The Populist Century. Pierre Rosanvallon
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the construction of a world of equals, and the very definition of “the people” all remain subject to controversy. At the same time, impatience on the part of some and fear on the part of others have led to a constant radicalization of the processes by which both the breaks with the past to be achieved and the gains to be preserved are perceived. In this context, I shall describe populism as a limit case of the democratic project, alongside two other limit cases: those of minimal democracies (democracies reduced to the rights of man and the election of leaders) and essentialist democracies (defined by the institution of a societal authority in charge of building public welfare). Each of the latter two forms, by virtue of its structure and its history, is threatened by a specific mode of degradation: a slide toward elective oligarchies in the case of minimal democracies and a totalitarian turn of power against society in the case of essentialist democracies. When the populist form of democracy that I have characterized as polarized is the basis for a regime, it runs the risk, for its part, of sliding toward democratorship6 – that is, toward an authoritarian power that nevertheless retains a (variable) potential for being overturned.
On critiques of populism
The most common political critique of populism charges it with illiberalism, that is, with a tendency to make the (“societal”) extension of individual rights secondary to the affirmation of collective sovereignty, and a simultaneous tendency to challenge the intermediary bodies accused of thwarting the action of the elected authorities. I myself spoke, some twenty years ago, of “illiberal democracy” with regard to the Second Empire,7 and I have used the term more recently with respect to populist regimes. The term still seems appropriate to me in almost all cases in which it is used to characterize an observable tendency. But I no longer believe that it can serve as an axis around which to build an effective critique (that is, a critique that advances arguments capable of modifying an opposing opinion), for the simple reason that the leading voices of populism explicitly denounce liberal democracy for curtailing and hijacking authentic democracy. Vladimir Putin, a propagandist for a democracy labeled “sovereign,” has asserted forcefully that liberalism has become “obsolete,”8 while Viktor Orbán, for his part, has insisted that “a democracy is not necessarily liberal.”9 Thus it is on the grounds of a democratic critique of populism that the new champions of this ideal need to be interrogated and contested.
Political life is a graveyard of critiques and warnings that have been powerless to change the course of events. I encountered this phenomenon while studying the history of the nineteenth century in France, when I saw, for example, the inability of the republican opposition to Napoleon III to get its arguments across to the French populace as a whole. The French rose up against a regime that they rightly denounced for quashing freedom, but at the same time they were incapable of seeing through the regime’s claim that its recourse to plebiscites served to honor the sovereignty of the people more than its predecessors had.10 In other words, their intelligence was not equal to their indignation. And this is the case today with those who settle for a liberal critique of populism. This book 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/.
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