multiple forms of vigilance and regulation in social relations which had previously been conceived as forming part of the private domain'. ⁴⁰ Acknowledging the familiar political ambiguities surrounding political resistance in a 'welfare state' context, Laclau and Mouffe see, amongst the various factors in play in such struggles, a newly articulated broad sphere of social 'rights'. Categories such as 'justice' and 'equality' have been, in a sense, lifted from their liberal context and articulated within a democratic political discourse. Laclau and Mouffe conclude here that commodification and bureaucratization, and the reformulation of a liberal-democratic political ideology, form the context in which we should understand the expansion of social conflict and the constitution of new political subjects, which in turn they describe as 'a moment of deepening of the democratic revolution'. ⁴¹

They add, however, that a third aspect of the new 'hegemonic formation of the post-war period' plays an important role: the expansion of mass communication and the retreat of traditional cultural identities. Laclau and Mouffe see, in the ambiguities of a cultural massification that interpellates subjects as theoretically equal consumers as well as providing some elements with subversive potential, a general homogenization of social life. They point, in a very interesting passage, to the fact that resistance to this has tended to take the form of a 'proliferation of particularisms' and the 'valorisation of "differences"', especially those geared to the creation of new cultural identities. In these demands for autonomy, so often slighted by the Left for their apparent individualism, Laclau and Mouffe see a reformulation of the demand for 'liberty' -- one of the central themes of the democratic imaginary. ⁴²

In considering Laclau and Mouffe's argument in general, one might want to draw attention to a key emphasis on what they describe as 'the logic of equivalence'. This can be explained as follows: the French Revolution was an important moment in the development of a democratic imaginary in that it ushered out a hierarchical social order ('ruled by a theological-political logic in which the social order had its foundation in divine will') where political discourse could only be the repetition and reproduction of inequality. (A striking instance of this is the notorious English hymn verse 'The rich man in his castle, /The poor man at his gate, /God made them, high or lowly, /And ordered their estate.') Here let me quote a crucial sentence from Laclau and Mouffe: 'This break with the ancien régime, symbolised by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, would provide the discursive conditions which made it possible to propose the different forms of inequality as illegitimate and anti-natural, and thus make them equivalent as forms of oppression.' ⁴³ Thus the 'logic of equivalence' is born: we have moved from a social order in which subjects are differentially, but fatefully,

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