“Soulless Monsters and Artificial Men”

• In Event: Populism and the American Left

Abstract

This paper reassesses the relationship between populism, intermediary bodies and democracy. Recent scholarship has converged on a stark opposition between the first and the second concepts, with populism consistently figuring as a species of direct or ‘naturalistic’ democracy seemingly opposed to the free interaction of intermediary bodies in pluralist states. Instead, populism seems to favor a ‘democratic monism’ that casts the ‘People-as-One’ (Lefort) and objects to any of the entities planted between individuals and states. Corporations are an inevitable scourge here, since they are units that can only achieve ‘concrete’ agency through an act of abstraction, mediate an individual’s relationship to the state, and weaken the latter’s claim to exclusive sovereignty. Instead of such interference by corporate actors, populists prefer a direct connection between their ‘people’ and a ‘leader’.
Questions arise, however, about the accuracy of this opposition in the face of historical evidence. The nineteenth-century People’s Party, for instance – the first self-declared ‘populist’ movement in modern history – frequently deployed intermediary bodies in their own visions of American statecraft, particularly corporations. I here focus on Populists’ usage of these agencies in co-operative farm organizing and legislative reform. In both fields, Populists sought to recuperate elements of corporate organization (including notions of corporate personality) whilst simultaneously seeking to preserve their democratic accountability. By recuperating the machinery of corporations while not accepting their separation of ‘ownership’ and ‘control’, Populists offered a highly specific answer to the question how individuals’ independence may be preserved in the face of corporate concentration. Finally, I assess the relevance of this tactic in light of recent developments in populism-scholarship

Author

• Anton Jäger, Cambridge University