Theory after Practice

Abstract

This article reflects on Laclau's theory of populism in the light of recent populist practice. The past ten or fifteen years have brought what many have termed the “explosion” and “global rise” of populism, a development that at least has the potential for radicalizing politics. It is radical in a dual sense: in its opposition to the existing system, and in its conditions of possibility, whereby crisis presents an opening for radical rupture. The article underscores two crucial concepts within the recent literature on populism: the context of crisis, and the role of performativity. These are highlighted in order to insist that it is the context of crisis that is crucial for understanding populism, whereas performativity only emerges within such a context. The context of crisis and the notion of performativity are considered through a critical engagement with three aspects of Ernesto Laclau's approach to populism: the interpretation of the master category of hegemony vis-à-vis populism; the account of the political; and the designation of populism as a logic. The argument takes these three aspects in (paradoxically?) different directions. It insists, first, on the importance of the distinction between hegemony and counterhegemony in understanding populism, and then argues that Laclau's contrast between the political and administration is too stark, in order to suggest that the attribution to populism the conceptual status of a logic is inadequate. Instead, this article argues that populism is better understood as a phenomenon because its logic shines in specific historico-political contexts. It proposes, in addition, that Laclau's account of populism can be read in this light. This is achieved by associating populism with the specific context of crisis, and introducing the notion of nonpopulism. It concludes by identifying elements of a research agenda that follows from the analysis developed that in turn sheds light on populism's link to crisis conjunctures that opens up possibilities for radical change.Before delving into Laclau's theory, two premises are outlined. In the first place, this article proceeds under the understanding that populism is linked to a context of crisis, which is perhaps best explained through Margaret Canovan's definition: “populism in modern democratic societies is best seen as an appeal to ‘the people’ against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values of the society.”1 Here, Canovan highlights that populism is not merely the performance of the people–elite antagonism, but is a more substantial challenge to the established order, its power, ideas, and values—in other words, it has entered into a context of crisis, and no longer receives the support of wide sections of the public. Related to this linkage with crisis, a further premise is that populism has two Others: anti-populism and nonpopulism.2 Anti-populism is the hostile response to populism's appearance on the political stage, and has a growing profile within populism studies.3 The same cannot be said for nonpopulism, which amounts to a context in which the populist logic cannot take hold or, put differently, the supply of or demand for populism fails—and usually both. The prospects for populism in such a context are dramatically curtailed, in a similar manner to which populist projects will not necessarily succeed within a “populist moment,” but the context enhances their prospects.4 This contextual contrast informs the ensuing argument.The historiography of populism alongside philosophies of its history remain, at best, emergent. Its historical profile is most prominent in Latin America stretching back at least as far as Perón, and continuing through “tides” that have become so numerous and variable that it's now difficult to identify where one ends and the next begins. The attempt of the People's Party to disrupt the party-system duopoly in the late nineteenth-century United States is often presented as a pioneering exemplar in the history of populism, which has ensured that examination and designation of it has sustained historians’ interest right up to the present. Histories of populism elsewhere are less forthcoming, with (Western) Europe especially conspicuous in its absence. This might be because of a void in populist practice itself but equally it might also suggest a failure to register that practice. This is unsurprising given the wild variations in how populism is conceived and the normative and affective responses it generates.Such affective dimensions have been particularly pronounced in the twenty-first century as a result of the “explosion,” “global rise” and other designations that announce populism's enhanced political profile in the new millennium.5 This was even more the case following the 2008 financial crisis, which stalled the decades-long expansion and consolidation of neoliberal financialized globalization, and potentially sent it into reverse. This hegemonic crisis provoked a myriad of different movements and developments, as each of the three “prongs” of neoliberal financialized globalization has come under attack. Highly prominent within this was the “Movements of the Squares” including the Aganaktismenoi, the Indignados, and the global spread of Occupy. Although