in their analysis of the 'new social movements' they have delivered an original and highly influential development in political thought. An obvious explanation of the enormous current interest in their work is that it speaks to a problem -- the weight to be attached to social class as opposed to other salient divisions such as gender, ethnicity or age, for example -- that has exercised a major hold on both academic analyses and on practical political activity across the traditional Right/Left spectrum.

On the academic front, we have seen a variety of debates around this topic, largely (not surprisingly) in Marxisant treatments of sociology, politics and economics. Partly these debates concern the massive retheorization required to apply Marx's own concepts and descriptors to societies whose class structures and relationships have changed radically in the ensuing century -- here one could point schematically to the debates around the work on class of Erik Olin Wright and Carchedi, around the questions that continue to arise from the writings of Poulantzas on politics and class and from the revolution in 'rethinking Marxism' spearheaded by the economists Steve Resnick and Rick Wolff, and indeed one could also mention the major developments known under the umbrella heading of 'rational choice theory' as it continues to sweep across the field of what we might still, rather loosely, call Marxism. In all of these debates, there has been a potential for engagement with the actualities of non-class divisions, but (to express the situation tactfully) this has remained in many instances a potential rather than a nettle to be grasped.

Partly, too, academic debates around class have taken place in a conscious dialogue with the work of feminists and the writings of those who have sought to rethink class in relation to the major concern of national identity and nationalist politics, as well as in relation to the issues of ethnicity and racism. It is perhaps worth stressing how rich and varied the challenge to 'class primacy' has become in social science: whole schools of thought now exist devoted to the ways in which housing, for example, or life-cycle effects, cut across cherished assumptions about the determining effects of social class. So it seems very clear that a radical new theorization of politics, in which the iconic factor of class is dramatically shifted from its privileged position, would be of great interest to many people. (Why Laclau and Mouffe's book has been taken up so extensively in literary critical theory is a more complex question, which I will not take up here.)

In terms of practical politics, there can be no doubt that Hegemony and Socialist Strategy addresses a problem of tremendous pertinence and significance. This is, perhaps, most obviously true of the beleaguered Left, which has had, in a variety of contexts, to rethink not only

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