Ebook: Seven Essays On Populism: For A Renewed Theoretical Perspective

Governments such as those of Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom or Iván Duque in Colombia and progressive experiences in many places around Latin America or Southern Europe have turned the classic schemes to understand contemporary politics upside down. The theories of neoliberal and consensual democracy fell short when it came to understanding the emergence of arcane political passions raised by charismatic leaders. As a result, populist theory has gained unusual importance in accounting for these new phenomena, affective and popular, in geopolitics. Our book enters into dialogue in this new scenario of political thought exacerbated by the pandemic. However, it puts forward a series of theses against the current usual prejudices about populism. The proposal of this book is to introduce a set of critical essays on populism in a double movement: on the one hand, disarming the general contempt towards populism shared by many of the academics, journalists and politicians from the right to the left wing of the political scope; and, on the other hand, introducing elements for a renewed theoretical perspective regarding populism in its ontological dimension. The main topics developed in the book, for a renewed populist theory, are: the link between institutions and the construction of People; the distinction between a right and left-wing populism; the articulation between a plebeian republicanism, feminism and populism; the differences between a populist ethos and a neoliberal one and the urgency to translate populism –following Judith Butler’s translatability notion – into the production of knowledge of the global south, in order to think to what extent populism is capable to dialogue and discuss with theories produced in some other global sceneries and what could its theoretical/practical contributions be as an alternative to neoliberalism. But above all, the most important contribution of this book, one that is crucial to the debate around populism but has not yet been carefully addressed in any published text, is its emancipatory dimension in a neoliberal context.
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This important intervention interrogates keystone features of the dominant European theoretical landscape in the field of populism studies, advancing existing debates and introducing new avenues of thought, in conjunction with insights from the contemporary Latin American political experience and perspectives. In each essay – the title a nod to the influential socialist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, from whom the authors draw inspiration – leading Argentine scholars Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia pair key dimensions of populism with diverse themes such as modern-day feminism, militancy, and neoliberalism, in order to stimulate discussion surrounding the constitutive nature, goals, and potential of populist social movements. Biglieri and Cadahia are unafraid to court provocation in their frank assessment of populism as a force which could bring about essential emancipatory social change to confront emerging right-wing trends in policy and leadership. At the same time, this fresh interpretation of a much-maligned political articulation is balanced by their denunciation of right-aligned populisms and their failure to bring to bear a sustainable alternative to contemporary neo-authoritarian forms of neoliberalism. In their place, they articulate a populism which offers a viable means of mobilizing a response to hegemonic forms of neoliberal discourse and government.