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Political Theory
For those with an interest in ‘post’-ology the title of this book may strike one as odd. Post-Marxism is the ‘thing’ (‘intervention’ perhaps?) invented by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to describe their theoretical ‘project’ announced in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Thus the notion that post-Marxism has an ‘intellectual history’ requires us to imagine that the rather straightforward equation of ‘post-Marxism’ with their work has to be rethought. What emerges here is that Laclau and Mouffe should be regarded merely as standard-bearers for a kind of critical thinking which is ‘not-quite-Marxism-but-still-in-some-way-radical’. The existence of such forms of thinking should then in turn allow the discussion of a ‘movement’ (p. 170) that can count on Luxemburg, Adorno, Lukacs, possibly the rest of the Frankfurt School, radical feminists, politically engaged post-structuralists and postmodernists, Žižek, some interesting philosophers of social science (and so on and so forth) as intellectual forebears and supporters.
How exactly this motley collection of thinkers support and sustain a ‘movement’ is never broached here, which in turn points towards the central paradox of the text. All these thinkers and trends can, it seems, offer so much more than ‘orthodox’/’classical’ Marxism, and yet the world remains in most respects indifferent to ‘it’. This is a ‘movement’ that does not ‘move’ and for which its chief theoreticians do not speak; which is to say that it is not a movement at all. Lacking any ‘movement’ type characteristics, the rationale of the text is thus, at the very least, questionable. Which leaves us with a set of polemical essays (and none the less enjoyable for that) arguing for the availability of a critical perspective that is not-Marxist. Read on these terms, rather than as a grandiose narration of the ‘intellectual history’ of an imagined post-Marxist ‘movement’, some readers may find it quite useful.
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