THE POPULIST FALLACY: Hobbes on Popular Authorization and the Impossibility of Unmediated Sovereignty

Contemporary populism presents itself as the authentic voice of "the people" speaking directly against corrupt elites and mediating institutions. From Trump's "I am your voice" to Orbán's claim to embody the national will, populist leaders across the democratic world assert a form of direct popular authorization that bypasses representative structures. This article argues that such claims commit what I call the "Hobbesian Fallacy"—the logical impossibility of unmediated popular sovereignty that Thomas Hobbes definitively exposed in Leviathan. Hobbes's account of political representation offers the most devastating critique of populist rhetoric available in political theory, yet it has been almost entirely overlooked in contemporary debates about populism. For Hobbes, "the People" does not exist as a political agent prior to representation. There is only the multitude—a disaggregated mass of individuals with conflicting wills and interests. "The People" as a unified political actor is constituted exclusively through the act of representation: "A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented." Without representation, there can be no "people" capable of willing, authorizing, or acting as one. The populist claim to bypass representation and speak for "the people directly" is therefore not merely dangerous but conceptually incoherent. This article makes three central arguments. First, I demonstrate that all populist movements, despite their anti-representational rhetoric, necessarily operate through representation—they simply mystify this fact. When Trump claims "I am your voice," he does not eliminate representation but rather obscures the representative relationship, making it impossible to hold him accountable as a representative. The populist leader is not the people's mouthpiece but their constitutive representative—the very person whose act of representation brings "the people" into political existence. By denying this, populism systematically evades the accountability mechanisms essential to representative democracy. Second, I show that the populist appeal to "direct democracy" through referenda, plebiscites, or claims about "what the people really want" cannot escape the logic of representation. Even a referendum requires authoritative interpretation—someone must determine what question is asked, how votes are counted, and what the result means. The will of "the people" never speaks for itself; it always requires representatives to constitute, articulate, and enact it. Populism's promise of unmediated popular sovereignty is thus structurally impossible within any political order, as Hobbes demonstrated. Third, I explore the normative implications of this Hobbesian critique for contemporary democratic theory. If "the people" is always a represented fiction rather than a pre-political reality, then democratic legitimacy cannot rest on the authenticity of popular voice but only on the quality of representative relationships—precisely what populism seeks to obscure. This suggests that defending democracy against populism requires not appealing to "the real will of the people" (which concedes populist premises) but rather insisting on the representative structures that constitute democratic peoples. The article concludes by examining how this Hobbesian framework illuminates specific populist phenomena: the leader's claim to unique authority, the rejection of institutional constraints as "elite" impositions, the treatment of electoral victory as permanent authorization.