a “Trump Syllabus 2.0” consisting

of a broad range of literature that helps explain the rise of Trump within the

Republican Party and the ascendancy of “Trumpism” in society at large

(Connolly and Blain 2016). Around the same time but on the other side of the

Atlantic, in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom,

History Workshop magazine published a “Brexit Syllabus” curated by histo-

rian Onni Gust with the stated goal of deconstructing the allegedly “histori-

cal” arguments mobilized by the leave campaign (Gust 2016). Both syllabi

suggest that to understand the historical trajectories and the social and politi-

cal forces that produced “Trumpism” and Brexit, the two phenomena must be

situated in relation to neoliberalism and its crises, the politics and ideology of

populism, and heterogenous but intersecting struggles around race, gender,

sexuality, and migration.

Two names that appear consistently in these and other reading lists for our

times, such as the New Internationalist’s “Anti-Trump Reading List”

(Fairhead 2017) or Verso’s “Top 20 Books on Populism” (Verso Books 2020),

are those of Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau. This is not surprising. Hall’s and

Laclau’s untimely death in 2014, only two months apart, certainly contrib-

uted to spark new interest in their work.1 But most importantly, it is the cur-

rent crisis of neoliberal hegemony and the concomitant proliferation of

populist formations left and right as well as new radical social movements on

a global scale that explain the relevance of Hall and Laclau for our times.

Even as they passed away just on time not to witness the election of Trump in

the United States, Modi in India, or Bolsonaro in Brazil, Hall and Laclau’s

longstanding commitment, ever since the 1980s, to a theoretical and political

renewal of the Left in the face of neoliberalism and authoritarianism—and

under the pressure of external and internal crises—confers upon their work

an air of exceptional actuality.