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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Populism is an expression of anger; its appeal stems from being presented as the solution to disorder in our times. The vision of democracy, society, and the economy it offers is coherent and attractive. At a time when the words and slogans of the left have lost much of their power to inspire, Pierre Rosanvallon takes populism for what it is: the rising ideology of the twenty-first century. In The Populist Century he develops a rigorous theoretical account of populism, distinguishing five key features that make up populist political culture; he retraces its history in modern democracies from the mid-nineteenth century to the present; and he offers a well-reasoned critique of populism, outlining a robust democratic alternative. This wide-ranging and insightful account of the theory and practice of populism will be of great interest to students and scholars in politics and the social sciences and to anyone concerned with the key political questions of our time.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction: Conceptualizing Populism
A reality to be theorized
The anatomy of populism
The three histories of populism
On critiques of populism
The alternative
Notes
I Anatomy
1 A Conception of “The People”: The People as One Body
From class to people
Them and us
The power of a word
Notes
2 A Theory of Democracy: Direct, Polarized, Immediate
The cult of referendums and the apologia for direct democracy
Democracy polarized
Immediate expression by the people
Notes
3 A Mode of Representation: A Leader Embodying the People
The Latin American precedent
The leader as an organ of the people’s body
Notes
4 A Politics and a Philosophy of Economics: National Protectionism
The return of political will
A conception of justice and equality
Protectionism as an instrument of security
Notes
5 A Regime of Passions and Emotions
The factors underlying the “return of the emotions”
Status-related emotions
Intellect-related emotions
Action-related emotions
Is there a populist personality?
Notes
6 The Unity and Diversity of Populisms
Diffuse populism
Regimes and movements
“Left” and “right” populisms
Notes
II History
1 History of Populist Moments I: Caesarism and Illiberal Democracy in France
The theory of the plebiscite
One man embodying the people and the people as one body
Democratic polarization
On the Caesarian critique of parties
A “democratic” vision for limiting freedom of the press
Notes
2 History of Populist Moments II: The Years 1890–1914
The panacea of referendums
The rise of national protectionism
Populism aborted
Notes
3 History of Populist Moments III: The Latin American Laboratory
Gaitán: a foundational figure
The Peronist regime
On the characterization of Latin American populism
Notes
4 Conceptual History: Populism as a Democratic Form
Structuring aporia I: the unlocatable people
Structuring aporia II: the ambiguities of representative democracy
Structuring aporia III: the avatars of impersonality
Structuring aporia IV: defining the regime of equality
Limit forms of democracy: the three families
Notes
III Critique
Introduction
1 The Issue of Referendums
The dissolution of the notion of responsibility
The difference between decision and will
Deliberation relegated to second place
A propensity for the irreversible
Silence about the normative impact of referendums
The paradoxical diminishment of democracy by referendums
Responding to the democratic expectations that underlie the idea of the referendum
Notes
2 Polarized Democracy vs. Pluralized Democracy
Democratic fiction and the horizon of unanimity
New paths for expressing the general will
The power of anyone
The power of no one
Of institutions that are democratic and not merely liberal
Notes
3 From an Imaginary People to a Constructable Democratic Society
From the imaginary society to the real society
The 1 percent
Populist peoples and democratic societies
Notes
4 The Horizon of Democratorship: The Issue of Irreversibility
The philosophy and politics of irreversibility
Polarization and politicization of institutions
Epistemology and morality of generalized politicization
Notes
Conclusion: The Spirit of an Alternative
Notes
Annex: History of the Word “Populism”
Russian populism
American populism in the 1890s
Populism in literature
Notes
Works Cited
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Populist Century
History, Theory, Critique
Pierre Rosanvallon
Translated by Catherine Porter
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Le siècle du populisme: Histoire, théorie, critique
© Editions du Seuil, 2020
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4628-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4629-9 (paperback)
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938630
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INTRODUCTION: CONCEPTUALIZING POPULISM
Populism is revolutionizing twenty-first-century politics. But the disruption it brings has not yet been assessed with any degree of accuracy. The word may turn up everywhere, but no theory of the phenomenon has emerged. The term combines a look of intuitive self-evidence with a fuzzy form, as attested first and foremost by the semantic slipperiness manifested in its usage. For it is a decidedly malleable word, so erratic are its uses. The term is paradoxical, too: even though it is derived from the positive foundations of democratic life, it most often has a pejorative connotation. It is also a screen word, for it applies a single label to a whole set of contemporary political mutations whose complexity and deepest wellsprings need to be grasped. Is it appropriate, for instance, to use the same term to characterize Chávez’s Venezuela, Orbán’s Hungary, and Duterte’s Philippines, not to mention a figure like Trump? Does it make sense to put the Spaniards of Podemos and the followers of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s movement, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), in the same basket with the fervent supporters of Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, or Nigel Farage? To understand something requires making distinctions; it is essential to resist simplifying amalgamations. Populism is a dubious notion, finally, because it often serves only to stigmatize adversaries, or to legitimize old claims by the powerful and the educated that they are superior to the “lower” classes, which are always deemed likely to mutate into plebeians governed by sinister passions. We cannot address the question of populism without keeping this observation in mind, as a caveat as well as a call for political lucidity and intellectual rigor in approaching the subject.
