Conflict as the Engine of Just Transition

Segal's five-stage pattern — threshold, exhilaration, resistance, adaptation, expansion — organizes the history of technological transitions into a narrative arc. The pattern is historically defensible at the level of aggregate outcomes. Over the long arc, the trajectory bends toward expansion. But the pattern conceals its own engine. The adaptation stage is described as though it were natural — the organic response of a society adjusting to new conditions. The dams arrive. The institutions form. The expansion follows. Mouffe's framework, grounded in the historical analysis of democratic struggle, reveals what the pattern obscures: adaptation does not happen naturally. It is fought for. The dams that redirected the Industrial Revolution from catastrophe to expansion — the eight-hour day, child labor laws, worker safety regulations, universal public education, the weekend — were not adaptations the culture produced through organic adjustment. They were political achievements won through decades of organized, often violent, always contested struggle.