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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Comparative Governance
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1455768
This article is part of the Research Topic Populism and the Border: Theoretically and Empirically Dissecting Strategies of Exclusion and the Recreation of Identities View all 5 articles
Authoritarian protectionism and the post-neoliberal transition: learning from Stuart Hall's method of articulation
Provisionally accepted- London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom
This article returns to Stuart Hall's account of Thatcherism to consider the interaction between consent-based hegemonic devices and the structural compulsions that emanate from political-economic transitions. It argues that Hall's method of articulation offers a middle position in analysing contemporary authoritarian trends, which recognises the role of structural constraints and logics, as well as the discursive construction of ideology in enabling (and inhibiting) hegemony seeking efforts. Building on existing work that has highlighted the distinction between classical neoliberal arguments regarding economic individualism and the trend towards 'protectionist' discourses today, where the state is cast as a protector of the in-group against threats, real and imagined, the article outlines how the method of articulation can aid us in making sense of the complexity and non-linearity of the post-neoliberal transition. This framework is then applied to the case study of the British Conservative Party's trajectory after the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Keywords: articulation, Authoritarianism, Neoliberalism, Political-economy, Stuart Hall
Received: 27 Jun 2024; Accepted: 13 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cooper. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Luke Cooper, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom
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