This necessary attention to the pitfalls that underlie the term “populism” must not lead us to stop using it, however, for two reasons. First, because in its very confusion it has proved unavoidable. If it has stuck to everyone’s lips and remains on everyone’s pen, despite all the reservations just mentioned, it is also because the term has responded, imprecisely but insistently, to a felt need to use new language to characterize an unprecedented dimension of the political cycle that has opened up at the turn of the twenty-first century – and because no competing term has surfaced so far. The newly launched political cycle is described by some as a pressing social expectation that the democratic project will be revitalized as the path of a more active sovereignty on the part of the people is rediscovered; others see it, conversely, as bearing signs that announce a threatening destabilization of that same project of revitalization. But the second decisive fact is that the term has been adopted with pride by political leaders seeking to pillory those who use it for the purpose of denunciation.1 We could make a long list of figures on the right and the far right who have sought to overturn the stigma, first by saying that the word didn’t scare them, and then by espousing it, over time. There has been a parallel evolution on the left, as attested in France in exemplary fashion by Jean-Luc Mélenchon: “I have no desire at all to defend myself against the accusation of populism,” he said as early as 2010. “It’s the elites expressing their disgust. Out with them all! Me, a populist? Bring it on!”2 The fact that a certain number of intellectuals have become advocates of a “left populism” has also helped considerably to give the term a desirable consistency and to make it common currency as a political designation. The positions and writings of Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe have weighed heavily in this direction, encouraging the retention of the word and validating the appropriateness of its use.
A reality to be theorized
The problem is that books devoted to populism, in their ever-increasing numbers, remain essentially focused on understanding the underpinnings of the populist vote in order to explain its spectacular advances throughout the world. Using the tools of electoral sociology and political science, these works characterize the populations involved, describing the values that motivate them, the way they relate to political life and institutions, and of course their living and working conditions, in various dimensions. Such investigations depict a social and cultural world that presents objective features common to many countries: people living on the margins of large cities in zones affected by industrial decline who can be defined as among the “losers” in globalization, people with below-average incomes and little if any higher education. And these people are angry, as well: they are defined, more subjectively, by their resentment toward a system in which they see themselves as held in contempt and reduced to invisibility; they fear being robbed of their identities as their locales open up to the world and to immigration. By bringing together multiple data sets and proposing new ways of looking at the issue, some of the existing studies have offered a better understanding of the makeup of populist electorates. At the same time, however, they have effectively forestalled an overall grasp of the phenomenon. They tacitly suggest that populism is a mere symptom, an indicator pointing to other things that by implication should be the real focus of our attention: the decline of the “party” form, for example, or the gulf that has deepened between the political class and society at large, or the suppression of the gap between a right and a left equally incapable of facing up to the urgencies of the present. In these cases, what is being conceptualized is not the nature of populism but rather its causes. Works of this sort all end up proposing yet another analysis of political disenchantment and contemporary social fractures.
The frequent reduction of populisms to their status as protest movements, with a focus on the political style and type of discourse associated with such movements, is another way of failing to take their full measure.3 If the dimension of protest is undeniable, it must nevertheless not be allowed to mask the fact that protest movements also constitute actual political statements that have their own coherence and positive force. The routine references in such movements to political figures of the past, in particular to far-right traditions, lead here again to reductionist characterizations. While populisms often do arise from within such traditions, the phenomenon has now taken on an additional dimension (even apart from the development of a populism that purports to be on the left).
It is important to stress, too, the limits of the various typologies of populism that have been proposed and promoted. Describing the multiplicity of variants (on both the right and the left, with their differing degrees of authoritarianism, differences in economic policy, and so on) does not help us reach a better understanding of what is essential, what constitutes the kernel of invariant elements, and on what basis we can differentiate among the variants. At most, a typology can assign each particular case to a specific category: it is then nothing more than a list without rhyme or reason. One journal deemed it useful to distinguish among the thirty-six families of populism!4 Such an exercise is the exact opposite of a work of conceptualization; it is only a way of masking the inability to grasp the essence of the thing under study.
