The Populist Century. Pierre Rosanvallon

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