Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a 1985 work of
political theory in the
post-Marxist tradition by
Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe. Developing several sharp divergences from the tenets of canonical Marxist thought, the authors begin by tracing historically varied
discursive constitutions of
class, political identity, and social self-understanding, and then tie these to the contemporary importance of
hegemony as a destabilized
analytic which avoids the traps of various procedures Mouffe and Laclau feel constitute a foundational flaw in Marxist thought: essentializations of class identity, the use of
a priori interpretative paradigms with respect to history and contextualization, the privileging of the
base/superstructure binary above other explicative models.