The problem, then, is that these populisms, celebrated by some and demonized by others, have remained characterized in vague and therefore ineffective ways. They have essentially been relegated to viscerally expressed aversions and rejections, or else to projects summed up in a few slogans (as for example in the case of citizen-initiated referendums in France). This makes it difficult both to analyze their rising potency and to develop a relevant critique. If one seeks to grasp populisms, taken together in their full dimensions, as constituting an original political culture that is actively redefining our political cartography, it becomes clear that they have not yet been analyzed in such terms. Even the leading actors in populist movements, a few notable publications or speeches notwithstanding (we shall look at these later on), have not really theorized what they were (or are) animating. In historical terms, this is an exceptional phenomenon. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the major ideologies of modernity were all associated with foundational works that tied critical analyses of the existing social and political world to visions of the future. The principles of free-market liberalism were articulated by Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say, Benjamin Constant and John Stuart Mill; socialism was grounded in the texts of Pierre Leroux, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jean Jaurès, and Karl Kautsky. The works of Étienne Cabet and Karl Marx played a decisive role in shaping the communist ideal. Anarchism, for its part, was identified with the contributions of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. Conservatism and traditionalism found their champions in Edmund Burke and Louis de Bonald. The rules of representative government were elaborated with precision by the French and American founding fathers during the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. And many other names closer to our own day could be cited to highlight the process of revising and refining these pioneering works – a process implicit in the economic, social, and political evolutions of the world that have been under way for two centuries.
There is nothing of the sort for populism. It is linked to no work of comparable scope, no text commensurate with the centrality it has acquired.5 Its ideology has been characterized as soft, or weak. These qualifiers are deceptive, as populism’s capacity to mobilize supporters makes clear; and while the adjectives cited convey implicit value judgments, they are not helpful. The problem is precisely that the ideology of populism has never been formalized and developed, for the simple reason that its propagandists have seen no need to do so: the voters they attract are more attuned to angry outbursts and vengeful demonizing than to theoretical argument.
The objective of this book, then, is to propose an initial sketch of the missing theory, with the ambition of doing so in terms that permit a radical confrontation – one that goes to the very heart of the matter – with the populist idea. As the starting point for developing an in-depth critique of the idea on the terrain of social and democratic theory, we have to recognize populism as the rising ideology of the twenty-first century. The pages that follow are designed to carry out this task in three phases. The first part describes the anatomy of populism, constituting it as an ideal type. The second part presents a history of populism that leads to an integration of that ideal type within a general typology of democratic forms. The third and final part is devoted to a critique of populism.
The anatomy of populism
This part is built around a presentation of the five elements that make up populist political culture: a conception of “the people,” a theory of democracy, a mode of representation, a politics and a philosophy of economics, and a regime of passions and emotions. The conception of the people, based on the distinction between “them” and “us,” is the element that has been most often analyzed. I shall enrich the usual description, however, first by shoring it up with an analysis of the tension between the people as a civic body and the people as a social body, and second by showing how the term “people” has acquired a renewed capacity to shape the social world in an age of individualism based on singularities. The populist theory of democracy is based, for its part, on three elements: a preference for direct democracy (illustrated by the glorification of the referendum process); a polarized and hyper-electoralist vision of the sovereignty of the people that rejects intermediary bodies and aims to domesticate non-elective institutions (such as constitutional courts and independent authorities); and an understanding of the general will as capable of expressing itself spontaneously. The populist conception of representation is in turn linked with the foregrounding of the figure of a “leader standing for the people,” an individual who manifests a perceptible quality of embodiment, as a remedy for the existing state of unsatisfactory representation. National protectionism is another constitutive element of the populist ideology, moreover, provided that it is understood as not limited to economic policy. National protectionism is in fact more deeply inscribed in a sovereignist vision of reconstructing the political will and ensuring the security of a population. The economic sphere is thus in this respect eminently political. Finally, the political culture of populism is explicitly attached to the mobilization of a set of emotions and passions whose importance is recognized and theorized here. I shall distinguish among emotions related to intellection (destined to make the world more readable through recourse to what are essentially conspiracy narratives), emotions related to action (rejectionism), and emotions related to status (the feeling of being abandoned, of being invisible). Populism has recognized the role of affects in politics and used them in pioneering ways, going well beyond the traditional recipes for seduction. Once the ideal type of populism has been fleshed out on the basis of these five elements, we shall examine the diversity of populisms, taking particular care to analyze the distinction between populisms on the left and those on the right.
The three histories of populism
Does populism have a history? While the answer to a question formulated in such general terms can only be in the affirmative, it must immediately be qualified, for that history can be conceptualized in three very different ways. First, one can simply consider the history of the word “populism”: this is the simplest approach and the one most commonly encountered. I shall wait to present its essential elements in an annex to this book, for it contributes relatively little to an understanding of our present situation. The word has in fact been used in three different contexts that are entirely unrelated to one another and only weakly related to what populism has come to mean today.
The term first appeared in the 1870s in the context of Russian populism, a movement of intellectuals and young people from well-to-do and even aristocratic backgrounds who were critical of projects for Western-style modernization of the country and sought to “go down to the people,” as they put it. They saw the traditions of agrarian communities and village assemblies as possible starting points for building a new society. The idea was that, in Russia, the peasantry would be the force for renewal, fulfilling the role the proletariat was expected to play in the West. This approach, which could be called “top-down populism,” never mobilized the popular masses themselves. Nevertheless, it left a significant legacy, for some of the great figures in Russian anarchism and Marxism took their first steps as militants in that movement.
