Beverley Best.Necessarily Contingent, Equally Different, and Relatively Universal: The Antinomies of Ernesto Laclau's Social Logic of Hegemony. RM 12(3):38-57 "Examines Ernesto Laclau's social logic of hegemony, with attention to the conditions that are essential for the existence of any identity or objectivity, drawing on the work of Saussure (1986). The paper then moves to a discussion of antagonism and the concept of difference, themes that are important to Laclau's hegemony theory. The relationship between structure and agency and the lapse into idealism are also examined. Finally, the paper offers the idea that social formations are created by social agents who have been granted a large share of the responsibility for determining the structure of society itself. This incompletion of the social acts as one of the few sources of hope that radical democracy will yet emerge. 26 References. K. A. Larsen."