The Populist Century. Pierre Rosanvallon
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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 critical of projects for Western-style modernization of the country and sought to “go down to the people,” as they put it. They saw the traditions of agrarian communities and village assemblies as possible starting points for building a new society. The idea was that, in Russia, the peasantry would be the force for renewal, fulfilling the role the proletariat was expected to play in the West. This approach, which could be called “top-down populism,” never mobilized the popular masses themselves. Nevertheless, it left a significant legacy, for some of the great figures in Russian anarchism and Marxism took their first steps as militants in that movement.
A decade later, it was in America that a People’s Party, whose supporters were commonly labeled populists, saw the light of day. This movement for the most part mobilized the world of small farmers on the Great Plains who were on the warpath against the big railroad companies and the big banks to which they had become indebted. The movement met with a certain degree of success in the early 1890s, but it never managed to reach a national audience, despite its resonant denunciation of corruption in politics and its call for a more direct democracy. (These themes were beginning to emerge everywhere in the country; they eventually gave rise to the Progressive Movement, which succeeded in developing a whole set of political reforms – the organization of primaries, the possibility of recalling elected officials, the recourse to referendums by popular initiative – that would be implemented in the Western states.) The People’s Party was an authentic popular movement, but it remained confined to a geographically circumscribed agricultural world; it failed to extend its appeal to working-class voters. None of the American populists appears to have been aware, moreover, of the earlier use of the term in Russia.
The word made its third appearance in France in 1929, in an entirely different and completely unrelated context. The “Manifesto of the Populist Novel” published that year was a strictly literary event: in the tradition of the naturalist movement, the manifesto urged French novelists to focus more on depicting popular milieus. Forerunners such as Émile Zola and contemporaries such as Marcel Pagnol and Eugène Dabit were evoked in support of this literary populism. There were no interactions at all between this third “populist” movement and either of its predecessors, nor did any of the three prefigure contemporary uses of the term populism, contrary to what ill-informed references sometimes suggest.
A second type of history allows us to advance in a more suggestive manner in the comprehension of contemporary populism: this is the history of moments or regimes that, without having invoked the label, resonate with our concerns today and make it easier to understand the dynamics of the essential components of populism. I have focused on three of these. First, France’s Second Empire, an exemplary illustration of the way in which the cult of universal suffrage and of referendums (called “plebiscites” at the time) could be linked to the construction of an authoritarian, immediate, and polarized democracy, one that would be qualified as “illiberal” today. What is of interest in the context of the current study is that this regime theorized its project, spelling out the reasons why it viewed the democracy it was establishing as more authentic than the liberal parliamentary model. Next, the Latin American laboratory of the mid-twentieth century, illustrated initially by Colombia’s Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and Argentina’s Juan Perón: these regimes bring clearly to light the conditions for expressing and enacting embodied representation, as well as the mobilizing capacity of the opposition between an oligarchy and the people in societies that were not based on European-style class structures. Finally, going back to the prewar period 1890–1914, we find a good vantage point for observing the rise of populist themes at the point of the first globalization, most notably in France and in the United States: what took place during this period sheds light on the conditions under which political divisions beyond the traditional right/left opposition were redefined. And it also helps us see how the populist wave of the period was brought to a halt. In effect, we are invited to consider a future that did not materialize. While the present always remains to be written, and while it is important to be skeptical of analogies that downplay this fact, the three periods I have evoked nevertheless offer food for thought.
A comprehensive global history of populism defines a third approach, one that might be called inseparably social and conceptual. It seeks to deepen our understanding of the present by considering the past as a repertoire of aborted possibilities, a laboratory of experiments that invite us to reflect on incompletions, reversals, and gropings in the dark. Here we are dealing with a long history of the problematic character of democracy. It is not the history of an ideal model whose germination we would study, thinking that it might one day be fully and completely realized. There is nothing linear about the history of democracy: it is constituted rather by continuous intellectual conflicts over its definition as much as it is marked by intense social struggles around the establishment of certain of its principal institutions (yesterday’s conquest of universal suffrage or today’s recognition of minority rights come to mind). It is a history of unkept promises and mangled ideals in which we remain completely immersed, as is obvious from the intensity of the contemporary disenchantment with democracy and the difficulty of finding the conditions that would allow us to institute an authentic society of equals. This tumultuous history is inseparable from the structural indeterminacy of adequate forms for democracies,