A decade later, it was in America that a People’s Party, whose supporters were commonly labeled populists, saw the light of day. This movement for the most part mobilized the world of small farmers on the Great Plains who were on the warpath against the big railroad companies and the big banks to which they had become indebted. The movement met with a certain degree of success in the early 1890s, but it never managed to reach a national audience, despite its resonant denunciation of corruption in politics and its call for a more direct democracy. (These themes were beginning to emerge everywhere in the country; they eventually gave rise to the Progressive Movement, which succeeded in developing a whole set of political reforms – the organization of primaries, the possibility of recalling elected officials, the recourse to referendums by popular initiative – that would be implemented in the Western states.) The People’s Party was an authentic popular movement, but it remained confined to a geographically circumscribed agricultural world; it failed to extend its appeal to working-class voters. None of the American populists appears to have been aware, moreover, of the earlier use of the term in Russia.
The word made its third appearance in France in 1929, in an entirely different and completely unrelated context. The “Manifesto of the Populist Novel” published that year was a strictly literary event: in the tradition of the naturalist movement, the manifesto urged French novelists to focus more on depicting popular milieus. Forerunners such as Émile Zola and contemporaries such as Marcel Pagnol and Eugène Dabit were evoked in support of this literary populism. There were no interactions at all between this third “populist” movement and either of its predecessors, nor did any of the three prefigure contemporary uses of the term populism, contrary to what ill-informed references sometimes suggest.
A second type of history allows us to advance in a more suggestive manner in the comprehension of contemporary populism: this is the history of moments or regimes that, without having invoked the label, resonate with our concerns today and make it easier to understand the dynamics of the essential components of populism. I have focused on three of these. First, France’s Second Empire, an exemplary illustration of the way in which the cult of universal suffrage and of referendums (called “plebiscites” at the time) could be linked to the construction of an authoritarian, immediate, and polarized democracy, one that would be qualified as “illiberal” today. What is of interest in the context of the current study is that this regime theorized its project, spelling out the reasons why it viewed the democracy it was establishing as more authentic than the liberal parliamentary model. Next, the Latin American laboratory of the mid-twentieth century, illustrated initially by Colombia’s Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and Argentina’s Juan Perón: these regimes bring clearly to light the conditions for expressing and enacting embodied representation, as well as the mobilizing capacity of the opposition between an oligarchy and the people in societies that were not based on European-style class structures. Finally, going back to the prewar period 1890–1914, we find a good vantage point for observing the rise of populist themes at the point of the first globalization, most notably in France and in the United States: what took place during this period sheds light on the conditions under which political divisions beyond the traditional right/left opposition were redefined. And it also helps us see how the populist wave of the period was brought to a halt. In effect, we are invited to consider a future that did not materialize. While the present always remains to be written, and while it is important to be skeptical of analogies that downplay this fact, the three periods I have evoked nevertheless offer food for thought.
A comprehensive global history of populism defines a third approach, one that might be called inseparably social and conceptual. It seeks to deepen our understanding of the present by considering the past as a repertoire of aborted possibilities, a laboratory of experiments that invite us to reflect on incompletions, reversals, and gropings in the dark. Here we are dealing with a long history of the problematic character of democracy. It is not the history of an ideal model whose germination we would study, thinking that it might one day be fully and completely realized. There is nothing linear about the history of democracy: it is constituted rather by continuous intellectual conflicts over its definition as much as it is marked by intense social struggles around the establishment of certain of its principal institutions (yesterday’s conquest of universal suffrage or today’s recognition of minority rights come to mind). It is a history of unkept promises and mangled ideals in which we remain completely immersed, as is obvious from the intensity of the contemporary disenchantment with democracy and the difficulty of finding the conditions that would allow us to institute an authentic society of equals. This tumultuous history is inseparable from the structural indeterminacy of adequate forms for democracies, given that the appropriate modalities for the exercise of collective sovereignty, the establishment of norms of justice that would allow the construction of a world of equals, and the very definition of “the people” all remain subject to controversy. At the same time, impatience on the part of some and fear on the part of others have led to a constant radicalization of the processes by which both the breaks with the past to be achieved and the gains to be preserved are perceived. In this context, I shall describe populism as a limit case of the democratic project, alongside two other limit cases: those of minimal democracies (democracies reduced to the rights of man and the election of leaders) and essentialist democracies (defined by the institution of a societal authority in charge of building public welfare). Each of the latter two forms, by virtue of its structure and its history, is threatened by a specific mode of degradation: a slide toward elective oligarchies in the case of minimal democracies and a totalitarian turn of power against society in the case of essentialist democracies. When the populist form of democracy that I have characterized as polarized is the basis for a regime, it runs the risk, for its part, of sliding toward democratorship6 – that is, toward an authoritarian power that nevertheless retains a (variable) potential for being overturned.
