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hegemonic analysis: about the recent development of political discourse analysis in the political sciences Inspired by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau's discourse and hegemony theory, I propose to analyze political discourse by reconstructing the hegemonic strategy to which it gives rise. The central aspect of this strategy is the separation of the discursive space into two parts. While on the one side a hegemonic project articulates an ever growing number of negative 'elements of lack' that need to be overcome, on the other it assembles all the demands aimed at overcoming this lack. In addition, any such hegemonic project will distinguish one specific demand which is articulated as encompassing all other demands. Such an encompassing demand can become a hegemonic demand if the hegemonic project is sufficiently successful. The article demonstrates these workings of the logics of hegemony through an analysis of the German economic policy discourse in the late 1940s and the 1950s which evolved around the demand for a 'social market economy'.