The paper discuss, firstly, the desirability of the populist approach for contemporary emancipatory politics over other accounts. Secondly, it will seek to qualify the type of populism the Left should endorse. The empirical bearing is taken from the Citizens' Revolution in Ecuador. While acknowledging that the flourishing of particularisms is an essential requirement for radical change, it will be argued that a politics predicated upon the autonomy of demands and self-management is quintessentially naive. However, an unrestrained support for left-wing populism can clash with the primacy accorded to the ethical by discourse theory. The ethical is not simply a dimension constitutive of all societies, but rather consists of the attentiveness to pluralism and the ineradicability of antagonisms. Such an insight is already part of the model of agonistic democracy developed by Mouffe, which needs to be more thoroughly incorporated to the reflections on populism.
