To anyone on the left working in the academic world in the 1980s, the publication of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (1985) came as something of a bombshell. Attacks on Marxism as both theory and practice had been building up steadily for some time by then, and there was a recognisably post- Marxist slant to many of these – Jean Baudrillard’s The mirror of production ([1973] 1975), Jean- François Lyotard’s Libidinal economy ([1974] 1993), and Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst’s Pre-capitalist modes of production (1975) and Mode of production and social formation (1977) all came out in the 1970s and all left their mark on the development of left-wing thought in the period – but it was Hegemony and socialist strategy that fully established post-Marxism as a theoretical position. As the authors announced in the Introduction to the book, setting an agenda for the post-Marxist cause in the process:

Critics quickly weighed in, with Normas Geras (1987: 43), for example, dismissing the book as ‘ex-Marxist’, and asserting ‘that if there are good reasons for not being, or for ceasing to be, a Marxist, so-called post-Marxism isn’t one of them’. Undeterred, Laclau and Mouffe soon replied that theirs was a ‘post-Marxism without apologies’ (1987: 79– 106), and it was a position they never backed down from. The tension that exists between being post-Marxist and post-Marxist has exercised critics ever since, and comes through in all the chapters in this book, which collectively set out to assess the legacy left by Laclau and Mouffe’s critique of the Marxist project and its implications for our own times.