Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction: the Edges as an Internal Periphery
- 1 The Underside of Difference and the Limits of Particularism
- 2 Populism as a Spectre of Democracy
- 3 Populism as an Internal Periphery of Democratic Politics
- 4 Stirred and Shaken. From ‘the Art of the Possible’ to Emancipatory Politics
- 5 Talkin' 'bout a Revolution: the End of Mourning
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Populism as a Spectre of Democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction: the Edges as an Internal Periphery
- 1 The Underside of Difference and the Limits of Particularism
- 2 Populism as a Spectre of Democracy
- 3 Populism as an Internal Periphery of Democratic Politics
- 4 Stirred and Shaken. From ‘the Art of the Possible’ to Emancipatory Politics
- 5 Talkin' 'bout a Revolution: the End of Mourning
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Populism and Democracy
To the best of my understanding, Peter Worsley (1969) provides us with one of the first intelligent proposals of how to link populism and democracy. He takes his cue from the double heading of populism suggested by Edward Shils, the supremacy of the will of the people and the direct relationship between the people and the government (p. 244). Worsley makes two claims based on this. One is that these notions apply to a wide variety of situations, which is why he argues that we should regard populism as an emphasis, ‘a dimension of political culture in general, not simply as a particular kind of overall ideological system or type of organization’ (p. 245). This is Worsley's way of saying that populism cannot claim any conceptual purity for itself, or that the ‘as such’ of populism is not such as it is always already contaminated and cannot be determined outside a context. The other claim is that one can plot the contact between the people and the leadership on a continuum that goes from the total non-involvement of the masses at one end of the spectrum to the anarchist ideal self-regulating commune at the other (p. 245). He uses this scale to distinguish Right from Left, although it seems more apt as a criterion to differentiate elitist and participatory politics. Having said this, Worsley also identifies the limits of an argument that rests solely on the directness of the link between leaders and masses, for in complex societies this must necessarily be a symbolic or a mystifying directness.
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- Information
- Politics on the Edges of LiberalismDifference Populism Revolution Agitation, pp. 42 - 53Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007