Multiple Populisms

Italy as Democracy's Mirror

Paul Blokker, Manuel Anselmi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032240374
• eBook ISBN: 9781351115728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a comprehensive interpretation of the multiple manifestations of populism using Italy, the only country amongst consolidated constitutional democracies in which populist political forces have been in government on various occasions since the early 1990s, as the starting point and benchmark.

Populism is a complex, multi-faceted political phenomenon which redefines many of the essential characteristics of democracy; participation, representation, and political conflict. This book considers contemporary versions of populism that pose a real challenge to representative and constitutional democracy. Contributors provide an integrative interpretation of populism and analyse its principal historical, social and politico-legal variables to provide a multi-dimensional reflection on the concept of populism, comprehensive analysis of the populist phenomenon and a theoretical and comparative perspective on the diverse political experiences of populism.

Based on conceptual and interdisciplinary reflections from expert authors, this book will be of great interest to scholars and post-graduate students of cultural studies, European studies, political sociology, political science, comparative politics, political philosophy, and political theory with an interest in a comparative and interdisciplinary theory of populism and its manifestations.

Part I

Which people for what form of democracy?

1 The construction of the people

Valentina Pazé

1 Togliatti a populist?

In one widespread view, Italy gave populism fertile ground to take root and flourish at the time of the Second Republic, starting from the 1990s (Mény and Surel 2000; Taguieff 2002; Revelli 2017). And yet, not all of the scholars who have dealt with the issue share this view. In his groundbreaking work on “populist reason”, Ernesto Laclau proposed a different interpretation, which sees the Communist Party guided by Togliatti as the paradigmatic example of a “populist” political force (Laclau 2005).

Following the Second World War, Togliatti found himself heading a workers’ party in a country that, especially in the South, was still largely made up of peasant farmers. For his ability to tie “communist” as a signifier to a wide range of democratic, rather than specifically workerist, demands, thus creating “a unity – a homogeneity – out of an irreducible heterogeneity” (Laclau 2005, 182), Togliatti should be considered an authentically populist leader. The same cannot be said of Silvio Berlusconi, whose followers were not a true “people” but a passive and acritical television audience (Laclau 2005, 191; Baldassari and Melegari 2012, 12–13). In the case of Berlusconi and Berlusconism, then, what was lacking was that active element of mobilization from below, without which we cannot speak of populism but, at most, of demagogy. More generally, though he devotes a certain amount of attention to the Northern League, Laclau accuses the Italy of the nineties and thereafter of having a “very limited ability to organize social forces in various sectors on a populist basis” (Baldassari and Melegari 2012, 14). This judgement is at odds with the view we took as our starting point – and indeed is diametrically opposed to it – viz., that Italy is a prime vantage point for studying populism from the nineties onwards, with the rise to power of Silvio Berlusconi, who “when called upon by the head of state to form a government […], issued a communiqué of only a few lines in which he stressed, for the first time in the history of the Italian Republic that he, as if he were an American or French president, had been invested with power by the will of the people” (Meny and Surel 2004, 14).¹

Such discordant interpretations evidently arise from different ways of using words and the concepts associated with them. There can be no populism without a people, as Laclau invites us to bear in mind. But what, exactly, is the people of populism? What distinguishes it from the people of democracy and, more specifically, the people of representative and constitutional democracy, who, as Article 1 of the Italian Constitution states, exercise sovereignty “in the manner and within the limits laid down by this Constitution”?

In the chapter, I will attempt to answer these questions, starting from a brief history of the concept of the people. With one caveat, which, though in many ways obvious, should nevertheless be expressed: “people” is an abstract term, with no clear, single referent. A collective subject called the “people”, as distinct from the individuals that make it up, does not exist, except in our discourses (Bobbio 1999, 332). In a way, moreover, the relationship between the people and populism echoes what has been said of the nexus of nation and nationalism: nations are “imagined” or “invented” by nationalists (Anderson 1986; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), just as peoples are “constructed” or “invented” by populists (Laclau 2005; Morgan 1988).² And in any case, even democracy cannot do without the people as the ultimate source of legitimate power. What we must do, then, is go back to the origins and investigate the function that the notion of the people fulfills in democratic theory and then ask whether there is a specific populist understanding of this notion and what form such an understanding might take.

