The Promise and Perils of Populism

Global Perspectives

Carlos la Torre, Carlos de la Torre

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780813153308, 9780813146867
• eBook ISBN: 9780813146881
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square to the Tea Party in the United States to the campaign to elect indigenous leader Evo Morales in Bolivia, modern populist movements command international attention and compel political and social change. When citizens demand "power to the people," they evoke corrupt politicians, imperialists, or oligarchies that have appropriated power from its legitimate owners. These stereotypical narratives belie the vague and often contradictory definitions of the concept of "the people" and the many motives of those who use populism as a political tool.

In The Promise and Perils of Populism, Carlos de la Torre assembles a group of international scholars to explore the ambiguous meanings and profound implications of grassroots movements across the globe. These trenchant essays explore how fragile political institutions allow populists to achieve power, while strong institutions confine them to the margins of political systems. Their comparative case studies illuminate how Latin American, African, and Thai populists have sought to empower marginalized groups of people, while similar groups in Australia, Europe, and the United States often exclude people whom they consider to possess different cultural values. While analyzing insurrections in Latin America, advocacy groups in the United States, Europe, and Australia, and populist parties in Asia and Africa, the contributors also pose questions and agendas for further research.

This volume on contemporary populism from a comparative perspective could not be more timely, and scholars from a variety of disciplines will find it an invaluable contribution to the literature.

Part I

The People and Populism

1

POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND POPULISM

Andrew Arato

Some of our significant political concepts are secularized theological ones. Not all of them. Some major religious-political concepts are theologized profane ones. What is crucial is that nontheological concepts like territory and population can also be theologized, as in “sacred homeland” or “the people.” Such is the main effort of political theology, the preservation and imposition of concepts and figures of thought in political theory inherited from mono the ism, however transformed. It can only be countered by the further secularization and disenchantment of political concepts, the preservation or the reestablishment of their secular and rational character.

Why should we engage in this secularizing effort? This essay will first argue, using the example of Carl Schmitt, that positive reliance on political theology not only can have a profoundly authoritarian meaning, but is helpful in disguising and misrepresenting that meaning. Second, I will try to show that taking this topos seriously does not commit a thinker to a political theological posture. As demonstrated by Claude Lefort, political theology can be thematized in order to go beyond it. Lefort is important for my essay because his concept of democracy as the empty space of power clearly draws the line of distinction with not only totalitarianism, as he stressed, but with all modern forms of dictatorship. Finally, I will argue that, without uttering the word, a political conception can be deeply theological with similar consequences as self-admitted versions. At a time when one can no longer openly argue for dictatorship as Schmitt still could in the 1920s, disguising the authoritarian disguise itself, namely political theology, can preserve its meaning and function. I will try to develop this point through a critique of populist politics in the version introduced by Ernesto Laclau, who explicitly advocates not only the construction of “the people” in an entirely voluntaristic manner, but filling the empty space of power by leadership incarnating a subject that does not exist.¹

By political theology, I do not mean only a politics that preserves the entire substance or structure or substantial contents of theology in secularized forms.² Mindful of Hans Blumenberg’s powerful if ambivalent critique,³ I do not identify political theology with the assertion of causality for theological origins, even a hypothetical one as in Weber’s “Protestant ethic” thesis, or with the claim of substantial structural identity of theological and “secular” concepts, as in Karl Loewith’s Meaning in History. Neither Weber’s nor Loewith’s conceptions are primarily political. Not being theories of politics, they are not political theologies. Neither causality nor substantial identity is sufficient or necessary to indicate the presence of political theology. I find Blumenberg’s idea of “reoccupation” only of the questions and not of the answers of theology powerful, but only with the proviso that for that reoccupation, the “transformed” linguistic resources and structures of monotheistic religion play a key role (as he is forced to admit).⁴ Thus I believe one can speak of partial identity of substance, in addition to the reoccupation stressed by Blumenberg. This step leads not to the rehabilitation of political theology that he feared, but to a diagnosis of its presence in modern and contemporary political thought. In his fear of political theology, Blumenberg went too far toward trying to argue that there is really no such thing at all. With this reservation, the shift of emphasis from substantial identity to the legitimating function of reoccupation remains important. That was already the role of the “king’s two bodies” doctrine in the variety of forms explored by Ernst Kantorowicz.⁵ The famous Schmittian thesis concerning the secularization of theological concepts also implied the mobilization of political theology in the sense of “reoccupation” for purposes of legitimation.⁶

Carl Schmitt’s Constituent Power and Political Theology

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Political Theology, I. 37). This statement of 1922 cannot be taken literally, at least as a description, in light of Schmitt’s Die Diktatur, published a year earlier.⁷ In that work, Carl Schmitt based his understanding of one of the two key concepts, commissarial dictatorship, directly on the Roman model linked to republican practice, rather than on any theology. The very concept of dictatorship is Roman, of course, and even the idea of sovereign dictatorship, if not the concept, made its appearance in Rome in the traditional treatment of the decemvir episode as recounted in Livy, as well as the dictatorship of Sulla.⁸ Schmitt’s use of the word “all” is therefore revealing. I believe that he may very well have used it as a normatively charged justification for his own turn to political theology, and his transformation of originally republican concepts into theological ones.

