The People: From Identification to Praxis

• In Event: Conceptions of Collectivity

Abstract

Radical democratic theorists have focused attention in recent years on the theoretical and historical dilemmas surrounding the “politics of peoplehood.” The late Ernesto Laclau went so far as to claim that “constructing a people is the main task of radical politics.” These theoretical debates have taken on a new political salience with the global resurgence of “populist” authoritarianism, on the one hand, and the proliferation of decentralized and egalitarian insurgencies like the French gilets jaunes, on the other. Intrinsic to most of these discussions—sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly—is a reliance on conceptions of political collectivity and collective agency deeply indebted to the theories and mechanisms of identification, whether drawn from semiotics, psychoanalytic theories of group psychology, or the decisionist political existentialism of Carl Schmitt. This reliance provides the theoretical underpinning of the “Jacobin,” “Caesarist,” sovereign, and state-focused preoccupations of much of this work. This paper will excavate the conceptions of political identification that are at once central and theoretically underarticulated in key works of democratic theory focused on the “politics of peoplehood,” whether written by radical democrats like Laclau or prominent liberal constitutionalist critics (Arato, Urbinati, and others). The aim of the paper is to reveal the limitations of this widespread model for conceptualizing political collectivity and collective agency, and to put forward an alternative orientation not captured by its central terms and that has been theoretically developed through the competing orientation of praxis.

Author

• Jason Frank, Cornell University