Many theories of hegemony take the social subject—not individual citizens or activists—as the proper agent of social change; and they assume that this social subject (known often as a collective will or social movement) is forged, sustained, and coherently heard through rhetoric. Whether a victory of coercion and consensus; the product of a leader’s vision or activists’ savvy in mobilizing their available resources; the outcome of a somewhat mysterious process which moves one to join “friends against enemies”; or the serendipitous transformation of an empty signifier into a formidable, mobilized resistance; rhetoric builds the social change agent.