Arguably, that turn had not yet begun in the 1921 work that has even been represented as a critique of sovereign dictatorship.⁹ That interpretation implies a radical shift in the 1922 Political Theology that is hard to explain or justify. After 1922, the issue is in any case moot, and it is certainly incorrect to claim, given the text of the 1928 Verfassungslehre,¹⁰ that Schmitt could adopt the concept of the constituent power of the people only as he freed it from the connotations of his earlier notion of sovereign dictatorship.¹¹ In the Verfassungslehre, Schmitt adopted the very concept of constituent power worked out in Die Diktatur, linked to sovereign dictatorship, and equally important, to political theology.

There is little question that Schmitt understood the historical introduction of sovereign dictatorship in political theological terms. The key figures in Die Diktatur were Cromwell and Rousseau, where one is theological in the traditional sense but on the borderline of the sovereign dictatorship already hinted at by radical Protestant thought in En gland, while the other breaks with the tradition and turns to political theology. The appeal to divine authorization is sincere in Cromwell, and the clue to his quasi-monarchical sovereignty, while in Rousseau (following Machiavelli), religious justification proper is only a noble lie. It is otherwise with political theology. Here in Rousseau, according to Schmitt, “the politicization of theological concepts, especially with respect to the concept of sovereignty, is so striking that it has not escaped any true expert on his writings” (Political Theology, I.46). According to Die Diktatur, Rousseau’s general will has godlike dignity uniting power and justice; it is an unlimited and illimitable legislator, the source of the laws of the state as God is of the laws of nature; it is undivided, and indivisible, indestructible, morally pure, incapable of error or even of willing a wrong (Die Diktatur, 118–19). This is distinguished from the will of all, the empirical will, and the people who can err, and thus the whole construct is an implicit transposition of the language of the king’s two bodies (if, pace Blumenberg, not the precise substantial structure!) from the monarch to the people. Both the figure of God the Father and the Christological metaphor of Kantorowicz are present in this theologically mixed depiction. Nevertheless, the sovereign of Rousseau’s political theology, whose will is the general will, is said to surpass the theologically legitimated absolute monarch in its legislative capacity unlimited by either a law of succession or divine and natural law (Political Theology, I.36).¹²

Rousseau’s conversion of theological to political (-theological) omnipotence or at least unlimited legislative power was not, as far as Schmitt is concerned, the final form of the political theology of the constituent power. As he correctly noted, Rousseau does not fully unify the will, and has a need to distinguish the authority of the wise législateur with a divine mission but without power, from both the power of the people that may not be wise and the power of the dictator that relies on external authority (Die Diktatur, 125ff.). Schmitt thought another step was essential: the unification of dictator, législateur, and, I would add, sovereign(ty) in a concept of sovereign dictatorship (ibid., 126), a step that he sees fully developed in Sieyes’s notion of the pouvoir constituant (ibid., 137ff.). Here all the theological motifs are restated with full force and are even radicalized: absolute creativity, absence of limits, priority to all organization, infallibility, persistence. The relation of the constituent to the constitué is said to be exactly analogous to Spinoza’s pantheistic distinction of natura naturans and naturata with its immanent rather than transcendent conception of the divine (ibid., 139).¹³ The constituent’s power is an infinite, inconceivable, inexhaustible ultimate foundation (Abgrund) that produces ever-new forms and organs.

At the same time, however, the very unclarity of the will of the people as the constituent power is interpreted theologically as expressing a hidden and never fully accessible divinity (ibid., 142). Since the will of the nation or the people is unclear, it can be misinterpreted and distorted, and therefore it takes an agency to rightly construe it, one that not only has the authority to interpret but has the power to impose as well. The role of such a church-like entity is all the more necessary because the empirical people is not the ideal one, and thus needs regeneration, and, as Lefort shows with respect to the Reign of Terror, this idea is then reduced to another: “the people must be extracted from within the people.”¹⁴ Many years before Schmitt popularized his concept of the political, his political theology anticipates the friend-enemy polarity, parallel to, even if not identical in substance to, the saved and the damned.¹⁵ This political theology could be said to be immanent; both friend and enemy are worldly actors. Admittedly, there is only partial identity of substance. While the friend is identical to the ideal people, the enemy is not identical to the empirical one that in part can be regenerated. But the empirical people is seen as contaminated by the enemy. Thus, while the external enemy can be excluded even from the empirical people, the internal one represents an entirely different task.¹⁶ The purified body of the elect is a not yet, an absence rather than a real presence. It cannot act, and must be represented, as the visible church represents the invisible one.¹⁷ Thus the idea of a “hidden God” appears in spite of Schmitt’s repeated criticism of the deist political theology he sees in the German Staatslehre, one that he describes derisively as a cloak-and-dagger drama (Political Theology, I.38; Die Diktatur, 27, 138), assuming an entity incapable of action behind a variety of political functions and institutions. Yet he himself has noted the absence of a personalist and decision-making quality in his central concept of the people (Political Theology, I.46). Where he differs from the German Staatslehre is that, unlike Jellinek et al., he posits the need to have an entity that can successfully identify itself with the people in order to have a popular decision at all (ibid., I.10, 49). That is where the biggest trouble lies.

