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.

Specifically, Chapter 1 discusses the work of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Georges Sorel (among other texts by major thinkers in the Marxist tradition).

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was greeted with positive reviews and has become a reference point in its field; for example, Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek cited Hegemony and Socialist Strategy as a work having influenced his book, The Sublime Object of Ideology.

A new edition was published in 2001, which included a preface by the authors in which they reaffirmed their commitment to the arguments made in 1985.

", lambasted Laclau and Mouffe for what he regarded as shallow obscurantism grounded on basic misunderstandings of both Marx and Marxism.