ABSTRACT
Determining what kind of change is needed (and how to achieve it) is a central preoccupation of the Left. Many radical political theorists see themselves as 'writing in the wake of the disaster of state socialism. The post-political literature has sought to understand how it is that more and more political ideas and acts are deemed 'impossible' and undebatable. The chronologies of the post-political-critique literature focus on the recent past, and this is directly related to another problematic aspect, which is the idea that identity-based social movements are new. This chapter discusses some weaknesses in the post-Cold War theorizing of the Left by Mouffe, Fraser and others, even as they tried to incorporate 'identity politics': first, their chronologies and, relatedly, their description of the 'post-political' foreclosure of certain politics as 'new'; and second, their ongoing reluctance to understand and engage 'identity politics' in any depth.
