effectively, based on individual nation-states: as if 'the sociology of Britain' or 'of India' were a viable project in an increasingly global social environment. Anthony Giddens has provided incisive critiques of the naive assumptions underlying some conceptions of 'societies', and indeed, the slogan 'Think globally, act locally' has recently been held up to sociologists as a better model for the discipline than some of the previous ones. ³⁰

[. . .]

Laclau and Mouffe do not rest at a critique of the idea of social 'totality', but move into a more fundamental -- philosophical rather than sociological -- set of arguments about the 'impossibility' of society. Before going into these, it might be useful to summarize the schema of interlinked concepts that they propose for the analysis of social relations. They define four terms -- articulation, discourse, moment, element-of which the second, 'discourse', has generated the most controversy. Articulation is defined as 'any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice'; discourse is 'the structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice'; moments are 'differential positions, in so far as they appear articulated within a discourse'; and an element is 'any difference that is not discursively articulated'. ³¹ The most important point to note about these definitions is that the very extended definition of 'discourse' by Laclau and Mouffe does not, as has been immediately concluded by several materialists, represent a vertiginous leap into idealism. The concept of discourse in their hands is a materialist one that enables them to rethink the analysis of social and historical phenomena in a different framework. Their concept of discourse has been developed in a mode of explicit criticism of the assumptions traditionally governing discussion of the 'material/ideal' split in Marxist theory, and thus cannot (or at least should not) be assimilated automatically to one position within a polarity that they have explicitly rejected. It has something in common with Foucault's use of 'discourse', but there are important differences too. As I shall clarify later, whatever the problems associated with their concept of discourse, Laclau and Mouffe, in their general epistemological orientation, do not occupy the 'idealist' and 'relativist' boxes into which their critics have tried to push them.

Departing, for the moment, from the contentious definition of 'discourse' in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, I want to consider the related set of propositions put forward in the book as to the 'impossibility' of society and represented, in the passage under discussion, by the sentence 'There is no single underlying principle fixing -- and hence constituting -- the whole field of differences.' What does it mean for

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