Even setting aside the ways in which Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man introduces questions that he himself pursued in his subsequent thirty years of wide-ranging scholarship, it is remarkable howmany topics in academic debates of the following generation are present in its pages. Fukuyama focused on Hegel’s (or “Hegel-Kojève’s”, as he sometimes names the hybrid theorist of most interest to him) theory of recognition in a book published contemporaneously with work by both Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth that madeHegelian recognition a central theme in political theory. But there are also, for example, discussions of the democratic peace, the limits of so-called realism in international relations, and Kant’s call for a federation of republics. These anticipate work by John Rawls a few years later, and the subsequent literature about relationships within the community of liberal democracies and between that community and the rest of the world; they also anticipate the enthusiastic visions of the European Union in the 1990s and 2000s. There are also pre-Robert Putnam worries about the decline of civil society and associational life. And, of course, the misremembered version of Fukuyama’s thesis both influenced and became a synecdoche for liberal democratic triumphalism in politics and political science alike through the
{"title":"World Without End","authors":"Jacob T. Levy","doi":"10.1086/721673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721673","url":null,"abstract":"Even setting aside the ways in which Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man introduces questions that he himself pursued in his subsequent thirty years of wide-ranging scholarship, it is remarkable howmany topics in academic debates of the following generation are present in its pages. Fukuyama focused on Hegel’s (or “Hegel-Kojève’s”, as he sometimes names the hybrid theorist of most interest to him) theory of recognition in a book published contemporaneously with work by both Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth that madeHegelian recognition a central theme in political theory. But there are also, for example, discussions of the democratic peace, the limits of so-called realism in international relations, and Kant’s call for a federation of republics. These anticipate work by John Rawls a few years later, and the subsequent literature about relationships within the community of liberal democracies and between that community and the rest of the world; they also anticipate the enthusiastic visions of the European Union in the 1990s and 2000s. There are also pre-Robert Putnam worries about the decline of civil society and associational life. And, of course, the misremembered version of Fukuyama’s thesis both influenced and became a synecdoche for liberal democratic triumphalism in politics and political science alike through the","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"802 - 809"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44884744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The history of Western political theory, Norman Jacobson wrote, is a history of “various structures of solace.” Beginning with the ancient Greeks and persisting through the modern era, canonical works evinced a recognizable “rhythm,” despite other deeply discordant features: occasioned by worldly crises, they aimed first to stoke fear in readers—fear the authors attributed to specific political conditions—and then offered a comforting “resolution,” a vision of sound public order that had vanquished, or at least properly managed, “men’s dread.” This pattern of thought and expression was disturbed, Jacobson argued, by the unprecedented disasters of the twentieth century. The brutal realities of world war, totalitarianism, and nuclear weaponry could be counted upon to provoke fear, but these collective experiences seemed to resist assimilation into any, even the most creative or carefully wrought, “structure of solace.” When Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man appeared in 1992, however, it announced itself as an anachronistic project, proudly out of synch with what Fukuyama called the “pessimism” of the times. While the “deepest thinkers” had concluded that there was no such thing, Fukuyamamade the case for a “Universal History of mankind,” reviving an older form of theorizing that had been thrown into question by the devastating events of the twentieth century. Fukuyama’s broadlyHegelian approach posited a “single, coherent, evolutionary process”moving
{"title":"The Last Human","authors":"Ella Myers","doi":"10.1086/721671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721671","url":null,"abstract":"The history of Western political theory, Norman Jacobson wrote, is a history of “various structures of solace.” Beginning with the ancient Greeks and persisting through the modern era, canonical works evinced a recognizable “rhythm,” despite other deeply discordant features: occasioned by worldly crises, they aimed first to stoke fear in readers—fear the authors attributed to specific political conditions—and then offered a comforting “resolution,” a vision of sound public order that had vanquished, or at least properly managed, “men’s dread.” This pattern of thought and expression was disturbed, Jacobson argued, by the unprecedented disasters of the twentieth century. The brutal realities of world war, totalitarianism, and nuclear weaponry could be counted upon to provoke fear, but these collective experiences seemed to resist assimilation into any, even the most creative or carefully wrought, “structure of solace.” When Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man appeared in 1992, however, it announced itself as an anachronistic project, proudly out of synch with what Fukuyama called the “pessimism” of the times. While the “deepest thinkers” had concluded that there was no such thing, Fukuyamamade the case for a “Universal History of mankind,” reviving an older form of theorizing that had been thrown into question by the devastating events of the twentieth century. Fukuyama’s broadlyHegelian approach posited a “single, coherent, evolutionary process”moving","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"771 - 780"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46372149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The cosmopolitan character of liberalism has been debated since its beginnings. The status of mercantilism, colonialism, and market relations is central to this debate. While most scholars agree that among eighteenth-century thinkers in the liberal tradition, Adam Smith is remarkably anti-colonial on both moral and economic grounds, they do not engage his theory of taste as part of his normative critique of the mercantilist and colonial projects and argument for free trade. Smith’s theory of taste, largely developed in Theory of Moral Sentiments and History of Astronomy, highlights the importance he placed on connecting with distant others despite the limitations of sympathy. I argue that for Smith, aesthetic judgment acts as an impetus to moral judgment because taste can overcome barriers to sympathy. However, taste has a dual-nature in Smith’s political economy. Bad taste widens the sympathetic gap. I show that the framework of taste in Smith’s moral theory applied to mercantilism and colonization demonstrates that substituting poor aesthetic judgment—love of order instead of true beauty—for sympathy objectifies distant others and prevents them from developing moral judgment through freely engaging in the market and sympathetic interaction.
