their historical reconstruction of the new hegemonic social formation -they automatically move first to the 'economic point of view' which, drawing on the work of Michel Aglietta, they analyse in terms of that most orthodox of Marxist concepts, commodification. Then we have a brief registration of environmental and urban issues, though, interestingly, the argument here does not operate by means of any concept equivalent to commodification. Next (and by contrast we find the concept of bureaucratization mobilized) Laclau and Mouffe move, in fact, to the state, and then on to political articulation and the reformulation of liberal-democratic ideology. The classical Marxist mind-set -- economy, then state, then ideology, then 'culture' -- is then fully completed in the addition of the 'important aspect' of mass communication and its new cultural forms. So, whatever their theoretical protestations about the economy as 'the last redoubt of essentialism', it is undoubtedly true that in one of the rare places where a substantive social/historical account is offered in the book it exactly reproduces, in its own ordering, that economistic and determinist logic.

As does the content of the argument, too, at this point. The thesis about capitalist development in this period is concerned with the expansion of capitalist relations into previously non-capitalist areas, but it rests on an extraordinary construction of capitalism as being about 'commodification' but not necessarily about labour/capital contradictions. They write: 'Today it is not only as sellers of labour-power that the individual is subordinated to capital, but also through his or her incorporation into a multitude of other social relations: culture, free time, illness, education, sex and even death. There is practically no domain of individual or collective life which escapes capitalist relations.' ⁵¹ The entire discussion of this phenomenon is interesting in that it is uncritically couched within a Marxist reading of this historical process that has long been challenged -- on the one hand by the Foucault/Donzelot position of the historical emergence of 'the social', and on the other by feminist insistence on the non-capitalist power relations at play in the world of the 'private domain'. ⁵² So, although Laclau and Mouffe gesture in the direction of feminism by noting the subordination of women in traditional community networks, they adopt a highly 'functionalist' and 'reductionist' and classically orthodox 'Marxist' formulation about the welfare state and the reproduction of labour-power, and one which has been explicitly criticized by feminists. And what is interesting about their constitution of 'capitalism' is that it remains an elemental and undefined agent in the argument -- yet an agent whose existence they have, in general terms, challenged.

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