Occupy's message resonated far and wide, it was unable to sustain its encampments, and the former two took a different turn, with many entering party politics. This involved the dramatic inflation of the once-marginal Syriza to the leading coalition partner in office, and the creation, rapid rise, and consolidation of Podemos in Spanish politics, eventually entering government as junior partner. Leading figures in both parties referenced Laclau's account of populism as a guide, and there was considerable optimism for its further extension in the early years of the last decade, when Laclau was advising the Kirchner governments in Argentina.As the decade progressed, however, left populisms stalled and failed to develop, whereas ethnonationalism became a recurrent political force in various countries attacking the globalization “prong,” in many cases building on and operating with or alongside a populism of the right. Although this nationalist turn and revival requires careful differentiation from populism,6 scholars have attributed overlaps in a wide range of actors from Orbán, Erdogan, Duterte, Le Pen and Farage to Trump. In terms of populism, right-wing variants have very much been in the ascendancy in recent years, although nonpopulistic forms of politics are reasserting themselves, and there are signs of yet another Latin American tide of left populism returning. These combined developments across multiple continents warrant careful reflection on both the progressive prospects and fertility of the populist form of politics.Performance and crisis are core to Moffitt's analysis of the global rise of populism.7 Moffitt outlines four dominant approaches within the populism literature, and proposes populism as a style as a new fifth way to approach it. Populism as style is linked to performativity, as evidenced by the book's subtitle: “Performance, Political Style, and Representation.” In this new understanding of populism, Moffitt elaborates performativity through drawing on a repertoire from the theatre. Within this, he insists that there are two “stages” on which the populisms stretching across the twenty-first–century globe perform: the media and crisis.8 In short, Moffitt brings performance and crisis together in analyzing populism. This article moves in the other direction, and insists they should be separated, arguing that the notion of crisis should take center-stage as the context within which populism occurs. Although there are important differences between the pairs, this performance-crisis contrast shows clear affinities to the logic-phenomenon contrast that this article highlights within Laclau. The point to emphasize is that populism cannot merely be performed by an actor abstractly, irrespective of context. The performance is inextricably linked to a context of crisis and hegemonic breakdown. This is another way of stating this article's argument: populism is a phenomenon because its logic shines in the historico-political context of crisis.To state this has important implications for not only how populism is conceived, but also Laclau's account of it and the interpretations that have flowed from the Essex School. It is to Laclau's account that attention now turns.In light of the rich empirics of populist practice over the past decade or two, we now turn to an examination of Laclau's account of populism and wider theory, alongside its reception. Three aspects will be considered in turn: the role of hegemony; the conception of the political; and an engagement with Laclau's account of populism in relation to the triplet of logic, phenomenon, and context. The engagement with these three debates will be used to make the case that populism is a phenomenon because its logic is restricted to specific historico-political contexts, wherein “the stage of crisis” facilitates the prominence of its logic.Hegemony can be tackled more briefly, and the importance of the contrast between hegemony and counterhegemony will be highlighted as pivotal for understanding populism. Building on Gramsci's reorientation of this term that has its origins in ancient Greek international relations, Laclau operates within the frame of hegemony, the master-category of his theory.9 In response to political, philosophical and theoretical developments in the half-century-plus since Gramsci, Laclau attaches a wide range of conceptual ideas in his sophisticated development of hegemony theory. Hegemony also remains central to Laclau's account of populism. This was acknowledged by Benjamin Arditi, who considered the relations in Laclau between politics, populism and hegemony.10 This intricate, critical analysis of their relations would be better formulated with counterhegemony rather than hegemony. This is because, to introduce a crucial conceptual contrast in Laclau, a hegemonic formation utilizes differential logics, whereas the challenge is for a counterhegemony to construct an equivalential chain.In order for a counterhegemonic project to construct an equivalential chain, the hegemonic formation needs to have entered into a crisis or, in Laclau's terminology, the number and depth of dislocations mount a challenge to hegemonic continuity. Since at least the 1980 publication of the revealingly titled “Populist Rupture and Discourse,”11 