Laclau - On Populist Reason

On Populist Reason

ERNESTO LACLAU

This paperback edition published by Verso 2018

First published by Verso 2005

Ernesto Laclau 2005, 2007, 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-131-7

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-132-4 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-133-1 (US EBK)

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To Chantal,
after 30 years

The main issue addressed in this book is the nature and logics of the formation of collective identities. My whole approach has grown out of a basic dissatisfaction with sociological perspectives which either considered the group as the basic unit of social analysis, or tried to transcend that unit by locating it within wider functionalist or structuralist paradigms. The logics that those types of social functioning presuppose are, in my view, too simple and uniform to capture the variety of movements involved in identity construction. Needless to say, methodological individualism in any of its variants rational choice included does not provide any alternative to the kind of paradigm that I am trying to put into question.

The route I have tried to follow in order to address these issues is a bifurcated one. The first path is to split the unity of the group into smaller unities that we have called demands: the unity of the group is, in my view, the result of an articulation of demands. This articulation, however, does not correspond to a stable and positive configuration which could be grasped as a unified whole: on the contrary, since it is in the nature of all demands to present claims to a certain established order, it is in a peculiar relation with that order, being both inside and outside it. As this order cannot fully absorb the demand, it cannot constitute itself as a those of representation and democracy.

So why address these issues through a discussion of populism? Because of the suspicion, which I have had for a long time, that in the dismissal of populism far more is involved than the relegation of a peripheral set of phenomena to the margins of social explanation. What is involved in such a disdainful rejection is, I think, the dismissal of politics tout court, and the assertion that the management of community is the concern of an administrative power whose source of legitimacy is a proper knowledge of what a good community is. This has been, throughout the centuries, the discourse of political philosophy, first instituted by Plato. Populism was always linked to a dangerous excess, which puts the clear-cut moulds of a rational community into question. So my task, as I conceived it, was to bring to light the specific logics inherent in that excess, and to argue that, far from corresponding to marginal phenomena, they are inscribed in the actual working of any communitarian space. With this is mind, I show how, throughout nineteenth-century discussions on mass psychology, there was a progressive internalization of those features concerning the crowd, which at the beginning in the work of Hyppolite Taine, for example were seen as considers the limits in the constitution of popular identities.

One consequence of this intervention is that the referent of populism becomes blurred, because many phenomena which were not traditionally considered populist come under that umbrella in our analysis. Here there is a potential criticism of my approach, to which I can only respond that the referent of populism in social analysis has always been ambiguous and vague. A brief glance at the literature on populism discussed in suffices to show that it is full of references to the evanescence of the concept and the imprecision of its limits. My attempt has not been to find the true referent of populism, but to do the opposite: to show that populism has no referential unity because it is ascribed not to a delimitable phenomenon but to a social logic whose effects cut across many phenomena. Populism is, quite simply, a way of constructing the political.

There are many people who, through their work or through personal conversations over the years, have contributed to shaping my view on these subjects. I will not attempt to list them any list will always necessarily be incomplete. I have recognized the most important intellectual debts through my quotations in the text. There are a few people, however, who cannot be omitted. There are two contexts within which these ideas have been discussed over the years and which were particularly fruitful for the development of my thought: one is the doctoral seminar on Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex, organized by Aletta Norval, David Howarth and Jason Glynos; the other is the graduate seminar on Rhetoric, Psychoanalysis and Politics at the Department of Comparative Literature, State University of New York at Buffalo, which I organized together with my colleague Joan Copjec. My other two main expressions of gratitude go to Chantal Mouffe, whose encouragement and commentaries on my text have been a constant source of stimulus for my work; and to Noreen Harburt, from the Centre for Theoretical Studies, University of Essex, whose technical skills in giving shape to my manuscript have proved on this occasion, as in numerous others invaluable. I also want to thank my copy editor, Gillian Beaumont, for her extremely efficient work in improving the English of my manuscript and for her several very useful editorial comments.

Evanston, November 2004

Populism, as a category of political analysis, confronts us with rather idiosyncratic problems. On the one hand it is a recurrent notion, one which is not only in widespread use being part of the description of a large variety of political movements but also one which tries to capture something about the latter which is quite central. Midway between the descriptive and the normative, populism intends to grasp something crucially significant about the political and ideological realities to which it refers. The apparent vagueness of the concept is not translated into any doubt concerning the importance of its attributive function. We are far from clear, however, about the content of that attribution. A persistent feature of the literature on populism is its reluctance or difficulty in giving the concept any precise meaning. Notional clarity let alone definition is conspicuously absent from this domain. Most of the time, conceptual apprehension is replaced by appeals to a non-verbalized intuition, or by descriptive enumerations of a variety of relevant features a relevance which is undermined, in the very gesture which asserts it, by reference to a proliferation of exceptions. Here is a typical example of an intellectual strategy dealing with populism in the existing literature: