argument made in that book has proved far more acceptable to most Marxists than those of his later works, and particularly Hegemony and Socialist Strategy ( 1985), co-authored with Chantal Mouffe. ⁹ Laclau's earlier text was concerned with the problem of 'reductionism' in Marxist political theory, and in particular he was critical of those who had tended to see political ideology exclusively as, almost by definition, class ideology.

To 'reduce', philosophically speaking, is to explain a phenomenon that appears in term A by invoking (or reducing it to) something else -term B. Within Marxism, the problem of reductionism has been acute, for a classic explanatory strategy has been to say that a particular phenomenon (often an awkward one such as working-class conservatism, racism or homophobia) is really caused by, or functional to, the overriding dynamic of class and class conflict. Marxism has no monopoly on this style of thought: psychoanalysis, for example, has an even more pronounced tendency towards explanatory reductionism. But within Marxist theory the issue has in recent years been a much-debated one, particularly in response to the question of gender and race as competing explanatory factors in thinking about the generation of social inequality. ¹⁰ In any case, Laclau was interested in the ways in which Marxists had ignored aspects of political ideology that did not fit into an analysis in which political ideology was explained by, or reduced to, the effects of social class interests.

A key figure in this debate was Nicos Poulantzas, whose attempt to demarcate 'the specificity of the political' in Marxist theory met in general terms with Laclau's approbation. According to Laclau, however, the enormous contribution made by Poulantzas was vitiated by 'the general assumption that dominates his whole analysis: the reduction of every contradiction to a class contradiction, and the assignment of a class belonging to every ideological element'. ¹¹ Laclau proposed a different, and entirely original, approach. He argued that Althusser's theory of the interpellation (hailing) process through which ideological subjects were constructed could be applied to the analysis of political ideology. This would enable us to see that non-class ideological elements operated, for example, in the integration of populardemocratic themes into Fascist ideological configurations and that these processes might, historically, be either independent of class or articulated with class but were in no circumstances reducible to class ideologies. He suggested that Fascist ideology could be understood, in particular historical instances which he described, as the articulation of 'popular-democratic' elements in political discourse rather than (as had been common in Marxist political analysis) the natural political discourse of extreme conservative groups. By 'popular-democratic'

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