Laclau repeatedly stresses the onset of crisis as the context within which a populist—counterhegemonic—project can emerge: “[t]he crisis of representation, which is at the root of any populist, anti-institutional outburst,”12 and: “The passage from one hegemonic formation, or popular configuration, to another will always involve a radical break, a creatio ex nihilo. It is not that all the elements of an emerging configuration have to be entirely new, but rather that the articulating point . . . does not derive its central role from any logic already operating within the preceding situation.”13 A substantial development that occurs in such a situation of crisis and hegemonic breakdown is that the meaning of keywords undergoes dramatic change, such that their understanding becomes detached from the hegemonic formation, and fits into the narrative frame of the counterhegemonic project. These are signifiers that “float” and, alongside empty signifiers, floating signifiers are crucial to Laclau's theory; more important for this argument, the floating from one camp to another occurs within the context of a crisis: “the ‘floating’ dimension becomes most visible in periods of organic crisis, when the symbolic system needs to be radically recast.”14The presence of floating signifiers points to one crucial aspect of the counterhegemonic project's task of establishing a new hegemonic formation: the subversion of the extant hegemonic formation. But a second development is also required: reconstruction. A new popular core needs to be constructed around a new order or hegemonic formation.15 Laclau writes, “populism presents itself both as subversive of the existing state of things and as the starting point for a more or less radical reconstruction of a new order.”16 This dual task of subversion and reconstruction emphasizes the difficulty of securing a hegemonic formation for any counterhegemonic project. It also indicates that the crisis of one hegemonic formation will not automatically lead to the consolidation of another, and that various rival counterhegemonic projects can enter into a protracted contest to establish their hegemonic credentials (where the potential remains for the prior hegemon to reinstitute itself). This is an apt description of our current post-2008 interregnum where the neoliberal financialized, globalizing hegemon has entered into crisis, but a new replacement is yet to emerge or, to invoke Gramsci, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”17 In other words, within the ongoing onset of crisis, a new counterhegemonic project has yet to consolidate itself as a new hegemonic formation.The previous subsection considered Laclau's account of populism, and stressed the stark distinction between hegemony and counterhegemony, alongside the centrality of the context of crisis for the emergence of populism. In this subsection, the argument moves in the opposite direction in seeking to depart somewhat from Laclau's analysis. This concerns Laclau's pivotal understanding of the political. In other words, there is in Laclau a stark dichotomy between politics and the political on the one hand, and administration on the other. The aim here is to loosen such starkness. The political versus administration dichotomy closely aligns with the distinction forged by Jacques Ranciére between politics and police, and also informs the analysis of “postpolitics” conducted by Chantal Mouffe and others.18 Laclau's crucial notion of antagonism flows from this dichotomy. It is not the notion of antagonism nor its pivotality to politics that this article disputes; it is, rather, the starkness of the dichotomy that is called into question. The understanding of the political provides welcome conceptual clarity that orients appropriate reflection on the analysis and practice of politics, and constitutes an important departure from those mainstream analyses that insist politics occurs solely in government, office or parliament. The contrast, however, is too simplistic as it generates the blanket portrayal of administration (or “police” or “postpolitics”) as restless when such situations are replete with their own dynamics and tensions.The slumber of administration depicted by Saint-Simon's motto whereby “the government of men” is replaced by “the administration of things” is called into question by the logical categories Laclau deploys. That is, the politics–administration dichotomy sits uncomfortably with the operation of the logics of difference that Laclau proposes as working alongside the chain of equivalence. Differential logics manifest themselves when a hegemonic formation or “administration” respond to, coopt and incorporate particular demands, thereby preventing such demands from accumulating on the other side of the frontier and linking together within an equivalential chain. Within the social, differential and equivalential logics are more compatible with a continuum rather than mutual exclusion: “the logic of equivalence is a logic of the simplification of political space, while the logic of difference is a logic of its expansion and increasing complexity.”19 This emergence of particular demands and the hegemon's response through differential logics, in other words, introduces some tensions and dynamics into the imputed