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This chapter explores what many observers suggest are the leading present-day forms of interpretive social science: postmodern theories of discourse. First, we challenge the belief these approaches have a shared paradigm stemming from anti-foundational philosophy. Instead, we suggest that anti-foundationalism is compatible with all kinds of approaches to political science, and these approaches arose out of distinctive socialist or radical traditions, not mainstream political science. Second, we argue that much post-Marxist discourse theory still relies on structuralist and occasionally even determinist forms of explanation associated with modernist-empiricism. There is a clear tension between this lingering structuralism and historicist genealogies. Third, we suggest that discourse introduces several new topics to the theory of the state. These topics include governmentality, collective identities, ideologies, and resistance in governance.

After two brief sketches on globalization and postmodernism, this chapter presents four unconventional economists such as K. Polanyi, N. Georgescu-Roegen, A. O. Hirschman and R. M. Goodwin. Then it considers various neo-insitutionalist approaches and the neo-Austrian school. Finally it surveys present days radical political economy, from analytical Marxism to post-Marxism and feminist economics.

This chapter examines the difference between the post-Marxist notion of ‘discourse’ and the deconstructive notion of ‘text’ in relation to problems of knowing the political, exploring the problems of establishing what is political, what the political is, and the political dimensions of all establishment. Organised by an analysis of Stuart Hall’s exemplary politically inflected concerns with post-Marxism’s ‘textualism’ and its theory of ‘discourse’, it is supplemented by John Mowitt’s important re-theorisation of the importance of what he calls the ‘textual paradigm’. This paradigm is deemed by Mowitt to be of immense ethico-political consequence when it comes to the question of ‘university responsibility’, and specifically, the responsibility of post-Marxism and cultural studies.

What is the future for radical politics in an age that proclaims itself to be not only post-ideological but post-political as well? There are three fundamental and, in some ways, contradictory conditions that radical political theory must contend with today: the so-called ‘war on terror’, the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, and the stifling atmosphere of consensus and centrism that so dominates modern democratic politics. This book examines and critically appraises the ideas of a number of key thinkers, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who have all had a strong impact on radical political theory and represent a broad range of theoretical perspectives such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post-Marxism, and autonomism. It discusses the points of intersection and divergence amongst these various thinkers on questions that are central to radical political theory today: power and ideology, subjectivity, ethics, democracy and collective action. Forming a background to these debates and issues will be the question of universality, and the extent to which these various interventions allow for some sort of universal, emancipative dimension to be realised.

This chapter examines the movement from the symbolic to a desymbolization that opens the door to political voluntarism by focusing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Theory, where they sought to restore the theoretical dignity of Marxism by articulating a “post-Marxism without apologies.” Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxism belongs to the intellectual history of France after 1968. In Hegemony and Socialist Theory, they reformulate proletarian dialectics into a theory that explicitly acknowledges the power of the symbolic as well as its debt to Claude Lefort's theory of democracy. Laclau's subsequent explorations and criticisms of deconstructionist philosophy and of Lacanian psychoanalysis are shown to be directed by his and Mouffe's concern to understand how radical politics can find its place in a world whose institution is ultimately symbolic and in which no agent or actor comparable to the dialectical proletariat can—or should—be imagined. An early ally in this search was Slavoj Žižek, who argues that “universality” is complicit with capitalist domination.

This chapter examines Slavoj Žižek's development from post-Marxism to revolution. Žižek's evolution from the primacy of the symbolic to an unintended repetition of the movement that culminated in Marxist desymbolization was accompanied by verbal fireworks and tenuous interpretations, for example of Ernesto Laclau or Jacues Lacan. He attempted to combine reductionism and voluntarism into what he calls a “positive vision” that he identifies now with “communism,” now with “Leninism,” and then again with the terrorist actions taken by self-defined leftist groups in Peru or Vietnam. In so doing, Žižek is trying to “fill in the hole,” to overcome the indeterminacy, and to secularize the transcendence of the political to the social. In addition to discussing the dramatic shift in his own politics, this chapter considers Žižek's views about universality and his critique of Jacques Derrida's religion without religion.

This epilogue summarizes issues underlying the emergence of post-Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s as Marxism lost its hold on the imagination of the western European intellectual left. The post-Marxism associated with Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek attempted to hold onto the possibility of radical action and progressive transformation, while also renouncing Marxism's idea of a privileged social actor, Leninism's insistence on a vanguard party possessing correct theory, and indeed, the basic Marxist-Leninist belief that a theory could ever adequately guide social movements operating within a complex historical reality. Many of the resonances between the eras before and after Marxism's ascendancy may be tied to the prominent role of the symbolic, which has furnished us a red thread by which to track a number of thinkers wrestling with the challenge of reconceiving democratic theory in a context marked by the collapse of really existing socialism and the weakening hold of the Marxist model.

This book narrates the history of post-Marxism as the adventure of the symbolic. Post-Marxism involves a confrontation between the relatively rigid semiotic concept of the symbolic order and looser, less formulaic and less deterministic ideas of the symbolic. These more open concepts tap the complicated legacy of the symbolic turn, a history with roots deeper than the twentieth century. In the context of the convergence of Marxism's eclipse and the decline of foundational principles, this book evaluates the prospects for regenerating critical social and political philosophy beyond the Marxist framework, as well as the possibilities of creating and sustaining a positive emancipatory project. To do so, it draws on a series of historically and philosophically informed studies of several major thinkers who confront us with contrasting approaches to the challenges of political philosophy in the postfoundational and post-Marxist context. These figures include Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek.