For Laclau and Mouffe, Marxism is founded on a political 'imaginary': it is a conception of socialism that rests on the assumption that the interests of social classes are pre-given, the axiom that the working class is both ontologically and politically privileged in its 'centrality', and the illusion that politics will become pointless after a revolution has founded a new, and homogeneous, social order. In one sentence describing this ' Jacobin imaginary' before its final stages of dissolution, Laclau and Mouffe condense some central themes of post-structuralist thought: 'Peopled with "universal" subjects and conceptually built around History in the singular, it has postulated "society" as an intelligible structure that could be intellectually mastered on the basis of certain class positions and reconstituted, as a rational, transparent order, through a founding act of a political character.' ²³ It is worth noting here the allusions to post-structuralist critiques of 'foundationalism' in the epistemology of social and political theory, the critique of the (Cartesian) model of the unified subject, the critique of history as a monolithic and unilinear process, the glancing blow at phallocracy in the reference to mastery, and so on. It is also worth noting that 'the imaginary' (as opposed to the more everyday use of 'imaginary' as an adjective) is, of course, a Lacanian concept, and one that will trail particular resonances for some readers. ²⁴

Laclau and Mouffe insist that they are not obliterating Marxism without trace (an impossible project, of course, for good Derridians), but are in some senses working through it: they are post-Marxist as well as post-Marxist. This, as we shall see, has led to some critics of their book saying that Laclau and Mouffe are themselves not really free from the residues of totalizing and essentialist thought that they have acquired on their long tramp through Marxism. (One might ask: if you want to end up with a theory of the rainbow coalition, why pick Kautsky as the place to start?)

The substantive arguments of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy pivot on Laclau and Mouffe's reading of Gramsci, and here, as they say, 'everything depends on how ideology is conceived'. ²⁵ Their account of Gramsci's theory of ideology and hegemony stresses -- initially, anyway -- his break with the critical conception of ideology, in favour of a positive (which they call 'material') perspective, and his rejection of the deterministic base/superstructure model of ideology. They insist, too, that for Gramsci'the ideological elements articulated by a hegemonic class do not have a necessary class belonging'. ²⁶

Gramsci is a pivotal figure for Laclau and Mouffe because he represents the furthest point that can be reached within Marxism and the intrinsic limitations of the theoretical problematic. For even the 'articulatory' role of the working class is, in their reading of Gramsci,

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