slumber of administration, which calls into question the starkness of the political–administration dichotomy.More important, however, the dichotomy sits uneasily alongside a hegemonic account of politics. The very word “hegemony” announces an ongoing process of forging, securing, and sustaining a dominant worldview, which is a restless process—and one conducted by multiple actors on multiple fronts across the social. This is something very different from the processual sterility associated with “the administration of things.” Hegemonic politics invokes a strategic approach that contains the warding off, limiting, belittling, and sidelining of counterhegemonic challenges. It also requires subtle shifts in the hegemonic configuration such that contingencies, challenges, and challenging situations can be addressed and either incorporated or responded to such that a rival hegemonic formation fails to emerge—in other words, a whole armory of defensive strategies are involved.There are times when Laclau himself calls this politics–administration dichotomy into question, such as the introduction of “state populisms” in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century.20 This notion of state populisms points to the acknowledgment of “populisms in power,” which highlights that populism is not merely an oppositional force purely operating antagonistically. It can also be both “administratively” propositional and functional in performing governmentality, thereby drawing the dichotomy into question.It's also worth stating that the politics–administration dichotomy deflects attention away from focus on the actions of an administration and the manner in which it attempts to produce the appearance of calm and/or how it responds to emerging demands through differential logics. Laclau offers one final reason to doubt the dichotomy's continuing relevance through the suggestion that we are potentially entering (or even have already entered into) a new historical postadministration era that would dissolve the dichotomy. This points to the “postmodern” eclipse of modernity, and the radical, democratic, egalitarian and hegemonic turn that Laclau and Mouffe designate for socialist strategy: “Perhaps what is dawning as a possibility in our political experience is something radically different from what postmodern prophets of the ‘end of politics’ are announcing: the arrival at a fully political era, because the dissolution of the marks of certainty does not give the political game any aprioristic necessary terrain but, rather, the possibility of constantly redefining the terrain itself.”21 There is a distinct echo of this in the reflective and implicatory remarks that close On Populist Reason: “[t]he dislocations inherent to social relations in the world in which we live are deeper than in the past, so categories that synthesized past social experience are becoming obsolete.”22 The depth of these dislocations, in turn, might explain the persistence of populism in contemporary politics.Within populism studies, Laclau's approach has often been characterized as one utilizing logics.23 This is in line with broader analyses from the Essex School outlining logics as a methodology for studying and explaining the social and political.24 This article argues that only a specific interpretation of logics holds. This is sharply delineated from an abstraction inhering in thought, but one that cuts across the thought–action or ideal–material distinction. Another way of saying this is the argument offered in this article: populism is a phenomenon because its logic shines in specific contexts. This theoretical tweaking is crucial for the future understanding and practice of populism but, I argue, also constitutes a closer reading of Laclau's account of populism. If this reading of Laclau fails, however, this article insists that the substantial point about understanding populism still stands and this, in turn, points to the promise of a post-Laclauian turn.25 In sum, then, two readings of Laclau's account of populism have been drawn, one emphasizing the importance of logics, which has an implicit connection to the notion of performativity, whereas the other situates the populist logic within the context of crisis, such that it should be conceived as a phenomenon whose logic arises within such a context.These notions of logic, phenomenon, and context all feature prominently in On Populist Reason, and especially in the preface and introductory chapter to which the analysis now turns. Here, there is abundant material for insisting that Laclau understands populism as (an abstract) logic—as against a phenomenon—starting with two passages in the preface: my task, as I conceived it, was to bring to light the specific logics inherent in that excess [linked to populism], and to argue that, far from corresponding to marginal phenomena, they are inscribed in the actual working of communitarian space.26My attempt has not been to find the true referent of populism, but to do the opposite: to show that populism has no referential unity because it is ascribed not to a delimitable phenomenon but to a social logic whose effects cut across many phenomena. Populism is, quite simply, a way of constructing the political.27Three points can be made here to call into