"Like most academic Marxists, Professor Eagleton knows that, put baldly, the doctrine of economic determinism is patently absurd. So he employs various gambits to soften or conceal the absurdity, without ever really denying the basic model of economic determinism. This is not to say that he is completely free of "vulgar Marxist" rhetoric; indeed, he sometimes sounds like nothing so much as a soapbox Marxist, railing (for example) against "a petty bourgeois liberal humanism, academically dispossessed and subordinated yet in intellectual terms increasingly hegemonic, [which] occupied the bastions of reactionary criticism from within as a dissentient bloc." Yet Professor Eagleton also takes great pains to distance himself from "vulgar Marxism"—the phrase occurs often in his works, always in his beloved scare quotes. The vulgar Marxist is a frank economic determinist and holds that the "superstructure" is a more or less direct reflection of economic processes. The sophisticated Marxist, well schooled in the writings of the Frankfurt School Marxists, allows that the superstructure is "relatively autonomous"—except when he wants to claim economic determination for some phenomenon of his own choosing. The "vulgar Marxist" is frankly Utopian and looks forward to the revolution and the establishment of a workers' paradise; a sophisticated Marxist like Professor Eagleton dandifies his utopianism with lots of high-flown rhetoric. "Once emancipated from material scarcity, liberated from labour," he writes in a typically starry-eyed passage, "[men] will live in the play of the mutual significations, move in the ceaseless 'excess' of freedom." Professor Eagleton's primary weapons against the charge of vulgar Marxism are words like "hegemony," "ideology," and "aesthetic," all of which in his hands have the wonderful property of meaning any of about six different and conflicting things."