Introduction: Defining Populism

Abstract

Why publish another book on contemporary populism in an already increasingly crowded scholarly field? As authors of several works on civil society, authoritarian regimes, sovereignty, and democratization, we believe that on many relevant issues we have new things to say, with more grounding theoretically than most works on the subject. Indeed, we think that the tradition of critical theory is not yet represented in the growing literature on contemporary populism, amazingly enough given the early interest in authoritarian forms of the founders of the critical theory tradition, and the later important work of the second generation concerning the public sphere and the changing structure of capitalism. We aim to fill this gap. More importantly, most existing works have paid little attention to the subject of democratic alternatives to populist politics. At best, many have assumed or even argued that the only alternative is to defend liberal democracy as it is or to return to this form as it was. Others like Ernesto Laclau, much more questionably, strongly imply, if never fully claim, that the alternative must be a complete replacement of liberal dimensions of representative democracy. We agree with neither of these options. All our chapters will be concerned with the problem of the democratization of democracy...