Changing Concepts of Power, Changing Concepts of Politics

Abstract

Two central debates about power converged in debate around the work of Laclau and Mouffe. On the one hand, they were key figures in Western Marxism. responsible for reconceptualizing its central concept - hegemony. On the other hand, they did so in a way that seemed to capitulate to the anti-Marxist politics of Foucault. Foucault is unable to find any place for error or falsehood. Without a correct means for identifying the fallacies of consciousness there can be no question of politics being bounded by truth and falsehood by real and false interests, by full and occluded knowledge. Laclau and Mouffe dissolve the boundaries defining the critical radical project of power in Western Marxism. Once the sovereignty of consciousness is cast in terms of popular consumer preferences rather than radical intellectual preferences, the central radical debates about power become evident as a matter of the distaste of elites.