Filling the empty place: Laclau and Mouffe on power and hegemony

This chapter gives an overview of the theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It starts with taking a glance at the conception of hegemony, which is central to their understanding of power. Hereon, the text reconstructs some of the key issues in Laclau and Mouffe’s work as the constitutive outside, the relation of sedimentation and dislocation, the concept of equivalential chain and the empty signifier. It then switches to Claude Lefort’s edict of the empty place of power. Thereafter, the chapter considers Mouffe’s advances in thinking about antagonism/agonism and Laclau’s variant thereof. It then reports on how Laclau and Mouffe use the concept of ideology to extend another version of their anti-essentialist thinking. The last part provides a general reflection on the relationship between power and planning. The finding is, that the writings from Laclau and Mouffe probably do not directly contribute to planning differently and better or to providing a different and/or better self-understanding for planners. But their theory provides a theoretical vocabulary to analyse politics, planning and power. Attention to the embeddedness of planning in hegemonic power processes is necessary to understand and situate current planning processes and controversies.