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 that make up populist political culture: a conception of “the people,” a theory of democracy, a mode of representation, a politics and a philosophy of economics, and a regime of passions and emotions. The conception of the people, based on the distinction between “them” and “us,” is the element that has been most often analyzed. I shall enrich the usual description, however, first by shoring it up with an analysis of the tension between the people as a civic body and the people as a social body, and second by showing how the term “people” has acquired a renewed capacity to shape the social world in an age of individualism based on singularities. The populist theory of democracy is based, for its part, on three elements: a preference for direct democracy (illustrated by the glorification of the referendum process); a polarized and hyper-electoralist vision of the sovereignty of the people that rejects intermediary bodies and aims to domesticate non-elective institutions (such as constitutional courts and independent authorities); and an understanding of the general will as capable of expressing itself spontaneously. The populist conception of representation is in turn linked with the foregrounding of the figure of a “leader standing for the people,” an individual who manifests a perceptible quality of embodiment, as a remedy for the existing state of unsatisfactory representation. National protectionism is another constitutive element of the populist ideology, moreover, provided that it is understood as not limited to economic policy. National protectionism is in fact more deeply inscribed in a sovereignist vision of reconstructing the political will and ensuring the security of a population. The economic sphere is thus in this respect eminently political. Finally, the political culture of populism is explicitly attached to the mobilization of a set of emotions and passions whose importance is recognized and theorized here. I shall distinguish among emotions related to intellection (destined to make the world more readable through recourse to what are essentially conspiracy narratives), emotions related to action (rejectionism), and emotions related to status (the feeling of being abandoned, of being invisible). Populism has recognized the role of affects in politics and used them in pioneering ways, going well beyond the traditional recipes for seduction. Once the ideal type of populism has been fleshed out on the basis of these five elements, we shall examine the diversity of populisms, taking particular care to analyze the distinction between populisms on the left and those on the right.
The three histories of populism
Does populism have a history? While the answer to a question formulated in such general terms can only be in the affirmative, it must immediately be qualified, for that history can be conceptualized in three very different ways. First, one can simply consider the history of the word “populism”: this is the simplest approach and the one most commonly encountered. I shall wait to present its essential elements in an annex to this book, for it contributes relatively little to an understanding of our present situation. The word has in fact been used in three different contexts that are entirely unrelated to one another and only weakly related to what populism has come to mean today.
The term first appeared in the 1870s in the context of Russian populism, a movement of intellectuals and young people from well-to-do and even aristocratic backgrounds who were
