specificity in the figure of the leader as organ.
In this regard, the straightforward declarations of a Jean-Luc Mélenchon are significant: “I am of the people. That is all I want to be, and I feel only scorn for those who would like to be something more.”13 The same Mélenchon exclaimed, while visiting the Forum in Rome in 2017: “Caesar was close to the people. The patricians, the enemies of the people, were the ones who assassinated him. It is interesting to see Caesar as a figure of the people.”14 Here Mélenchon is observing that politics implies more than ever the need to “construct a collective affect” even while deeming it necessary at the same time to “deconstruct it in order to anchor rational choices.” This is a Mélenchon finding the personalization of power sincerely “intolerable” and simultaneously seeking to keep on plowing the “tribunist furrow,” a Mélenchon at once hesitant and determined to resume the garb of leader embodying a people with which he had entered politics. Questioned about how he thought he could enlist the support of ordinary people, he answered: “[As] myself. You can identify with me . . . The people I meet in the street, on the bus, in the metro, feel instinctively the one who is ‘with us.’”15 This way of conceiving representation via embodiment is found throughout the populist galaxy. Even Donald Trump did not hesitate to say, during his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican Convention: “I am your voice.”16 Laying claim to such an identification is a program in itself. Beyond the formulation of proposals for reform, the defining feature of populist policy is thus that it is grounded in embodied speech that has what might be called an existential dimension, speech that is addressed to the emotions as much as to reason. We shall come back to this crucial point.
Notes
1 1 Jean-Luc Mélenchon notes about La France Insoumise, significantly: “We do not want to be a party. A party is a tool of a class. A movement is the organized form of the people.” L’Hebdo, no. 174 (October 18, 2017).
2 2 On this point, see my book Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).
3 3 See Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Escritos politicos (Bogotá: El Ancore Editores, 1985).
4 4 Juan Domingo Perón, El modelo argentino (Gualeguychú: Tolemia, 2011), p. 11.
5 5 Hugo Chávez, in a speech delivered 12 July 2012; the same formulas were repeated verbatim September 9 and 24, 2012.
6 6 Let us note that Subcomandante Marcos adopted the same approach, from his refuge in Chiapas, Mexico, to justify wearing a face-covering hood at all times. When anyone asked him what was hiding under the mask, he would answer: “If you want to know who Marcos is, get a mirror; the face you’ll see is Marcos’s. Because Marcos is you, a woman; he is you, a man; he is you, an indigenous person, a farmer, a soldier, a student . . . We are all Marcos, a whole insurgent people” (cited by Ignacio Ramonet in Marcos, la dignité rebelle: Conversations avec le sous-commandant Marcos [Paris: Galilée, 2001]; emphasis added).
7 7 Hugo Chávez, Seis discorsos del Presidente constitutional de Venezuela (Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República, 2000), p. 47.
8 8 Ernesto Laclau, “Logiques de la construction politique et identités populaires,” in Jean-Louis Laville and José Luis Coraggio, eds., Les gauches du XXIe siècle: Un dialogue Nord–Sud (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2016), p. 153.
9 9 Ibid., p. 156.
10 10 Chantal Mouffe and Íñigo Errejón, Podemos: In the Name of the People, trans. Sirio Canós Donnay (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2016), p. 109.
11 11 On the issue of the introduction of a leader into left-wing political thought, see for example the work of Jean-Claude Monod, Qu’est-ce qu’un chef en démocratie? Politiques du charisme (Paris: Seuil, 2012). See also the postface written for the second edition of that work in the “Points” series (Paris: Seuil, 2017).
12 12 To pursue this notion further, one can turn to Raymond Carré de Malberg, who presents the organ theory in German public law in the late nineteenth century in his comprehensive Contribution à la théorie générale de l’Etat, 2 vols. (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1920–2). In populism, then, there is an implicit transposition of the theory of the organ into the figure of the leader (whereas Carré de Malberg made Parliament the organ of a nation, an entity that was unrepresentable in itself).
13 13 Jean-Luc Mélenchon, citing Robespierre, in L’ère du peuple (Paris: Fayard, 2014), p. 31.
14 14 Remarks reported in Lilian Alemagna and Stéphane Alliés, Mélenchon à la conquête du peuple (Paris: Robert Laffont, [2012] 2018), p. 410. The citations that follow are from the same text.
15 15 Interview in Le 1 Hebdo, no. 174 (October 18, 2017). Let us also recall that during the contested search of the France Insoumise headquarters on October 16, 2018, he did not hesitate to say “I am the Republic” (tweaking a formula attributed to Louis XIV), “My person is sacred,” and “I am more than Jean-Luc Mélenchon, I am 7 million persons” (remarks reported in Le Monde, October 19, 2018).
16 16 Donald J. Trump, near the end of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on 22 July 2016. Transcript published by The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/us/politics/trump-transcript-rnc-address.html.
The history of modern economies is embedded in the long-term evolution and expansion of exchanges at both the intranational and international levels. The increasing specialization of productive activities and the development of economies of scale have thus tended to deterritorialize economies and to create a world market. But the benefits anticipated from this movement toward free exchange have been subject to constant interrogation. In the early nineteenth century, the optimism of an Adam Smith or a David Ricardo was already being denounced on the grounds that the underlying vision of the wealth of nations was an abstraction. In France, Germany, and the United States, the calls for adopting systematic protectionism were thus heeded by governments for social and political reasons as well as economic ones. “Where industry is concerned, we are conservatives, protectors,” according to François Guizot, the leading figure in French political liberalism of the period.1 He was concerned that free exchange would lead, as he put it, to “introducing a disturbance into the established order,” and for that reason he and his friends defended “national work” against “cosmopolitan competition.” In Germany, in 1841, the economist Friedrich List published Das nationale System der politischen Oekonomie, which was to prove profoundly influential for the future of his native land. List proposed the creation of a customs association (Zollverein) to encourage the political unification of the country through the establishment of a protected economic zone. His aim was in no way doctrinal: for him, protectionism was a circumstantial instrument for the “industrial education of the country.”2 The same thing held true in late nineteenth-century America, which limited foreign imports in order to ensure the rise of its own manufacturing industry.
For two centuries now, protective measures and preoccupations of this nature have been the basis for a sort of alternation between waves of protectionism and free exchange on the level of nations. They are still the focus of debates, as attested by the controversies in 2019 over trade agreements between Europe with Canada and with the Southern Common Market (Mercosur),
