Reconceptualizing Populism

Democracy, understood as the rule of the people, is almost universally accepted today and is primarily identified with liberal democracy and representative government. However, democracy is also perceived to be under threat from populists who claim to represent the people against it. This creates a conceptual confusion that makes it exceptionally difficult to define populism and study its relationship with contemporary democracy. Most studies over the past decade have converged around Cas Mudde’s influential definition of populism as a thin-centered ideology organized around a cohesive conception of the people and its general will (volonté générale) morally and politically counterposed to contemporary political elites and institutions. Yet, it remains unclear how this differs from liberal democracy’s own historical origins in the popular struggle against absolutism or its contemporary claims to represent the people, which underpin and legitimize its institutions. This is the real problem of defining populism in the literature: the challenge of clearly differentiating its invocations of the people from liberal democratic doctrines. Much of the recent scholarship suggests that the difficulty in defining populism arises from the fact that it is not an independent ideology but a derivative form of democratic ideas, which mobilize the promise of popular rule against contemporary liberal democratic institutions and elites. This perspective explains the problems involved in defining populism and differentiating it from liberal democracy. It also provides resources for accomplishing this differentiation by pointing towards their common historical lineage and development. This allows us to retrace and examine the formation and development of populist ideas and practices prior to their nominal appearance in the nineteenth century, which have thus far remained unexplored. It is important to note that contemporary democratic ideas and practices did not derive directly from their nominal predecessors in ancient Greece, which were widely disdained throughout the history of political thought, but from the doctrines of popular sovereignty that emerged from the medieval reception and misinterpretation of Roman law. In the proposed paper, I will employ Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach to trace the historical formation and discontinuous development of the concept of the people and doctrines of popular sovereignty in the longue durée of Western political thought, from Roman law up to the present. This genealogy reveals two conceptually coextensive but fundamentally contradictory concepts of the people and popular sovereignty: one conception identifies the people as a disunited and dangerous multitude that can only attain political existence through its unification and representation by a government, whereas the other identifies the people as an independent political entity that precedes and remains superior to any and all institutions of government. I argue that these two conceptualizations of the people inform two very different notions of what it means for the people to rule, which find their expression in contemporary liberal democratic doctrines and populism respectively. This explains both the immediate similarities between them and provides the key to differentiating them as well as analyzing the continuous conflicts between them.