“Extraction” and “regeneration” (and therefore proscription) as the production of the supposedly constitution-making subject are the highest tasks of sovereign dictatorship in Schmitt’s original interpretation, higher than even the production of the constitution. As I will show below, this idea will be taken over by Ernesto Laclau. In Schmitt’s case, dictatorship is still in the name of the true sovereign or rather its placeholder, the pouvoir constituant, and in appearance it is commissioned by the people. There is not, however, nor can there be, an actual act of commissioning by the ideal body of the people, whose general will is identified not as the fallible will of all but as one that cannot err. This will must be represented, empirically speaking, by the will of a minority or even of one man! (Die Diktatur, 120). If there is commissioning, or authorization, it comes close to self-commissioning or self-authorization. The empirical people is either not a person, unlike the monarch, with a will (Political Theology, I.48–49) or, less likely, it has a will that only corresponds to that of the monarch’s natural body, which could be in error. This is perhaps why the pouvoir constituant of the people is not initially identified with sovereignty as such, implying that the ideal unity is not a person with a will. Its sovereignty is at best latent, and its powers are given to, or rather taken by, the sovereign dictator. While the pouvoir constituant and sovereign dictator may not be omnipotent, they are both unlimited and illimitable.¹⁸

Thus, in sovereign dictatorship uniquely, and (I think) absurdly, dictatorship is exercised also over the entity that supposedly commissions it and is the source of its legitimacy (Die Diktatur, xix).¹⁹ How much difference does it make that this is supposed to be only dictatorship and not sovereignty itself? The temporal limitation Schmitt implies may turn out to be illusory as already in France in 1793 and then in Russia in 1918. It is true, with the regeneration of the people as expressed, legally speaking, by the full enactment of a constitution, even sovereign dictatorship is supposed to come to an end. Here, however, the classical concept of dictatorship is under strain because regeneration may be time-consuming, and who is to say when it is completed? Even the enactment of a constitution, as in 1793, need not mean full regeneration since the emergency definition of the gouvernement revolutionaire as in place “till the peace” refers to both the external and the internal enemy. The difficulty is even more clearly illustrated by the example of the dictatorship of the proletariat that has no strict time limits in any Marxian version. Even this motif, I should add, is theological, with the sovereign dictatorship exercised by a quasi-church waiting for “the end of time.”

The two Schmittian works that treat the constituent power are not fundamentally different in their conception. First, in both, the theory of constituent power is understood as the secularization of the notion of God as the “potestas constituens” (Verfassungslehre, 77). Yet, well before Blumenberg, both texts comprehend that political theology is not simply theology since the people can neither fully replace God nor create a constitution alone; nor is a constitution the whole of social life. And second, because here, as elsewhere,²⁰ Schmitt sees no tension or fundamental contradiction between dictatorship and democracy, and even states that dictatorship is possible only on democratic foundations (Verfassungslehre, 236–37) in distinction to the republican but hardly democratic earlier theory of the commissarial dictatorship. The key here, obviously, is an understanding of democracy in plebiscitary terms as a fundamentally public possibility of acclamation. But most importantly, third, because the newer conception of constituent power is such that all the elements are still there that require dictatorship: the friend-enemy conception of the political requiring “the extraction of the people from the people,” the unclarity of the will, the disorganization of its agent, the possibility of error and falsification on the one hand, and the indivisibility, purity, creativity, incapability of error of the people’s ideal body on the other. I would even say finally that the need for a disguise for a fundamentally authoritarian politics was there in both texts. Originally this need was answered by the Roman concept of dictatorship, but in spite of Schmitt’s notable and sophisticated scholarly effort, this remained suspicious because of his own new concept of sovereign dictatorship, as well as the stubborn, more modern meaning of the same term as a permanent regime that Schmitt was in any case closer to conceding in the Verfassungslehre.²¹ There, the theologically constructed de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Power to the People? Populism, Insurrections, Democratization
• Part I: The People and Populism
• Part II: Global Populism
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index