gender, as these emerge in social science anyway, have proved unequal to the task of dealing with the 'newer' (to some) questions of ethnicity and racism. As I have suggested elsewhere, it is as if existing theories of social structure, already taxed by attempting to think about the interrelations of class and gender, have been quite unable to integrate a third axis of systematic inequality into their conceptual maps. And it is easy to point, by contrast, to the veritable explosion of work that does combine these three interests (the 'holy trinity' of class, race and gender) in disciplines and genres where these structural/morphological constraints do not hold back the exploration of new issues. ⁴⁸

It might be relevant to add, here, that the general orientation of Laclau's earlier work rejecting the 'class-belonging' dimension of political ideology has proved a useful framework for thinking about political discourse in a nuanced manner. I have previously mentioned the influence of that work on the exploration, by Colin Mercer and Stuart Hall among others, of nationalism (the Gramscian 'nationalpopular'), patriotism and Thatcherism, for example. The idea of 'political discourse', as a concept that can accommodate a variety of groups, demands and interests as they are articulated, opens the way for an analysis of gender that was by definition marginalized in the 'reflection of class' school of thought about political ideology. We have certainly seen, drawing loosely on the ideas of 'early Laclau', several analyses of contemporary political discourse as gendered: they consider the ways in which, for example, feminism and anti-feminism, constructions of 'family' and sexuality, or articulations and denials of women's reproductive rights, figure in the discourses. ⁴⁹

It remains to be seen, however, how far Hegemony and Socialist Strategy really does carry through its iconoclastic project of the complete dismantling of class privilege. To say this is not to make a cheap point of the order of 'caught you using the word society' but to address a more serious issue that surfaces in relation to the majority of post-structuralist work. This is the intrusion, or return in disguise, of elements (often of the kind that postmodernists refer to as 'metanarratives') which have been explicitly rejected elsewhere in the texts in question.

As far as Laclau and Mouffe are concerned, we revert here to the question of their post-Marxism. Let me take as an example the section of their argument where they set out the hegemonic transformation of the postwar social order, in which they locate the emergence of new social antagonisms and their articulation in new social movements. ⁵⁰ Far from subscribing to a logic of 'contingency', the sequence of their propositions, and the model of causality expounded in them, are entirely characteristic of the traditional patterns of Marxist thought. If we take the sequence of the argument first, it is astonishing that -- in

-256-