On critiques of populism
The most common political critique of populism charges it with illiberalism, that is, with a tendency to make the (“societal”) extension of individual rights secondary to the affirmation of collective sovereignty, and a simultaneous tendency to challenge the intermediary bodies accused of thwarting the action of the elected authorities. I myself spoke, some twenty years ago, of “illiberal democracy” with regard to the Second Empire,7 and I have used the term more recently with respect to populist regimes. The term still seems appropriate to me in almost all cases in which it is used to characterize an observable tendency. But I no longer believe that it can serve as an axis around which to build an effective critique (that is, a critique that advances arguments capable of modifying an opposing opinion), for the simple reason that the leading voices of populism explicitly denounce liberal democracy for curtailing and hijacking authentic democracy. Vladimir Putin, a propagandist for a democracy labeled “sovereign,” has asserted forcefully that liberalism has become “obsolete,”8 while Viktor Orbán, for his part, has insisted that “a democracy is not necessarily liberal.”9 Thus it is on the grounds of a democratic critique of populism that the new champions of this ideal need to be interrogated and contested.
Political life is a graveyard of critiques and warnings that have been powerless to change the course of events. I encountered this phenomenon while studying the history of the nineteenth century in France, when I saw, for example, the inability of the republican opposition to Napoleon III to get its arguments across to the French populace as a whole. The French rose up against a regime that they rightly denounced for quashing freedom, but at the same time they were incapable of seeing through the regime’s claim that its recourse to plebiscites served to honor the sovereignty of the people more than its predecessors had.10 In other words, their intelligence was not equal to their indignation. And this is the case today with those who settle for a liberal critique of populism. This book seeks to break the spell by proposing an in-depth critique of the democratic theory that structures the populist ideology.
This endeavor begins with a detailed analysis of the limits of referendums with respect to a project for achieving democracy. Next, it addresses the question of democratic polarization by emphasizing that a democracy that proposes to make a collectivity responsible for its own destiny cannot be based solely on the exercise of majoritarian electoral power. Since this latter is simply a conventional but notoriously imperfect manifestation of the general will, the general will has to borrow complementary expressions in order to give more consistent body to the democratic ideal. The notions of “power belonging to no one” and “power belonging to anyone at all,” two other ways of grasping the democratic “we,” are examined here, along with the institutional arrangements that may be attached to them, in order to stress the narrowing implied by an exclusively electoralist vision of power belonging to all. I shall also demonstrate in this context that institutions such as constitutional courts and independent authorities, generally viewed only through the prism of their liberal dimension, have a democratic character first and foremost. In effect, they constitute a guarantee for the people in contentious encounters with its representatives. By the same token, this approach is an invitation to conceptualize the relations between liberalism and democracy, that is, between freedom and sovereignty, in inclusive rather than exclusive terms. I shall also examine the popular conception of the notion of “the people” by advancing a sociological critique of the opposition between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. In this context, the notion of a “democratic society to be constructed” is opposed to that of an imaginary “people as one body.”
These assorted critiques of a theoretical nature will be supplemented by critiques focused on the practices of populist regimes, and in particular the conditions under which the polarization of institutions comes into play: modifications of the role and modes of organization of constitutional courts, and suppression or manipulation of independent authorities and especially of electoral oversight commissions, where they exist. To these elements I shall add data concerning policies toward the media, associations, and opposition parties. Taken together, all these elements give body to the qualifier “illiberalism,” which takes on a meaning that we can then assess concretely (the relation between the practices and the justifications of France’s Second Empire will be highlighted in this context). Here I shall pay specific attention to the legal arrangements adopted in order to secure the irreversibility of these regimes and their installation for the long run, most often through the removal of restrictions on term limits.
The alternative
Before it can be studied as a problem, populism has to be understood as a proposition developed in response to contemporary problems. This book takes populism seriously by analyzing and critiquing it as such a proposition. But a critique can only fulfill its role completely if it goes on to sketch out an alternative proposition.11 The final pages of this study are devoted to such an effort. They present the major features of what could be a generalized and expansive sovereignty of the people, one that enriches democracy instead of simplifying or polarizing it. This approach is based on a definition of democracy as ongoing work to be undertaken in a process of continuous exploration, rather than as a model whose features could be faithfully reproduced without further conflict and debate over its adequate form.
Notes
1
I should emphasize that the same thing happened earlier to the word “democracy,” especially in the United States. At the turn of the nineteenth century, it was an insult to be called a “democrat” in that country. The term was equivalent to “demagogue,” and “democracy” at that time meant “mob rule” or “reign of the passions of the populace,” in the words of the founding fathers and their descendants. It was a provocative move when the Republicans of the day (Jefferson’s party) renamed their organization “Democratic Party” in the late 1820s. On this point, see Bertlinde Laniel’s documented history,
Le mot “democracy” et son histoire aux États-Unis de 1780 à 1856
(Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 1995).
