Populism

Abstract

Populism seems to be today’s pejorative buzzword in the global political lexicon. It is the word on which the contempt of most of the academics, journalists, and politicians from the right to the leftwing political specter seems to converge. Usually this common rejection associates populism with something considered profoundly vulgar, esthetically ugly, morally wrong; with the lack of civic culture, civility, and respect for institutions; with what contradicts political correctness; even with authoritarianism, demagogy, and so on. It evokes something uncanny that arouses exasperated disdain. They just cannot stand populism. This is the reason why we should not be surprised when we witness the mass media using this word in a pejorative way to vilify a government or a political party or to describe the personality of a politician or leader with whom they disagree; when we fi nd that within the political arena, politicians use it as a lethal weapon to discredit an adversary; or, within the academic fi eld, when it easily drags academics toward normative sermons. Immediately, we can hypothesize that if populism provokes such aversion, it must be because there is something worth the attention about it—maybe something that has to do with the political potency of this category. In this chapter, we will summarize, fi rst, three general (mainstream) lines of thought about populism: the fi rst emanates from the sociology of modernization; the second is associated with a class struggle perspective; and the third involves a democracy-based analysis This summary will mainly see how these perspectives cannot ‘rescue’ populism from its marginal and vilifi ed position within the fi eld of the social sciences at large. Second, we will introduce the psychoanalytic turn that opens up a new, innovative avenue of research. To achieve this goal, we will follow the theoretical orientation of Ernesto Laclau (2005), whose work played a fundamental role in the systematization of the notion of populism; instead of approaching populism from a predetermined model of rationality, he enriched his perspective by using psychoanalytic categories to locate the reason, the logic, that constitutes populist confi gurations. Third, we will discuss how this expanded schema of social rationality activated an intense debate within the fi eld of psychoanalytic political theory, where one can encounter lively supporters such as Jorge Alemán (2016 ) and sophisticated detractors such as Slavoj Žižek (2009 ).