CONCEPT
Hegemonic Articulation
The Laclau-Mouffe concept for the contingent, always-contestable political process by which disparate social demands are linked into a bloc capable of challenging the prevailing order—and by which that order sustains itself by presenting its particular arrangement of power as universal common sense.
Hegemony, as
Antonio Gramsci developed the concept and as
Chantal Mouffe and
Ernesto Laclau radicalized it, is not domination by force but something more durable and more difficult to contest: the construction of a social order in which one particular arrangement of power relations appears as the natural, rational,
inevitable state of affairs. Hegemonic articulation is the process by which this construction occurs—not through conspiracy but through the linking of disparate social identities, demands, and interests into a bloc that presents its particular vision as the universal good. The word “articulation” is precise: it names both the act of giving voice to something and the act of joining separate elements into a connected whole, the way a joint articulates two bones. Political subjects—workers, citizens, consumers, users of AI—are not pre-given; they are constructed through articulation, through the contingent linking of demands that might otherwise remain separate. The prevailing order sustains itself by successfully articulating