2 Aristotle and “demagogic democracy”

Discussions of the nexus between the people, democracy and populism have often preferred to stress the Roman heritage rather than the Greek one. Nevertheless, if our primary aim is to investigate the role of the people in democracy, it is hard not to start from the experiences of the society that invented, and for the first time experimented with, democracy as a form of government and perhaps also – as we will see – something bearing a close resemblance to what today we mean by “populism”.

In ancient Greece, the word demos, in the singular, had two main meanings that were not always clearly distinguishable (Finley 1973; Hansen 1991). On the one hand, it meant all the citizens of a polis who held political rights: in Athens between the fifth and fourth centuries, all free and native-born adult males. On the other hand, however, it was also used less broadly, to mean – usually with negative connotations – not the citizen body as a whole, but its humbler members: the peasants, the sailors, the manual laborers in general.³ This explains the fact that Aristotle was able to define democracy not so much as government “of the many” but as government “of the poor”. And also that one of the recurrent criticisms that aristocrats have launched against this form of government complains of its “partisan” nature: the demos – consisting of the majority of the poor (meaning the coarse, the uneducated, the wastrels) – who hold sway over the minority of the “best” (the aristoi), exercising their tyrannical domination. Conversely, the (few) passages in Greek literature that voice a favorable view of democracy generally use the term demos in a more inclusive sense. As the Syracusian Athenagoras argues: “It will be said, perhaps, that democracy is neither wise nor equitable, but that the holders of property are also the best fitted to rule. I say, on the contrary, first, that the word ‘demos,’ or people, includes the whole state, oligarchy only a part”.⁴

The fact that the demos, even when it is only a part (the “poor”), tends to represent itself as the whole raises legitimate concerns among its adversaries. But what triggers the greatest fear and alarm is the fact that the demos often appears to “act as a whole”: a faceless, compact mass, with no internal distinctions, in which individual differences disappear and everyone conforms to the will of the majority. We need look no farther than Thucydides’ description of the expedition to Sicily, decided through acclamation by an assembly drugged by Alcibiades’ fiery words, which quash all hopes for debate and prevent the unconvinced from voicing their misgivings. “With this enthusiasm of the majority – writes Thucydides – the few that liked it not, feared to appear unpatriotic by holding up their hands against it, and so kept quiet”.⁵

The theme of the people’s manipulability by able demagogues, in assemblies or in courts, is at the center of the worries of all critics of democracy, beginning with Plato. More interesting from our standpoint, however, is the tack taken by Aristotle, who, less biased against democracy than his mentor, distinguishes between several forms that the “government by the demos” can take. In Book IV of the Politics in particular, he identifies five different types of democracy, the last of which – “demagogic democracy” – has many points in common with tyranny.⁶

Aristotle’s “demagogic democracy” has three essential features. The first is that in this form, “not the law, but the multitude, have the supreme power”. The ancient principle of the primacy of the nomoi (the fundamental laws) over the psephismata (the decrees of the popular assembly), forcefully reaffirmed after the oligarchical revolution of 404,⁷ is turned on its head here, and the people, utterly unchecked, make arbitrary and unreasonable decisions. Aristotle’s backdrop here is the memory of the years of “radical democracy”, when the demos was responsible for choices that were not only unjust but were also foolish, such as the death sentence passed on the generals who had commanded the shipwrecked fleet in the Arginusae islands, which violated the law against collective punishments.

Second, in demagogic democracy the demos presents itself, and governs – as a “whole”. Aristotle writes that “the people” becomes a monarch, and “the many” have power in their hands “not as individuals, but collectively”. The point is clarified with a reference to the second book of the Iliad, where Agamemnon, wishing to put his warriors to the test, leads them to believe that the siege of Troy has ended. The soldiers are then transformed into a mob, displaying all the crowd traits that were later to be studied by the social psychologists of the nineteenth century: an unruly and irrational throng moving like a single mindless beast, overwhelming everything in its path. The description of this hysterical mass, incapable of heeding Achilles’ words, follows that of the calm and orderly discussion that took place in the council of the aristoi. Aristotle remarks that when Homer says ‘it is not good to have a rule of many”, it is not clear whether he means a rule where people act as a mass or “the rule of many individuals”. What is clear, however, is Aristotle’s opinion of the dynamics of assemblies, which bring the people to the level of the crazed mob described in the Iliad.

