'Thatcherite politics are 'hegemonic' in their conception and project: the aim is to struggle on several fronts at once, not on the economic-corporate one alone; and this is based on the knowledge that, in order really to dominate and restructure a social formation, political, moral and intellectual leadership must be coupled to economic dominance. The Thatcherites know they must 'win' in civil society as well as in the state.' ¹⁸

Stuart Hall is noteworthy for having devoted considerable attention to the inflection of Thatcherite themes, both 'organic Tory' and the aggressive neo-liberal strands of the ideology, in political constructions of gender, family and sexuality and with regard to racism and the politics of ethnicity. So, if his analysis was frequently directed, as I believe it was, to an audience of 'the Left' (particularly those who clung to the hope that one morning they would wake up and find that it was all a bad dream and the working class had come to its senses), it nevertheless addressed 'the Left' as a group that is in significant ways internally differentiated and divided by gender and race. That Stuart Hall's interpretation of Thatcherism occasioned so much criticism from the Left is, to my mind, symptomatic of the political weight carried by the theory of ideology. Bob Jessop and others, in a lengthy critical discussion of Hall's work, argued that one of his main errors was 'ideologism', or a tendency to neglect the 'structural underpinnings' of Thatcherism in his concentration on ideological processes and his analysis of patently ideological institutions such as the media. ¹⁹ This is the classic charge of idealism and, as we shall see, it surfaces a great deal in contemporary debates about ideology. Hall's reply -- that he found it 'galling' to be accused of ideologism simply for tactically drawing attention to important and specifically ideological aspects of Thatcherism -- is an apt one. ²⁰ For classical Marxists any serious consideration of ideology is, in practice, nearly always too serious.

It might seem a long way from debates about whether or not all elements of a political ideology should be designated as class-bound to the position described by this subheading. Yet this is the end point of Ernesto Laclau's trajectory (so far), and it marks the very interesting point at which critical arguments made within Marxism have coincided with some important 'post-structuralist' ideas in such a way as to challenge the viability of Marxism as a systematic theory. It seems to me that we can speak of a 'paradigm shift' here, however loosely such

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