by MARCO D’ERAMO
The repugnance with which the words ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ are uttered these days is a familiar feature of the political scene. The former Italian prime minister Mario Monti appeals to people to avoid ‘a return to the past and populism’. The French president, François Hollande, warns against ‘dangerous populist excesses’ (‘as in Italy’), while his finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, in his turn, expresses the fear that one-sided austerity programmes may ‘nourish a social crisis that leads to populism’. Other epithets used to describe populism include ‘aggressive’, ‘virulent’, ‘uncivilized’. No one knows why this creature of the ‘saloon bar’, ‘incited by swaggering ham actors’, is always ‘ridden’—but even the impeccable German Free Democrats have ‘decided to ride the tiger of populism’. If the Austrian Social Democrats head ‘back to the roots’ it is in a principled way, not that of ‘a cheap, vote-getting populism’. Populism is always an ‘anti-systemic’ threat, not less so in its newest, ‘digital’ variant. [1] And so on.
Amid this anxious unanimity, one thing stands out: the concept of populism is regarded as self-evident, as if we all know what is being referred to. The truth is that political scientists have been debating its meaning for at least fifty years. In a famous 1967 conference on the question at the London School of Economics, the keynote lecture by the us historian Richard Hofstadter was already entitled ‘Everyone Is Talking About Populism, but No One Can Define It’. The discussion was unintentionally comic at times. While Margaret Canovan listed seven forms of populism, Peter Wiles enumerated no fewer than twenty-four defining characteristics, but proceeded in the second half of his text to the exceptions—the populist movements that did not exhibit these features. [2] In short, as the label comes to be applied to the most diverse movements, the phenomenon itself has become increasingly elusive. It would be easier to list what has not been defined as populist. At the same time, as we shall see, the social category from which it has been derived historically, ‘the people’, has all but vanished from political discourse. This essay will offer an explanatory hypothesis for the trajectories of both ‘populism’ and ‘the people’; but first we need to trace something of their history.
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