The People

"Populism studies has two doyens. One is Ernesto Laclau, an Argentine philosopher who was important in a specific, critical philosophical tradition. The other is Margaret Canovan who wrote, already in 1981, the classic study called Populism . Margaret Canovan is a foundational scholar of populism. In this particular book, what she does that is so interesting is that she looks at the importance and the complexity of the concept of ‘the people.’ It is this importance of the people that connects populism and democracy. Both in a democratic discourse and in a populist discourse, the power of the people is central. What she shows is that ‘the people’ is a very complex and fluid concept, but what populists do, by and large, is make that mythical concept very concrete and thereby claim it. That is their strength. What I also like about the book is that it clearly shows how closely democracy and populism are related. In general, populism is seen as a pathology and pathologies are completely unrelated to whatever they’re a pathology of. This book shows that while democracy and populism are different interpretations of the people, they are both, essentially, about the power of the people. I think there are two key differences. The first is that for populists, the people are homogeneous, whereas in most understandings of democracy, the people are plural: they have different interests, different motivations. The second is that for populism, the people are pure. It’s a moral concept as well, whereas in a democratic context, the people don’t have a particular moral. It is both the homogeneity and the morality that sets populism apart. She goes through all kinds of different discourses in history about the people and how politicians have tried to mobilise populations with the concept of ‘the people.’ What she argues, by and large, is that while there is a kind of a global understanding of the people as humanity, in practice, the concept of the people can only really be successfully mobilised if it is relatively clearly conscribed to a certain geography. That used to be city-states, and nowadays it’s states or nation-states. The book is pretty complex. It really is a philosophical discussion and to me— and I’m sure for most readers—this will be the least accessible of the books I’ve chosen. But for anyone who wants to understand populism better, it is essential because it looks beyond populism today and puts it in a historical perspective. It is."