Hegemony, Antagonism, and Political Identity: Ernesto Laclau's Post-Marxist Theory on the Rise of 21st Century Far Right

This article review and discuss Ernesto Laclau's concepts of antagonism, hegemony, and political identity considering the far-right rise on global politics. This unique political scenario compels us to rethink and debate, though not exhaustively, these categories, given that the historical and epistemological structures that informed them were shaken by a new way of doing politics, based on populist and authoritarian forms of governance. The year 2025 was an important milestone for political science conceptual field, especially for Ernesto Laclau's discourse theory. The year marked the 40th anniversary of the publication, with Chantal Mouffe, of the book "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics" (1985) and the 20th anniversary of the publication of "The Populist Reason" (2005). In the first book, the authors left aside orthodox Marxist theory, based on the centrality of class struggle as analysis axis – and appropriating ideas formulated by Saussure, Althusser, Gramsci, Lacan, among others – laying the foundations of their discourse theory through concepts such as articulation, antagonism, hegemony, identity and nodal points. These formulations were marked by Soviet Union imminent decline and by the belief that the global ideological polarization that marked post-war period had come to an end. In the second book, Laclau systematized and redefined some of these formulations, stressing notions such as chains of equivalence, empty and floating signifiers, political identity, among others. The repositioning of these ideas as central axes of analysis in understanding populism occurred within the political context of the first half of 2000, marked by global insecurities stemming from the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11th and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. These two moments, although of different natures, marked, in addition to a fissure in the global hegemonic order, a significant upheaval in the existence and functioning of liberal democracies and the respective social contracts that sustained them. If the decline of the USSR marked the consecration of liberal democracy and Western capitalism as a new and definitive World order, the global insecurity caused by September 11th attacks and its political consequences sowed the seeds of this democracy's crisis by revealing the political and cultural vulnerability of main Western democracies. Just as these scenarios cultivated fertile ground for the formulation and redesign of the ideas proposed by Laclau between 1985 and 2005, the rise of the far-right today compels us to rethink these notions in light of a new conjuncture in which: the antagonism between left and right (and to some extent between West and East) has been elevated to a new level of hostility; the democratic arrangements of post-World War II welfare state hegemony were seriously threatened by new authoritarian far-right leaderships, specially after 2008 crisis; and new political identities have begun to emerge in face of different antagonisms that challenge the hegemonic arrangement of Western politics. We seek to discuss these concepts considering: 1 - possible reinterpretations from a theoretical point of view; 2 - debates on their analytical-interpretative perspective; and 3 - their applicability in practical terms.