Beyond political postmodernism. Hegel and Laclau

It would be far too ambitious to sketch a full profile of postmodern political thinking. In this paper, I will only make reference to the thought of Ernesto Laclau, whom I take to be a peak of political postmodernism both for his high critical awareness and for his perseverance in developing a theory of political and social emancipation. My paper will first introduce some key notions in Laclau’s thought while underlining their critical implication for Hegelian dialectics: the dialectical tradition is burdened by essentialism and evolutionism and it is not able to articulate a conception of political emancipation. Second, I will show that, pace Laclau, Hegelian dialectic is fully compatible with the deconstruction of essentialism in political and social theory, and, most importantly, that dialectic involves a concept of truth – closely tied to the crucial notion of concrete universality – which does not fall into the aporias Laclau denounces.