EL SACRO IMPERIO ROMANO

What these considerations show is the fact that there is an unavoidable paradox of democracy. We have already affirmed that the ‘paradox of politics’²⁴ is given by the indetermination of ‘who’ constitutes the people. More precisely, it consists in a sort of vacuum, derived from the mechanism of abstraction democratic subjectivity has entered. As far as it has been argued up to now, populism makes this emptiness visible and, at once, attempts to fill this vacuum. As we have seen, while formal and proceduralist liberal approaches assume this emptiness, populism tends to supply a substantial-ontological answer to the ‘who’ of politics – or, more accurately, states that this ontological trends (in the form of collective identifications) is somehow inevitable. Populism’s first aim, then, consists in filling out the empty space of democracy (Laclau, 2005a: 168), and liberal approaches have stressed the potential danger of this operation. What is clear is that there is a fundamental problem within democracy, and it is related to the constitution of the people.

While claiming for ‘the people’ is a way of filling this emptiness, liberal theory, for its part, overstates the historical interpretation of the constitution and legitimacy of the people as a historical event, rather focusing almost exclusively on the legitimacy of government²⁵.

Drawing on Panizza’s advice to distinguish ‘populism in the streets’ from

‘populism in power’ (2000: 190), Urbinati argues that populism in its nascent form can play a democratizing role, insofar as it often leads to mobilization and helps the critique of existent state of affairs, and forms of political representation. However, once in power populism can have significant

24 Certainly not the only paradox, but perhaps one of the deepest and unsolvable paradoxes of politics.

25 An interesting argument has been advanced in this sense by Sofia Näsström who underlines the shortcoming of the liberal interpretation in current debates around political and democratic legitimacy, in so far as it does not account well for the constitution of ‘the people’, considered as merely a contigent and historical event. (2007:

negative effects on democracy. Populism, we have underlined, competes with representative democracy on the very meaning of representation. Since its aim is to reach a more genuine identification between the represented and the representatives, populism operates through a process of people's unification, understood as a better form of representation. Here, the question of leadership is of central importance. The central figure of the leader is indeed a core aspect for every theorist of populism: populism and the politics of personality go hand with hand. This also leads us to the fact that, while there is certainly a process of polarization of the social and the political field, there is also a process of verticalization, brought about by the presence of a charismatic leader. Again, this move has been interpreted as a radical challenge to representative democracy (Urbinai, 2014: 155). Following Rosanvallon’s argument (2006), Urbinati argues that populism can lead to the most devastating corruption of democracy, since it radically downturns representative institutions, and drastically polarizes the social realm, depicting democracy essentially as a conflict between two different and potentially hegemonic positions that merge the plurality of opinions into two antagonistic blocs.

At any rate, beyond the concrete judgment on the matter, what all perspectives recognise is the fact that, whereas normatively the act of filling the vacuum can be dangerous, at the same time it is an essential – and inevitable – process that belongs to the democratic process. Analogously to the

‘redemptive’ aspect of modern politics underlined by Canovan (1999), the filling of the vacuum is inherent in the idea of popular sovereignty, and belongs to the idea of the ‘will of the people’ as the foundation of any legitimate action. As we have already partly seen through the example of the anti-austerity movements, redemption resonates with a series of elements, brought to the forefront by other scientific traditions: the perception of an injustice, identity formation – specifically the democratic subjectivity –, and the transformation of all this in action.

Within populist discourse, in fact, ‘the will of the people’ is generally interpreted as belonging to two ideas: political majoritarianism and moral authenticity. The invocation of authenticity and ordinariness is a key aspect of populism’s appeal to the people. In this vein, this populist operation towards authenticity would resonate with what Paul Taggart (2000: 95) has called

‘heartland’. Dealing with the slippery concept of ‘the people’, Taggart makes use of this term as a mythical ideal of a given population, an ‘imagined community’. In fact, populists seek to emphasise their physical proximity to the people and distance from the elites, and portray themselves as those who resonate with the reason, emotions and ‘truth’ of the ordinary people. ‘The people’ is conceived of as a homogeneous entity, and all ‘ordinary’ men and women have a shared interest in their opposition to the elite.

Although the critique that liberalism raises towards populism affirms that there is an intrinsic danger in a politics that relies on a charismatic leader who invigorates ‘harmful’ emotions such as resentment and anger, still emotional factors play a fundamental role. Authenticity, in this sense, becomes a pivotal axe around which other emotional dynamics converge and contribute in the construction of the identity formation. Moreover, as we have seen, recent anti-austerity movements resonates with a populist ‘move’, bringing into play a manifest use of the emotional dimension, and polarizing the political field in opposed blocs. The aim is, as we have argued, is to fill the emptiness of ‘the people’.

In the previous chapter we have focused on the discursive level, aiming at

‘registering’ the role of emotions in the essential contestability of political concepts – especially those related to the idea and practice of democracy –, here we have grounded the theoretical reflection in populism and democratic theory. We have seen that even within political theories the articulation of a political discourse takes place around what we can call empty signifiers.

Liberal and radical perspectives tend to fill such emptiness, and are therefore in a ‘articulatory’ struggle for the ‘matter’ of these empty signifiers. Anti-austerity movements, resonating with these debates, somehow represent an attempt to fill the empty signifiers of popular sovereignty and democracy.

5. Conclusion

In this chapter we have focused on a problematic horizon that recent anti-austerity movements bring to the forefront: the uneasy relationship between populism and democracy. We have outlined the theoretical and empirical consequences involved, presenting different perspectives and approaches of analysis. Taking up the inquiry of Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser – and their question about the threatening or as a corrective nature of populism for democracy –, we have dealt with the intellectual tradition that sees populism as a threat to liberal democracy, to the extent that it damages some of its core values. At the same time we have highlighted the positive assessments offered by those who maintain that populism is an essential aspect of any political articulation.

Our argument was intended to show the inner, and fundamental tension in the relationship between democracy and populism. Particularly drawing on recent literature on the matter, we have focused on the ‘paradoxes’ of democracy, as well as on the location and function of ‘the people’. Moreover, although from a normative point of view, liberal criticisms have the merit of underlying some inaccuracies of populist theory, we affirm that it partly fails to capture the role of emotions within politics – and the way in which they operate in the discursive filling of the vacuum of democracy. Indeed, as we have partly shown through our discursive analysis of recent anti-austerity mobilizations, emotions have an evocative role in the struggle for popular sovereignty; a role that formal approaches hardly grasp. Nonetheless, different kinds of analyses,

such as those of Canova, Urbinati, and Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, contribute to the analytical task of clarifying the extent and the cogency of contemporary political theories and their usefulness in the understanding of the current phenomena we have studied.

Therefore, in order to continue our research, in the next chapter we will return to the normative questions about the role of emotions in the democratic domain. Particular attention will be paid to the agonistic approach – developed by a series of authors, and especially by Chantal Mouffe –, which represents an interesting normative standpoint on this matter.

Chapter 7. Agonism and the role of passions: conflict, populism, and the