2
Interview in
L’Express
, September 16, 2010. Mélenchon had said the same thing in his book
Qu’ils s’en aillent tous! Vite, la révolution citoyenne
(Paris: Flammarion, 2010): “The fine folk, the satisfied folk, their story-tellers and all the sermonizers who take the high ground can choke on their indignation. Let them brandish their pathetic red cards: ‘Populism!’ ‘Out of control!’ Bring it on!” (pp. 11–12).
3
I myself have taken that reductive approach in the past, by considering populism as a caricature of the counter-democratic principle; see my
Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust
, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [2006] 2008).
4
Dossier “Les 36 familles du populisme,”
Éléments
, no. 177 (April–May 2019):
https://www.revue-elements.com/produit/familles-du-populisme-2/
.
5
Nevertheless, we must salute the effort of conceptualization made by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, on the left. These authors have no counterparts on the right.
6
This ungainly term, translating the French
démocrature
, appears to have been adopted in English in recent years to label a democracy that has features in common with a dictatorship, or a dictatorship that purports to be a democracy. –
Translator’s note
.
7
In
La démocratie inachevée: Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France
(Paris: Gallimard, 2000).
8
In an interview in the
Financial Times
, June 27, 2019:
https://www.ft.com/content/878d2344-98f0-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36
.
9
See the programmatic speech he delivered at Bǎile Tuşnad in Romania, 24 July 2017:
https://visegradpost.com/en/2017/07/24/full-speech-of-v-orban-will-europe-belong-to-europeans/
.
10
Moreover, this regime had restored universal suffrage, which the republicans in charge had eviscerated in 1849.
11
This is where the weakness lies in approaches that treat the problem as a “pathology” of democracies. They imply that the existing democracies constitute successful embodiments of the democratic project, a referential norm from which populisms would constitute deviations. This is to neglect the structural character of democratic indeterminacy and the fact that democracy is consequently an unstable regime that is constantly exploring its own aporias. I myself used that terminology in the earliest writings I devoted to the question: see “Penser le populisme,”
Le Monde
, July 22, 2011.
I ANATOMY
1 A CONCEPTION OF “THE PEOPLE”: THE PEOPLE AS ONE BODY
One common feature of populist movements is that they establish the people as the central figure of democracy. Some will call this a tautology, given that the demos is sovereign by definition in a type of regime whose name itself refers to the demos. And every good democrat is necessarily a populist, in this very general sense. But the self-evident statement is as fuzzy in practical terms as it seems to be imperative conceptually. Who is in fact this governing people? The question never fails to come up. From the outset, it has been invoked in endless oscillation between a reference to the people as a civic body, a figure of political generality expressing unity, and reference to the people as a social group, a figure conflated de facto with a specific segment of the population. When the Americans began the preamble to their Constitution in 1787 with the words “We the People,” they were using the term in the first sense. It was in that sense, too, that the French revolutionaries consistently linked references to the people with references to the nation (a term that referred explicitly, for its part, only to a historical and political notion). This people stemmed from a constitutional principle or from a political philosophy before it had any concrete existence (moreover, when it did come into being, it took the reduced form of a rarely unanimous electoral body). But in 1789, when one spoke about the people who had stormed the Bastille, the reference was also to a crowd that had a face – as did the crowd that gathered in 1791 on the Champ-de-Mars to celebrate the Federation, and the crowds that erected the barricades in 1830 or 1848. The people existed, in these cases, in the form of specific manifestations. The people to whom Jules Michelet or Victor Hugo referred had a perceptible consistency: they were les petites gens, the bottom layers of society (those featured by Hugo as “the wretched” in his novel Les Misérables). In this case, one could speak of a “social people,” the people as a specific social group. It was imperative to tell this people’s story, to bring it to the fore, in order to constitute it and pay it homage through the representation of particular existences. A more sociological approach gradually took hold and defined the contours of this people. The social people then took on the name proletariat, working class, or “popular classes” (the plural taking into account the complexity of social structures). The language of class thus gave the term “people” a particular meaning. But this reduction in scope was corrected by a statistical fact, namely, the numerical preponderance of a world of workers that had its own pronounced identity – further complicated by the fact that Marxism saw the working class as the forerunner of a new universalism: the classless society.
Although these two peoples, the people as a social group and the people as a civic body, did not coincide, they were nevertheless inscribed in a common narrative and a common vision, that of achieving a democracy understood simultaneously as a governing regime and as a form of society. The prospect of such an achievement dimmed at the turn of the twenty-first century, in two ways. First, electoral bodies have suffered a certain atrophy: a growing rate of voter abstention expresses both the rejection of traditional parties and the feeling of being poorly represented. This atrophy can be seen in the decline in voter turnout, that is, in the democratic exercise of expressing one’s opinion at the ballot box.1 Next, in sociological terms, societies have been affected by increasing individualization as well as by the transformation of living and working conditions that has shaped unprecedented modalities of exploitation, relegation, and domination. These insufficiently studied upheavals have reinforced feelings of inadequate representation and invisibility for a growing part of the population in most countries. Under such conditions, “the people” has become “unlocatable.”2 It is in this context that the populist notion of the people has been forged, proposing a purportedly more appropriate evocation of the present and embedding itself within a perspective intended to mobilize a refounding of democracy.
