The article is a detailed consideration of the poststructuralist concept, which is developed in the work "Logic of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory" by D. Glinos and D. Howarth, and will arouse the interest of all those engaged in discursive research. In the work of professors of the University of Essex, the forces of social and political philosophy carried out a deep study of the discursive paradigm, first conceptually outlined in the work of S. Mouff and E. Laclo "Hegemony and socialist strategy", which has not yet been translated into Russian. The "new ontology" proposed by Mouff and Laclos became the basis for the original scientific school. The reviewed monograph is presented as a new round of development of this research direction. Based on the ontological attitudes of the discursive paradigm, Glinos and Howarth propose a postpositivist model of social sciences based on abduction, a problem-oriented approach (problematization), the need to take into account both the "hermeneutic" and "materialistic" components, both the objective and subjective sides of the social. The schemes they form for socio-political analysis seem analytically valuable. Of course, there are alternatives to them, but one of the key consequences of the discursive paradigm is the installation not on the competition of ontic approaches, but on their unification, since it is important to rely on what one or another approach brings to social knowledge, and not what it contradicts to another approach.