80 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
series of stages in a pre-ordained logic and secondly, the affirmation of the Enlightenment belief in the growth of scientific knowledge and the increasing control of nature (the productive forces) as the basis of progress.
The fact that this new thinking took place in France was not inconsequential for the subsieqyent debate between poststructuralism and marxism. The powerful influence of the French Communist party jon progressive intellectual activity in post-war France meant that any innovations within, or criticisms of marxist theory, would at best be received with great suspicion and at worst would have to operate outside the traditional forums of the left. This background provides some perspective on the theoretical and political issues at stake and why they took on some of the characteristics th^y did in the French context, especially after the events of 1968. Foucault's notion of power as extending beyond the state throughout society, Derrida's critique of a fixed centre from which objective knowledge could be obtained, and Lyotard's suggestion that the 'postmodern condition' is characterized by the 'suspicion of meta-narratives* or philosophies of history, all could be seen (and were seen) as attacks on the Marxist-Leninist themes of 'capturing' state power, the working-class as the subject-object of history and the notion of *the class struggle as the motor of history'.2
Finding its initial reception in the 1960s in the areas of literary and art criticism—particularly in the United States—the themes and concerns have slowly found their way into political th&ry proper. Arguably the key text in this trajectory is the seminal work. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics by Emesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.3 A critical analysis of marxist theory and socialist politics, it is, in the words of the authors, a 'postmarxism without apologies*.
The overlap between what might be termed 'postmarxism* and postmodernism, though not complete, has been significant enough to cause alarm in marxist circles. In retrospect, the valiant attempt by Louis Althusser, the leading philosopher of the PCF, to synthesise these novel themes (such as Saussurian linguistics and Freudian psychoanalysis) with(in) marxism, led not to its rejuvenation but its demise. The thrust of postmodernism was towards a radical questioning, if not rejection, of the philosophical foundations of marxism, irrespective of the former's own political destination.
The responses to this widespread attack from writers committed to the marxist theoretical and political project have tended for the most part to be polemical denunciations: idealism, revisionism and so on. The most notable full-length critiques from an explicitly marxist perspective to date have emerged from Britain: Perry Anderson's In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London, 1983), Ellen Meiskins Wood's The Retreat From Class (London, 1986), and Norman Geras' review 'Postmarxism?' (NLR, 198), all three writers connected with