Democracy, hegemony and populism. Ernesto Laclau as reader of Claude Lefort

Abstract

Since “Hegemony and socialist strategy”, Ernesto Laclau has adopted Claude Lefort´s understanding of modern democracy regarding his own work. However, in his posterior work and specially in “The populist reason”, Laclau´s conceptualization of democratic experience confronts with his initial thoughts, causing a rupture with Lefort´s understanding on the subject. This paper has two objectives. On the one hand, it will try to clarify how Laclau reads Lefort´s work in “The populist reason”, trying to prove that his latter understanding of the democratic experience is –in some aspects- contradictory with that of the French philosopher. On the other hand, it will try to follow Laclau´s consideration of populism, in order to understand the indefinition between Populism and Democracy, a subject that has been –in many cases- poorly studied, and represents one of the main theoretical issues regarding populism.