From class to people
The populist project of refounding democracy by restoring the centrality of the idea of a people is based in the first place on the abandonment of analyses of the social world in class terms. The arguments of two of the chief exponents of left populism, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, are very revealing on this point. Coming out of a Marxist tradition, these authors observe that ownership of the means of production, with the exploitative relations that ensue, is no longer the only or even the principal issue shaping the contemporary social divide. For the conflicts structuring public space have now spread into new fields: relations between men and women, territorial inequalities, questions of identity and discrimination, for example. But they have also spread into everything that is felt to be an infringement on personal dignity; such infringements are experienced as intolerable forms of distancing and domination (populist discourse reflects this by promising to restore pride even before the question of increased buying power arises). In this context, there is no longer a single class struggle that polarizes things all by itself, just as there is no longer a single social class that essentially bears the hope for humanity’s emancipation (the working class, the proletariat). “The populist moment,” Chantal Mouffe writes,
is the expression of a set of heterogeneous demands, which cannot be formulated merely in terms of interests linked to specific social categories. Furthermore, in neoliberal capitalism new forms of subordination have emerged outside the productive process. They have given rise to demands that no longer correspond to social sectors defined in sociological terms and by their location in the social structure . . . This is why today the political frontier needs to be constructed in a “populist” transversal mode.3
As Mouffe sees it, this new frontier is the one that opposes “the people” to “the oligarchy.” Ernesto Laclau deduces from this argument that
populism is not an ideology but a mode of construction of the political, based on splitting society in two and calling for the mobilization of “those at the bottom” against the existing authorities. There is populism every time the social order is felt to be essentially unjust and when there is a call for the construction of a new subject of collective action – the people – capable of reconfiguring that order in its very foundations. Without the construction and totalization of a new global collective will, there is no populism.4
Laclau presupposes that all the demands and conflicts that traverse society can be ordered along the single axis of the opposition between those who hold political, economic, social, or cultural power, taken as a bloc (Bourdieu calls this the dominant class), and the rest of society (the people).
Them and us
Laclau thus conceives populism as derived from a “horizontal logic of equivalence”5 that amalgamates the entire set of social demands. This amalgamation is made possible by the recognition that a common enemy exists, tracing the line of separation between “them” and “us.” The enemy can be characterized as a “caste,” an “oligarchy,” an “elite,” or a generalized “system.” The existence of this enemy is what draws an “interior borderline dividing the social realm into two separate and antagonistic camps” – a vision that is thus the polar opposite of a “liberal” understanding of conflicts and of social demands, which are viewed as always subject to possible compromise and arbitration. For Laclau, the populist project entails a radicalization of politics as a process of construction and activation of a friend/enemy relation. Hence his central concept of “antagonism,” which allows him to characterize conflicts for which no rational and peaceful outcome is possible. Hence, too, his fascination – shared by Chantal Mouffe – with the work of Carl Schmitt, in particular Schmitt’s political theory and his radical anti-liberalism. This fascination constitutes one of the intellectual links between right and left populism, moreover, as attested by the convergence between Laclau’s analyses and those of thinkers such as Alain de Benoist.6
The designation of an “enemy of the people” is not based on a simple acknowledgment of opposing interests or of competition for power. It also has an instinctual dimension, based on a sense that the “enemy” sets itself apart, displays contempt, lacks compassion. Populist movements strongly emphasize the power of affects in political mobilization: they help promote the feeling that worlds foreign to one another are in confrontation and that the barriers between “them” and “us” are insurmountable. These movements invoke the lack of humanity on the part of a “caste,” an “elite,” or an “oligarchy” in order to justify and legitimize the hatred manifested toward these enemies, who are perceived as having seceded, morally and socially, from the common world. Hence the virulence of the diatribes against those who “stuff themselves” at the expense of the people, the stigmatization of the “financial wizards” who “pig out,” “gorge themselves” with riches, and cut themselves off from their fellow citizens in countless ways. The figures of the politician, the billionaire, and the technocrat are superimposed and denounced as similarly execrable.
The power of a word
The word “people” is thus particularly meaningful today because it gives voice to something that many citizens feel in a confused way, whereas the concepts of traditional sociology, the statistical vocabulary of socio-professional categories, or the criteria of administrative forms strike these citizens as belonging to dead languages, remote from their own lives and experience. The divide between the “top” and the “bottom” of society is thus also perceived in an existential mode. The elites are accused of living in a world that does not know what is happening at its gates. And “the people” is defined, in a mirror image, as the world of men and women who remain nameless in the eyes of the important figures, the elites. The social fracture is thus also identified with a “cognitive distance” – with the gap between the “statistical truths” that the governing authorities put forward in order to qualify the state of society, on the one hand, and the living conditions people actually experience, on the other. The ordinary individual in fact has nothing to do with the average person in today’s society: he or she is always a particular individual.
