Ernest0 Laclau was, by all accounts, a decent, gentle man and a path-breaking scholar on the Left.

I first became aware of Laclau in terms of his participation in the famous “modes of production” debate in the 1970s (I was working on my senior thesis at the time, on modes of production in Peruvian history). Later, of course, Laclau shifted his attention to the theory of hegemony, radical democracy, and new social movements (in work with his wife Chantal Mouffe) and then finally to populism.

I met Laclau only a couple of times, most recently at the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference, where he spoke in a plenary session (along with Ella Shohat and Antonio Callari) on “Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy.” He was a member of the international Advisory Board for Rethinking Marxism from its inception.

This is from an interview conducted in 1998:

Ernesto, what were your first…