question a simple understanding of the role of logics and phenomena in Laclau's theory. The first is that neither of these passages point towards a binary choice between understanding populism as either a logic or as a phenomenon. Laclau is distancing populism from being either a marginal or a delimitable phenomenon. This differentiates Laclau's understanding of populism from those he surveys in the first chapter of On Populist Reason, which are rationalistically informed. These understandings insist that delimitation follows because every concept must have a clear referent, and the task of the analyst is to isolate and delimit an appropriate concept to the observed phenomenon. Populism's marginality flows from the frame provided by developmental and/or modernization theories: populism appears in the transition to a higher stage of capitalism (from rural to industrial, for instance) or through the disjuncture of “underdeveloped” Third World countries coping with the requirements of functioning alongside more “advanced” countries in the global economy. Once such conditions have been surpassed, populism will no longer appear, which explains its marginal status. In contrast to these attempts to delimit and marginalize populism, Laclau's effort is to demonstrate its political importance, and to the failure of attempts within the literature to link it with specific content.This brings us neatly to the second point, which concerns how the concept of phenomenon is being deployed here, the ambiguity of which is highlighted in an excerpt from the second quoted passage above: “it is ascribed not to a delimitable phenomenon but to a social logic whose effects cut across many phenomena.”28 The imbrication of logics and phenomena come clearly to the fore in this quotation. The engagement with the extant literature on populism makes clear that the critique is posed against how others had applied the concept of populism across diverse historical phenomena: the U.S. People's Party, the Narodniki, European agrarian movements after the First World War, Social Credit in Alberta, and Peronism, among others. Analytic attempts to isolate a concept that incorporated and accounted for such diversity, moreover, had not proved forthcoming. What Laclau is challenging here is the diverse content that other analysts have attributed to populism and that, however it is conceptualized, that content always exceeds the concept offered. As an alternative methodology and in keeping with his wider theory, Laclau adopts a formalist approach.29 Here, populism has identifiable logical operations. But these logics, in turn, operate within specific contexts, which, in the argument of this article, amounts to a phenomenon operating with a logic.Later in the more thorough discussion, Laclau carefully explains how populism operates, beginning the section entitled “Populism” as follows: “by ‘populism’ we do not understand a type of movement—identifiable with either a specific social base or a particular ideological orientation—but a political logic. All the attempts at finding what is idiosyncratic in populism in elements such as a peasant or small-ownership constituency, or resistance to economic modernization, or manipulation by marginalized elites are . . . essentially flawed.”30 This passage helps clarify the logic–phenomenon relation that this article develops. In it, Laclau is distancing the understanding of populism he elaborates from two different erroneous presentations, and the content that is attributed to it. The first of these is conceiving populism as an ideology, replete with specific and identifiable content, ideas, and values that can be found in other political ideologies, such as liberalism, conservatism, and socialism.31 Laclau in addition disassociates any alignment of populism with a specific social base. More important for this analysis, Laclau detaches populism from modernization and developmental theorists who situate their analysis within a teleological frame that entail “stages,” with populism depicted as an ephemeral sign of a transition from one stage to another, destined to be superseded and to be discarded once history runs its destined course.What isn't excluded from Laclau's analysis here is the detachment of populism from any or all context—rather it's from those contexts deployed by those theoretical accounts reliant upon holistic teleological frameworks. Populism should be understood as much as a phenomenon as a logic because it occurs in specific and identifiable contexts. That this is incorporated into Laclau's account can be garnered from his explanation of the notion of political logic raised in the previous quotation: “political logics are related to the institution of the social. Such an institution . . . proceeds out of social demands and is, in that sense, inherent to any process of social change. . . . This . . . involves . . . the construction of internal frontiers and the identification of an institutionalized “other.’”32 The discussion here indicates that logic is deployed not as an abstract category tasked with delivering certainty and indisputability. Instead, political logics inhere and operate within society—and this social-political imbrication points to logics functioning within phenomena. Here too, populism's