The positive redeployment of the word “people” is inscribed in this context. Its new use no longer refers to a political abstraction or to a faceless crowd. In its very indeterminacy it seems open to the perceptible, concrete life of each person. It gives collective form to a society of individuals while welcoming singularities – all the more so in that its glorious history ennobles, in a way, the position of those who feel dominated, invisible, or locked into the specificity of their conditions. One can thus claim with pride that one is part of “the people,” whereas one can feel vaguely ashamed to be defined by reductive criteria (being unemployed, living on the minimum wage, having a hard time making ends meet, lacking higher education, and so on). Membership in “the people” allows one to cry out in anger and to display noble tendencies at the same time.
The use of this advantageous and divisive identification allows for a return to rhetorical figures and expressions of passion that revive the old revolutionary aversion to the privileged figures considered alien to the nation, along with the type of demonization of foreigners that has often been observed in wartime. Moral disqualification also plays an essential role in the way everyone deemed corrupt, in the various senses of the term, can be seen as forming a single bloc. Conversely, those counted among “the people” are seen as virtuous, sensitive to the suffering of others, hard-working and self-supporting. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has explicitly appropriated this populist discourse; the parallel with Robespierre’s is striking.7 The parallel is also clear in the way political adversaries are characterized as foreign agents, described as agents of international capitalism, a globalized multiculturalism, or a technocratic Europe that flouts national sovereignties; the term “neoliberalism” sums up in a single word the political and social culture of the enemy “caste.” More generally, the word “people” is two-faced, like Janus. It resounds with the idea of a certain moral grandeur even as it justifies murky hatreds.8 It constructs the political field in such a way that the adversary must necessarily be an enemy of humanity. It serves as a label for discontent even as it indicates the pathway to a certain type of change.
From these various standpoints, populist movements seek to restore perceptible consistency to the invocation of a people as one body that has become unlocatable, a reference that was previously just a “floating signifier” or even an “empty signifier,” to return to Ernesto Laclau’s terminology. This way of “constructing a people”9 obviously raises a number of questions; we shall return to these in part III of this book, where we shall explore the conditions for an appropriate critique of populism. But it is important to note that this approach has the advantage of reducing the split or at least the tension between the notion of the people as a civic body and that of the people as a social group. The two in fact coincide, in that they both relegate the governing authorities and the various types of elites or oligarchs to the same category: that of caste, for example. The revitalization of democracy and the improvement of living conditions thus depend, in the populist perspective, on the simultaneous rejection of that small, unified group of enemies of the people; social struggle and political confrontation are conflated.10 This is what gives the movement its strength.
Notes
1
On this point, see the developments in my 2018 seminar at the Collège de France, “Les années 1968–2018: Une histoire intellectuelle et politique (suite et fin)”:
https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/pierre-rosanvallon/course-2017-2018.htm
.
2
I address this issue in my book
Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France
(Paris: Gallimard, 1998).
3
Chantal Mouffe,
For a Left Populism
(London: Verso, 2018), pp. 5–6.
4
Ernesto Laclau, “Logiques de la construction politique et identités populaires,” in Jean-Louis Laville and José Luis Coraggio, eds.,
Les gauches du XXIe siècle: Un dialogue Nord–Sud
(Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2016), p. 151. This essay consists in excerpts from Laclau’s
On Populist Reason
(London: Verso, 2005) and offers a good summary of that volume.
5
Laclau, “Logiques de la construction politique et identités populaires,” pp. 152ff.
6
See Benoist’s article “Ernesto Laclau: Le seul et vrai théoricien du populisme de gauche,”
Eléments
, no. 160 (May–June 2016):
https://www.breizh-info.com/2016/05/15/43439/sortie-magazine-elements-n160-suis-guerre/
.
7
See Mélenchon’s dialogue with Marcel Gauchet in Marcel Gauchet and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, “Robespierre, le retour?”
Philosophie Magazine
, no. 124 (October 2018):
https://www.philomag.com/archives/124-novembre-2018
(Gauchet had just published
Robespierre, l’homme qui nous divise le plus
[Paris: Gallimard, 2018].) See also Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Cécile Amar,
De la vertu
(Paris: Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2017).
8
The defense of the dignity of one’s identity can be expressed, for example, through a rejection of religions deemed “foreign” (as Islam is rejected in today’s France).
9
Construire un peuple
is the title given by Chantal Mouffe to a book written in French in collaboration with Íñigo Errejón, the leader of Podemos in Spain. It has been published in English as
Podemos: In the Name of the People
, trans. Sirio Canós Donnay (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2016).
10
Hence the minimal attention paid to unions by populist movements.
