LOS CAROLINGIOS

Populism, one might argue, attempts to resolve the ‘paradox of politics’ which is determining ‘who’ constitutes the people. (e.g. Frank, 2010: 5) But who are the ‘people’ who form the ultimate source of political authority? No simple answer to this fundamental question can be taken for granted.

Nowadays, the term ‘the people’ has assumed new visibility in recent decades, saturating the grammar of many actors and political phenomena. At least at the European level, the semantics of ‘the people’ is present in the wide ideological-political spectrum (Mény and Surel, 2000), since in both (extreme) right-wing and (extreme) left-wing poles we find examples of this. The ubiquity of the term points to the success of the concept and to its ambiguity.

In fact, ‘the people’ can mean many different things in many different

circumstances (e.g. Canovan, 1981; Mudde, 2004). It can refer, for instance, to peasants, the working class, the electorate, the nation, and so forth.

Moreover, Juan Francisco Fuentes identifies the three dimensions that are intrinsic to the notion of people: the political, the social and the moral dimensions. The political dimension, firstly, is explicit when thinking of the people as representing the sovereign subject and the source of legitimacy. The social dimension, in turn, is reflected in the extent to which the people represent the cluster or set of groups, communities or social classes. Finally, the moral dimension is given as ‘the people’ is seen as made up of different virtues, passions and vices. In this sense, ‘the people’ often represents the natural and the original of a community and is generally given a positive value because it is perceived as something authentic that must be rescued and valued above all other dimensions of social life (Fuentes, 2004: 98).

In this context, it is appropriate to note the problematic value that the term

‘the people’ has always assumed in the political discourse. Indeed, many authors emphasize the polysemic value of the term ‘the people’. Raphael Samuel (1984: 23) notes that the people “is a word whose meaning has as many nuances as applications have the term”. Other authors emphasize the ambiguity and the indetermination of the term: Pierre Rosanvallon (1998: 32) reminds us of the words of Mirabeau in 1789, “le mot peuple signifie nécessairement ou trop ou trop peu […] c’est un mot qui se prêt à tout”;

Margaret Canovan (1984) also underscores the elasticity of the notion of the word ‘the people’. Ernesto Laclau argues that “the people is a concept without a defined theoretical status: despite its frequent use in political discourse, its conceptual precision remains exclusively at the allusive or metaphorical level”

(Laclau, 1977: 165).

What seems clear is that, studying populism and its relationship with democracy means dealing with the question of the ‘who’ of politics. In this

sense one is confronted by the uses and the role of the signifier ‘the people’, and the ways in which it has been articulated and politically theorized throughout time and space, as well as both idealized and demonized. A historical and conceptual reconstruction would certainly shed much light on the variability of the term and its political significance. However, it is impossible for us to offer an exhaustive historical and conceptual picture of the term ‘the people’. We will mainly draw on Canovan’s (2005) seminal contribution, in order to sketch some central aspects of the notion, and its value for the debate we are dealing with.

The definition of the term ‘the people’ is controversial and leads to conceptual ambiguity. “The blurred boundaries of the people reflect conflicts and dilemmas that continue to bedevil democratic politics” (Canova, 2005: 3). In this context, according to Canovan the concept of the people involves two problematic horizons. The first one is that the same term the ‘people’

produces a division between two separated and differentiated communities, ourselves and others. Asking who belongs to the people means interrogating the borders of the political community, thereby defining an inside and an outside of communal space limiting and defining the political subject.

Although it seems clear that the external borders of a state – or a national or regional community – do not automatically correspond to the boundaries of a people, its concept intrinsically needs an external definition. The second question is that internally the situation is as complex as externally. It is evident, at the outset, that the term “has meant both the whole political community and some smaller group within it” (Canovan, 2005: 5), such as the excluded, the poor, and so forth. In this context, is seems accurate to affirm that, throughout history, ‘the people’ has functioned as a sign of the internal division of every political community between a part and a whole, between the few and the many, and those governing and those governed, and so forth.

In sum, an ambiguous political identity that “cannot be included in the whole of which it is a part and […] cannot belong to the set in which it is always

already included. Hence the contradictions and aporias to which it gives rise every time that it is evoked and put into play on the political scene” (Agamben, 1998: 178)

It is also interesting to note that, throughout history, this intrinsic ambiguity of

‘the people’ – and the political theories that operate through it – have caused paradoxical outcomes. On the one hand, appeals to it permitted the elevation of the ‘people’ into the basic democratic subjectivity and allowed the inclusion of the popular strata and their demands within the political community. On the other hand, it stands for the idea of the dangers involved in mass mobilizations as well as the idealization of ‘the people’ as a political subject, and the belief of its factual presence in politics. In this sense Claude Lefort (1988) foresaw the paradoxical risks contained within democratic government, and its aspiration of materializing the sovereign collective – not yet as characterized by pluralism – but as if it were a homogenous actor. In the wake of Tocqueville’s critique of democracy, Lefort thinks that the democratic subject, ‘the people’, is an abstraction – a contentless and unstable notion that is even more abstract than ‘the majority’ – and as such, cannot be assumed as effectively governing itself. In this way the locus of rule in a democracy is void of real people – it is an ‘empty place’ as Lefort calls it:

“Democracy inaugurates the experience of an ungraspable, uncontrollable society in which the people will be said to be sovereign, of course, but whose identity will constantly be open to question, whose identity will remain latent” (Lefort, 1988: 304).

If, with Lefort, one might argue that the emptying of the space of political power is an historical event – he emphasizes this through the example of the French Revolution – it is nonetheless interesting the process of filling this space. Lefort normatively thinks that democracy is especially susceptible to demagogy: since the political power in it is ‘empty’, democracy permanently

party manages to ‘fill’ the empty space by claiming to embody ‘the people’

However, referring to the contemporary debates about populism, Michael Kazin shows that in the context of the American Revolution the idea of “We the people’ initially functioned more as an incantation than a description of a concrete reality, as an empty signifier designating the whole of the community: “it indicated who the ultimate sovereign was but did not specify who was actually to rule the nation” (Kazin, 1998: 13).

Margaret Canovan, for her part, notes the peculiar characteristic of ‘the people’ as sovereign power, and its location between action and myth (2005:

105, 124)²³. If on the one hand the people embodies the founding, mythical idea of a political community that gives life to a legitimate order, on the other hand it is problematic to conceive this same community in action: how can ‘the people’ exercise its sovereignty? Is the representation the only mechanism through which it can act politically?