assigned to it on the basis of economic location, and thus has a necessary rather than their preferred contingent character. Gramsci's view is therefore, in the last analysis, as 'essentialist' one. It is essential with regard to the privileged position of the working class, and with regard to 'the last redoubt of essentialism: the economy'.

Their own conclusions, bracingly headed 'Facing the Consequences', are to deny that the economy is self-regulated and subject to endogenous laws, to deny that social agents are constituted, ultimately, in a class core, and to deny that class position is necessarily linked to 'interests'. The propositions of the new theory can be reduced to two, at its most simple. They are (1) a general philosophical position on 'the impossibility of society', explicated in the chapter entitled 'Beyond the Positivity of the Social'; and (2) a theorization of the issue of agency in radical democratic politics, in an epoch where class essentialism has given way to the pluralist demands of the 'new social movements' -feminism, anti-racism, lesbian and gay rights, ecology, peace, etc.

"'The Impossibility of Society'" is the title of an article published by Ernesto Laclau in 1983, prefiguring the more detailed argument on this theme to appear in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. ²⁷ Laclau and Mouffe are making a Derridean point here: not that there is no such 'thing' as society, but -- as they put it, echoing Derrida's famous Il n'y a pas de hors-texte -- '"Society" is not a valid object of discourse.' ²⁸

What do they mean by this? This is a decisive step in their argument, and it might be helpful to quote the passage at greater length, since it contains a number of key allusions and some characteristic 'moves'. They write: 'The incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of "society" as a sutured and self-defined totality. "Society" is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing -- and hence constituting -- the whole field of differences.' ²⁹ The first and most obvious point to extract from this is the rejection of a model of society as a totality. Marxists have, it is true, differed as to how far they thought of societies as integrated totalities, but certainly they have tended to see them at least as bounded entities. In recent years, however, this notion of a social 'totality' has come under renewed scrutiny and reflection. In sociology, too, there has been a drift towards what we might call anti-totality models, with the rise of more micro-sociological and phenomenological approaches. Another aspect of this would be the reconsideration now under way of models of social entities that were,

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