point of emergence is contextual. It is specifically aligned with social change, brought about as a result of social and political crises. In Laclau's own terminology this materializes with the advent of a multiplication of unmet demands that coalesce in solidarity on one side of a frontier as a result of the dislocations within the institutional structure positioned on the other side of that frontier.This is in keeping with the manner in which Laclau sidesteps and rejects the idealism–materialism debate. Three features illustrate this. The first is his regular invocation of Wittgenstein's language games, which is used to undermine the thought–action distinction.33 Laclau often deploys Wittgenstein in order to explain his understanding of discourse, and is at pains to insist that this is not solely—and amounts to more than—speech or language. Laclau adopts discourse from Foucault, and adapts it to fit into the development of his theory.34 The third feature is the notion of antagonism, which is contrasted to opposition and contradiction, and the elaboration is instructive for the logic–phenomenon distinction under consideration. An opposition for Laclau pertains to two forces in reality (A–B), whereas a contradiction pertains to the realm of thought (A–not-A). Although not-A is a negation, A and B are positive identities whereas, for Laclau, antagonism constitutes the limits of positivity, identity, and objectivity. This is because, although antagonistic to one another, antagonistic “identities” are never full identities because they contain those of the Other. This builds on Saussurean structuralism within which there are no positive terms, only differences that require one another. Yet although Saussure was considering linguistics, in addition, Laclau's notion of antagonism undermines the thought/reality or idealism/materialism distinction through which the notions of contradiction and opposition operate.35The proposal that populism is better understood as an identifiable political phenomenon within which there is the operation of a clear logic shares kinship with this undermining of the various distinctions whether they be word–action, thought–reality, or idealism–materialism. This proposal gravitates against and moves in the opposite direction to the argument developed in the previous subsection concerning the broader issue of “the political.” There it was argued that the political–administration contrast was too stark, but here there is a specific analytic purpose in insisting that populism should be identified as a phenomenon displaying a particular logic: it enables the contextual contrast between the different situations within which populist projects struggle to gain traction or have the possibility to succeed. Elsewhere I have termed these two situations ones of nonpopulism and populism, respectively.36 The alternative to the argument in this article that populism is a phenomenon displaying a particular logic is to insist that it, and Laclau's account of it, is a logic—whether abstract or not. Populism's nonphenomenality is the corollary of this alternative position. If this is the case then populism becomes decontextualized, and the analyst is unable to distinguish between situations of populism and nonpopulism, and designate them as such.Although it shares many similarities, the populism/nonpopulism contrast cannot be precisely mapped onto the political/administration contrast that Laclau elaborates, whereas it shows far closer resemblance to the distinction between counterhegemony and hegemony that Laclau and Mouffe stress. When discussing Bernstein and their position on the debate between gradualism and discontinuity, they write: “[h]istory, therefore, is regarded not as an ascendant continuum of democratic reforms, but as a discontinuous series of hegemonic formations and historical blocs.”37 All of this points to the populist challenge being a substantial—phenomenal—one. This is reinforced given what has already been established in this article through the insistence that Laclau's populism is counterhegemonic, which reveals an intimate connection with dislocations and crisis, and the role that is assigned to the reconstruction of a new order or hegemonic formation. Such substantiality orients populism away from any understanding presenting it as an (abstract) logic, and towards conceptualizing it as a logic operating within a specific context—not unlike a phenomenon.This proposal of populism as a phenomenon operating with a logic is proximate to an argument forged in 2004 by Yannis Stavrakakis that questioned the formalism of the new approach to populism that Laclau set out in “Populism: What's in a Name?” Despite such proximity, different quibbles can be raised with both Laclau and Stavrakakis here. In this article, Laclau presents the populist logic as identifiable on a continuum, writing: “[t]he question that we should, instead, ask ourselves is . . . to what extent is a movement populist?” to which the answer is “[a] movement or an ideology . . . will be more or less populistic depending on the degree to which its contents are articulated by equivalential logics.”38 Both the contrasts between administration and the political and the one I have proposed between nonpopulism and populism, however, point