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The heated and long-standing debate on the politics of democracy and populism between Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek re-emerged in a series of remarkable articles in Critical Inquiry. 1 Laclau’s On Populist Reason (2005) appeared after the French and Dutch ambivalent “no” to the ratification of the EU constitution in the spring of 2005 and inaugurated this round of discussions. This text and the disputes following it provide important indications that the question surrounding populism represents a cleavage within the “post-Marxist” tradition itself. The foundation of this tradition was strengthened for the most part with the resurgence of interest in Antonio Gramsci’s hegemonic “war of position” in The Prison Notebooks. 2 Indications of Laclau’s clear debt to Gramsci and even Louis Althusser can be found in both his early Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), and even later in the collaborative work with Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). 3 Together Laclau and Mouffe in their collaborative project outlined what came to be a key moment in post-Marxist theory fixated on the concept of hegemony or what they called “radical democracy”. Laclau and Mouffe purported to outline a socialist theory of the sort capable of discerning links between New Social Movements,