seeks to break the spell by proposing an in-depth critique of the democratic theory that structures the populist ideology.
This endeavor begins with a detailed analysis of the limits of referendums with respect to a project for achieving democracy. Next, it addresses the question of democratic polarization by emphasizing that a democracy that proposes to make a collectivity responsible for its own destiny cannot be based solely on the exercise of majoritarian electoral power. Since this latter is simply a conventional but notoriously imperfect manifestation of the general will, the general will has to borrow complementary expressions in order to give more consistent body to the democratic ideal. The notions of “power belonging to no one” and “power belonging to anyone at all,” two other ways of grasping the democratic “we,” are examined here, along with the institutional arrangements that may be attached to them, in order to stress the narrowing implied by an exclusively electoralist vision of power belonging to all. I shall also demonstrate in this context that institutions such as constitutional courts and independent authorities, generally viewed only through the prism of their liberal dimension, have a democratic character first and foremost. In effect, they constitute a guarantee for the people in contentious encounters with its representatives. By the same token, this approach is an invitation to conceptualize the relations between liberalism and democracy, that is, between freedom and sovereignty, in inclusive rather than exclusive terms. I shall also examine the popular conception of the notion of “the people” by advancing a sociological critique of the opposition between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. In this context, the notion of a “democratic society to be constructed” is opposed to that of an imaginary “people as one body.”
These assorted critiques of a theoretical nature will be supplemented by critiques focused on the practices of populist regimes, and in particular the conditions under which the polarization of institutions comes into play: modifications of the role and modes of organization of constitutional courts, and suppression or manipulation of independent authorities and especially of electoral oversight commissions, where they exist. To these elements I shall add data concerning policies toward the media, associations, and opposition parties. Taken together, all these elements give body to the qualifier “illiberalism,” which takes on a meaning that we can then assess concretely (the relation between the practices and the justifications of France’s Second Empire will be highlighted in this context). Here I shall pay specific attention to the legal arrangements adopted in order to secure the irreversibility of these regimes and their installation for the long run, most often through the removal of restrictions on term limits.
The alternative
Before it can be studied as a problem, populism has to be understood as a proposition developed in response to contemporary problems. This book takes populism seriously by analyzing and critiquing it as such a proposition. But a critique can only fulfill its role completely if it goes on to sketch out an alternative proposition.11 The final pages of this study are devoted to such an effort. They present the major features of what could be a generalized and expansive sovereignty of the people, one that enriches democracy instead of simplifying or polarizing it. This approach is based on a definition of democracy as ongoing work to be undertaken in a process of continuous exploration, rather than as a model whose features could be faithfully reproduced without further conflict and debate over its adequate form.
Notes
1 1 I should emphasize that the same thing happened earlier to the word “democracy,” especially in the United States. At the turn of the nineteenth century, it was an insult to be called a “democrat” in that country. The term was equivalent to “demagogue,” and “democracy” at that time meant “mob rule” or “reign of the passions of the populace,” in the words of the founding fathers and their descendants. It was a provocative move when the Republicans of the day (Jefferson’s party) renamed their organization “Democratic Party” in the late 1820s. On this point, see Bertlinde Laniel’s documented history, Le mot “democracy” et son histoire aux États-Unis de 1780 à 1856 (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 1995).
2 2 Interview in L’Express, September 16, 2010. Mélenchon had said the same thing in his book Qu’ils s’en aillent tous! Vite, la révolution citoyenne (Paris: Flammarion, 2010): “The fine folk, the satisfied folk, their story-tellers and all the sermonizers who take the high ground can choke on their indignation. Let them brandish their pathetic red cards: ‘Populism!’ ‘Out of control!’ Bring it on!” (pp. 11–12).
3 3 I myself have taken that reductive approach in the past, by considering populism as a caricature of the counter-democratic principle; see my Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [2006] 2008).
4 4 Dossier “Les 36 familles du populisme,” Éléments, no. 177 (April–May 2019): https://www.revue-elements.com/produit/familles-du-populisme-2/.
5 5 Nevertheless, we must salute the effort of conceptualization made by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, on the left. These authors have no counterparts on the right.
6 6 This ungainly term, translating the French démocrature, appears to have been adopted in English in recent years to label a democracy that has features in common with a dictatorship, or a dictatorship that purports to be a democracy. –Translator’s note.
7 7 In La démocratie inachevée: Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).
8 8 In an interview in the Financial Times, June 27, 2019: https://www.ft.com/content/878d2344-98f0-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36.
9 9 See the programmatic speech he delivered at Bǎile Tuşnad in Romania, 24 July 2017: https://visegradpost.com/en/2017/07/24/full-speech-of-v-orban-will-europe-belong-to-europeans/.
10 10 Moreover, this regime had restored universal suffrage, which the republicans in charge had eviscerated in 1849.
11 11 This is where the weakness lies in approaches that treat the problem as a “pathology” of democracies. They imply that the existing democracies constitute successful embodiments of the democratic project, a referential norm from which populisms would constitute deviations. This is to neglect the structural character of democratic indeterminacy and the fact that democracy is consequently an unstable regime that is constantly exploring its own aporias. I myself used that terminology in the earliest writings I devoted to the question: see “Penser le populisme,” Le Monde, July 22, 2011.
One common feature of populist movements is that they establish the people as the central figure of democracy. Some will call this a tautology, given that the demos is sovereign by definition in a type of regime whose name itself refers to the demos. And every good democrat is necessarily a populist, in this very general sense. But the self-evident statement is as fuzzy in practical terms as it seems to be imperative conceptually.