Lastly, the fifth type of democracy described by Aristotle in the Politics is that brought about by demagogues, who spring up when the people no longer hold the laws supreme. For Aristotle – as for Aristophanes, Plato and a lengthy tradition – the demagogue is essentially a “flatterer”. Indifferent to the truth, he tells the citizens what they want to hear, cajoling them and arousing their basest instincts. In doing so, he presents himself as “one of them”, a “man of the people”, in how he dresses and holds himself and in his speech, always direct and colloquial, often coarse and vulgar.⁸ A peculiar sort of vicious circle – as Aristotle points out – is set up between the people and demagogues. On the one hand, the demagogues “grow great, because the people have all things in their hands”, and on the other, they “hold in their hands the votes of the people, who are too ready to listen to them”. In this sense, the rhetorical arts mastered by demagogues can be described as a form of psychagogy: the art of guiding people from within, penetrating into their psyche.⁹ As a result, the flow of power is reversed, no longer rising from the base but moving downwards from the top, because – appearances notwithstanding – it is the leader who drags the masses after him with the persuasive force of his discourse, not the other way around. At this point, we can readily see what Aristotle means when he notes that this form of democracy can be compared to tyranny.

Supremacy of the demos over the law; a holistic conception of the people as an undifferentiated “whole”; a direct emotional relationship between the leader and the masses, fueled by a spirit of retaliation against the aristocratic minority: the parallels are not hard to perceive between Aristotle’s description of “demagogic democracy” and what is commonly meant by “populism” today (Mény and Surel 2000; Weyland 2001; Taggart 2000, 2002; Pasquino 2008; Urbinati 2013). Without wanting to push the parallels too far, we can nevertheless say that ever since its origins, democracy has been dogged by an ominous shadow (Canovan 1999, 2002): a regime in which the people – but in fact only a portion of the people – claims to be everything and to have the last word on everything, exerting a “tyrannical” domination over the minorities.¹⁰

3 Reinventions of the people in the modern age

The idea that the people is the original source of legitimate power was handed down from the Greeks to the Roman world where, well beyond the Republican period, the law continued to be seen – in Gaius’s definition – as “what the people orders and has established”. Even the absolute power of the Roman emperors is justified on the basis of the lex whereby the princeps receives the whole of the people’s imperium and potestas (McIlwain 1947, 48).

During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the nature and limits of this granting of power were to become the crux of the debate between absolutists and constitutionalists. The supporters of absolute monarchy interpreted the lex regia de imperio in terms of traslatio, i.e., a definitive and unconditional transfer of sovereignty to the king. The theorists of constitutionalism, like Bracton and, later, the Monarchomachs, maintained that this transfer is conditional, interpreting it as a concessio, dependent on whether the princeps fulfills his duty to rule justly.

The people invoked as “the source of all legitimate government, even that by emperors and kings” (Canovan 2005, 15) includes everyone who lives in a certain country and is subject to its laws. In the France of the Ancien Regime, for example, the people is the set of the three estates that, taken together, form the “body of the nation”, governed by the crowned head. And yet the term peuple and its derogatory version, populace, are also used to denote a specific fraction of society, the Third Estate or, in some contexts, its poorest and most destitute members, despised and feared because of their subversive potential (Ruocco 2011). In England and the rest of Europe too, the politico-legal notion of the “people-as-a-whole”, taken as the basis of legitimate power, coexists and is at times confused with the more sociological “people-as-a-part”, meaning the humbler levels of society (the “common people”) (Canovan 2005).

The appeal to the people takes on new meaning in the age of revolutions, starting from England’s “great rebellion”, when the mobilization of those on the lowest rung of society by a Parliament that was still monopolized by the well-off classes took place “in the name of the people”. Attention has been drawn to the “fictional” and “ideological” character of the notion of popular sovereignty which, in replacing the older formula of the “divine right of the king”, ends by “providing the few [the gentlemen sitting in the Long Parliament, who represent a tiny minority of society] with justification for their government of the many, and reconciling the many to that government” (Morgan 1988, 38). What is certain is that the idea of the people became a powerful draw for the poorest and most ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Multiple populisms. Italy as democracy’s mirror
• Part I Which people for what form of democracy?
• Part II Populism and the transformation of parties
• Part III Populism and the transformation of the public sphere
• Part IV Populism and the transformation of politics
• Index