Lineages of Political Society by Chatterjee Partha

Author:Chatterjee, Partha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Asia/General
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2011-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

Popular Reason

This is the place to confront another concept of modern politics in real time. The concept is that of populism. It has not yet made its entry into the hallowed portals of political theory and is still regarded as fit only for empirical discussions of sociology. However, considerations of contemporary democratic politics cannot avoid taking account of populism, especially because its practices constitute much of what is known today as ethnic politics, and because these overlap with the politics of nationalism. It would be useful, therefore, to consider here the analysis of populism offered by Ernesto Laclau.17

Laclau discusses populism as a continuation of his earlier Gramsciinspired analysis of hegemony.18 He takes seriously the necessary entanglement of rhetoric with the activities of democratic politics. But populism, in particular, he refuses to dismiss merely on the ground that populism is vague and empty, or that it tries to mean everything to everybody. On the contrary, “instead of starting with a model of political rationality which sees populism in terms of what it lacks—its vagueness, its ideological emptiness, its anti-intellectualism, its transitory character,” Laclau proceeds “to enlarge the model of rationality in terms of a generalized rhetoric (what … can be called ‘hegemony’) so that populism appears as a distinctive and always present possibility of structuration of political life.”19 Indeed, I will go so far as to say that populism is the effective form of democratic politics in the contemporary world. Needless to say, there are specific reasons of contemporary history that have produced this condition. Those reasons have a great deal to do with capitalism and governmentality.

The key move that Laclau makes is to acknowledge the sheer heterogeneity of demands in a modern democratic polity and then distinguish between differential and equivalent demands. In the former case, each demand is considered in isolation from the others and is either pressed or satisfied in a differential way. In the latter case, equivalences are sought to be established between several demands. The former, says Laclau, can be considered democratic demands, but it is only in the latter form that we get popular demands.

I have elsewhere pointed out the distinction between the homogeneous conception of the nation based on undivided popular sovereignty and the heterogeneous conception of the social based on a congeries of populations. The connection between the two is established by contemporary political regimes through the instruments of governmentality.20 One of the key features of modern governmental techniques is the flexibility they provide in the domain of policy—the ability to break up large agglomerations of demands and to isolate specific groups of benefit-seekers from others. This, we could say following Laclau, is the differential mode of responding to democratic demands. But the politics of the governed has taken other forms in contemporary democracies. It has sought to establish equivalences among various democratic demands and bring them together into the form of a popular claim. It does this, Laclau says, through rhetorical and performative political acts that establish chains of equivalences over different demands.

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