Populism as a Symptom: Finance Capital and the Volatile Politics of Citizenship

• In Event: Democracy and the Social Question

Abstract

In this paper, I challenge the sharp divide between liberal critics and radical advocates of populism, and call for a shift in perspective. Despite their disagreements, both sides of the current debate tend to focus on extracting formal conceptual properties—such as an aspiration for a unified and homogeneous people—from populism’s various empirical manifestations. In doing so, critics and advocates alike tend to treat populism as a self-contained category which unfolds following its own inner logics independent of surrounding political and socioeconomic conditions. Challenging these tendencies, I suggest that instead of trying to fix populism’s conceptual boundaries, we pay more attention to the conditions that embolden exclusionary claims to “the people” that, à la Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, reject the inherent openness of democratic membership. Schmitt often serves as a reference point in the current debate on populism; both critics and advocates of populism draw on his well-known juxtaposition of liberalism and democracy, albeit in different ways. But contemporary theorists’ purely conceptual appropriation of Schmitt’s theory creates important blind spots. Schmitt’s supposedly conceptual account of democracy’s logics was thoroughly inflected by his substantive concerns about the rise of the working masses and their demand for socioeconomic democratization. Schmitt’s contemporaries clearly recognized this, and they countered his polemic with alternative analyses of what might fuel the politicization of such a belligerent aspiration for a unified people. I articulate these alternative accounts by turning to early twentieth-century critiques of capitalism advanced by such figures as J. A. Hobson, Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, and V. I. Lenin, and especially by examining how Franz Neumann and Hannah Arendt built on those critiques to develop unique political insights.

Author

• Kyong-Min Son, University of Delaware