This article analyzes populism utilizing the semiotic theory of A.J. Greimas. This structural linguist offers a tool for uncovering links between manifestations of populism and the language structu...

A growing genre of ‘crisis studies’ traces liberal-democratic instability to technocratic reformism and populist reaction to it. Most contributions recommend restoring economic growth, rebuilding civic culture and eschewing populist ‘us-versus-them’ narratives. This literature relies on a problematic way of thinking we label irenicism, and show to be a contemporary variant of what political realists call progressive moralizing. Irenicism portrays liberal-democracy as the product of voluntary consensus among rational individuals to sustain institutions that, by promoting endless economic growth, support universal interests (...) and values. By way of a synthesis of realist thinking and Dewey’s pragmatic approach to experimental theory-building, irenicism is shown to preserve a lacuna for political interpretation. The task for current political theory should not be to affirm old ideas in the face of new challenges. Rather, it should be to do away with ‘traditionalized’ ideas, to clear the field for experimental responses to democratic political thought and action. (shrink)

Contemporary ‘crisis studies’ seek to advance democracy by emphasizing the threats that technocracy and populism pose to a specific form of it, liberal-democracy. Crisis studies argue that, since the 1970s, technocratic policymaking has deepened economic inequality. This has fostered citizenly anger, which populists exploit. Four well-known iterations of this argument are evaluated using a political realist lens. Political realism emphasizes the historical context of politics, actors’ possible motives, and a normative orientation derived from the political order itself, rather than an (...) external ethico-moral ideal. The realist lens encourages comparison of crisis studies with historical political theory, which situates liberal-democracy within the long-term development of oligarchic systems of authority, and political history, which portrays technocracy as a product of the well-funded reaction to assertions of the democratic impulse that began in the 1970s. Populism is in this view not so much a perversion of liberal-democracy as it is a perhaps unintended consequence of anti-democratic reaction. The crisis studies make this error because based on a moral defence of the justice of the liberal-democratic order. Revealing the democratically unhelpful moralism at the core of crisis studies demonstrates the usefulness of political realism as a form of applied political theory, and not simply theory about theory. (shrink)

This article recovers Claude Lefort’s engagement with the issue of populism, which was inspired by the emergence of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a major figure in French politics during the late 1980s. I show how Lefort developed both an analysis of populism as a pathology of modern politics and a new vision of representative democracy as the alternative to populism. In doing so, Lefort drew upon his more familiar theory of democracy and totalitarianism, his study of the history of French (...) political thought, and his partnership with Pierre Ronsanvallon, who was also developing an analysis of populism in response to Le Pen. Lefort’s approach to populism has outlived the context in which he first expressed it. Over the last decade, a number of prominent political theorists have drawn on Lefortian themes to formulate their own accounts of populism and democracy. In many cases, their arguments are quite similar to those that Lefort was expressing in the late 1980s and 1990s. A particular version of Lefortianism, which was foreshadowed in the writings of Lefort himself, has become one of the defining democratic theories of our political moment. (shrink)