in a different direction. They invite analyses far closer to either-or than more-or-less. The difference is highlighted still further when the quibble with Stavrakakis is raised who, when considering the above formulation from Laclau, states that “[t]his analysis highlights the ever-present character of populism in political life.”39 In contradistinction to this, there are great swathes of “political” life that are characterized by nonpopulist hegemonic calm within which equivalential logics are unable to take hold and grip. Populism, in other words, is not ever-present in political life, nor can it be gradationally classified on a scale. Instead, its appearance is more closely aligned with specific historical moments: those beset by crises or, to adopt Laclau's register, when dislocations proliferate and sedimentations are reactivated.This begins with an analysis of populism and “the political.” Weyland sought to develop a political-strategic regionalization of populism, although one built on more limited theoretical underpinnings than Laclau.40 The argument developed in this article emphasizes the necessity of understanding populism's political operation within the social, against any “regionalization” of populism at a specific “level,” and is in line with Laclau's critique of such practices in Althusser.41 The presentation of populism as a logic operating within identifiable contexts such as crisis reconnects populism's operation within the social, and raises the potential for analysts to identify it as a logic operating within a historical context of hegemonic breakdown. This reconnection returns analyses of populism back to its prior connection with wider social practices—a connection called into question by Weyland's intervention at the turn of the millennium. It challenges the disconnection of politics from the social that Weyland explicitly performed, and the understanding of populism as an abstract logic that commentators have aligned with Laclau's approach. In addition, the insistence that populism is a phenomenon with a distinctive logic situates Laclau's account of populism in similar terrain to the distinctive understanding of discourse in his theory, informed as it is by Wittgenstein's undermining of the word–action dichotomy and critique of positivism. Populism as a phenomenon with a logic, moreover, enables the crucial distinction between populism and nonpopulism. This arms analysts with the conceptual tools to distinguish between historical contexts in which populism's emergence and persistence is more likely and this in turn facilitates the comparative study of populism.One schematic contrast can be drawn utilizing this distinction: the comparison between Latin American and European histories in relation to both populism and crisis. With the broad exception of military dictatorships, populism has proliferated in Latin American postwar history. This continuity of populism in postwar Latin America can be aligned with an ongoing crisis and the enduring difficulty for a hegemonic formation to establish itself. The most likely explanation for this is the disjuncture between its periphery status within the global economy, and the challenges posed by the core. Europe's association with populism, by contrast, has been both more recent and abrupt. There, populism's prevalence has coincided with the failure of hegemonic neoliberal financialized globalization to sustain itself post-2008, and populism's subsequent endurance results from the failure of a new hegemonic formation consolidating itself to usher in a new situation of nonpopulism devoid of crisis.The contextual situating of the contrast between populism and nonpopulism can also assist wider and deeper understandings of populism itself, warding off not only what certain commentators have identified as “populist hype,” but also the related and reverse issue of “populist silence” that the notion of the populist hype provokes. “Populist hype” was introduced to distinguish between the theory of populism and the far more widespread application of the signifier to a myriad range of unpleasant practices, many of which bore no resemblance to it.42 “Populist silence” is invoked to operate in the opposite direction, and to isolate historical case studies that closely map onto the theory of populism but are yet to be named as instances of it, or such naming remains marginal within the academy.43 Chartism immediately comes to mind here.44Thus, the analysis offered reconnects populism to the social, through the stress on context, crisis and the insistence that populism is a phenomenon whose logic shines with the context of crisis. This reinsertion of the political into the social enables the contrast between different contexts: the hegemonic breakdown that facilitates the emergence of populism, which can be contrasted to the hegemonic calm of nonpopulism, in which the supply of or demand for populism fails to take hold—and more usually both. And, finally, this disassociation of populism from a decontextualized performativity and an abstract logic establishes populism as a radical, disruptive style of politics—one that is capable not only of challenging the existing system, but also in outlining and enacting novel and radical visions of future hegemonic formations.