{"title":"Adam Smith’s Cosmopolitan Liberalism: Taste, Political Economy, and Objectification","authors":"B. Wolf","doi":"10.1086/721233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721233","url":null,"abstract":"The cosmopolitan character of liberalism has been debated since its beginnings. The status of mercantilism, colonialism, and market relations is central to this debate. While most scholars agree that among eighteenth-century thinkers in the liberal tradition, Adam Smith is remarkably anti-colonial on both moral and economic grounds, they do not engage his theory of taste as part of his normative critique of the mercantilist and colonial projects and argument for free trade. Smith’s theory of taste, largely developed in Theory of Moral Sentiments and History of Astronomy, highlights the importance he placed on connecting with distant others despite the limitations of sympathy. I argue that for Smith, aesthetic judgment acts as an impetus to moral judgment because taste can overcome barriers to sympathy. However, taste has a dual-nature in Smith’s political economy. Bad taste widens the sympathetic gap. I show that the framework of taste in Smith’s moral theory applied to mercantilism and colonization demonstrates that substituting poor aesthetic judgment—love of order instead of true beauty—for sympathy objectifies distant others and prevents them from developing moral judgment through freely engaging in the market and sympathetic interaction.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"709 - 733"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44073064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
If Machiavelli was a committed republican, as the dominant interpretations suggest, then why did he heap praise on an oligarchic creditor government that ran the city of Genoa in the fifteenth century? In the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli offers a curious encomium to a remarkable oligarchic institution in Genoa: the Bank of Saint George (Casa di San Giorgio). A creditor association and oldest chartered bank in the world, San Giorgio owned Genoa’s public debt. In return for the credit it extended to the commune, the Casa exercised a striking degree of fiscal, judicial, political, and even military power. This politically unaccountable creditor government with its discretionary powers would seem to violate Machiavelli’s commitments to institutionalized forms of sharing power. This article offers a sustained analysis and historical contextualization of Machiavelli’s remarks about San Giorgio. Drawing on historical research on public debt in Renaissance Italy, I put forward a new hypothesis to explain Machiavelli’s praise for the institution.
如果马基雅维利是一个忠诚的共和主义者，正如主流的解释所暗示的那样，那么他为什么要对15世纪统治热那亚市的寡头债权人政府大加赞扬呢?在《佛罗伦萨历史》一书中，马基雅维利对热那亚一个引人注目的寡头机构——圣乔治银行(Casa di San Giorgio)——进行了奇怪的颂扬。作为债权人协会和世界上最古老的特许银行，圣乔治银行拥有热那亚的公共债务。作为给予公社信用的回报，Casa行使了惊人程度的财政、司法、政治甚至军事权力。这种政治上不负责任的债权人政府拥有自由裁量权，似乎违反了马基雅维利对制度化的权力分享形式的承诺。本文对马基雅维利关于圣乔治的评论进行了持续的分析和历史语境化。根据对意大利文艺复兴时期公共债务的历史研究，我提出了一个新的假设来解释马基雅维利对这一制度的赞扬。
{"title":"A Government of Creditors: Machiavelli on Genoa, the Bank of San Giorgio, and the Financial Oligarchy","authors":"Y. Winter","doi":"10.1086/721231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721231","url":null,"abstract":"If Machiavelli was a committed republican, as the dominant interpretations suggest, then why did he heap praise on an oligarchic creditor government that ran the city of Genoa in the fifteenth century? In the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli offers a curious encomium to a remarkable oligarchic institution in Genoa: the Bank of Saint George (Casa di San Giorgio). A creditor association and oldest chartered bank in the world, San Giorgio owned Genoa’s public debt. In return for the credit it extended to the commune, the Casa exercised a striking degree of fiscal, judicial, political, and even military power. This politically unaccountable creditor government with its discretionary powers would seem to violate Machiavelli’s commitments to institutionalized forms of sharing power. This article offers a sustained analysis and historical contextualization of Machiavelli’s remarks about San Giorgio. Drawing on historical research on public debt in Renaissance Italy, I put forward a new hypothesis to explain Machiavelli’s praise for the institution.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"658 - 683"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42622523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The historical turn in political science has yielded numerous innovations in historical methods, but little in terms of systematic engagement with historical methodologies, understood as the logics of inquiry underlying historical analysis. The lack of engagement with historical methodologies has led to a narrowing of the space for historical inquiry, as scholars are often presented with a binary choice between realist and poststructuralist approaches, with the question of objectivity serving as the intractable divide. To the extent that scholars have carved out a middle ground, it has rested on contextualist approaches, though these too have been vulnerable to the critique of objectivity. In this article, I articulate the principles of a fourth position, rooted in the methodology of Max Weber and the idea of reflexive verstehen (understanding), a mode of investigation which seeks an empathetic understanding of historical subjectivities while foregrounding the researcher’s subjective orientation to the inquiry. The Weberian alternative, I argue, navigates a unique path around the gauntlet of scientific objectivity. It offers the possibility of historical understanding that is rooted in subjective understanding, but by virtue of submitting to a process of evaluation and incorporating an element of reflexivity can claim the status of scientific knowledge. It also enables an “event” driven approach to historical inquiry that expands where we can look for historical knowledge. In doing so it both improves the quality of historical understanding and increases its scope.
{"title":"What Can We Learn from History?: Competing Approaches to Historical Methodology and the Weberian Alternative of Reflexive Understanding","authors":"Amel Ahmed","doi":"10.1086/721563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721563","url":null,"abstract":"The historical turn in political science has yielded numerous innovations in historical methods, but little in terms of systematic engagement with historical methodologies, understood as the logics of inquiry underlying historical analysis. The lack of engagement with historical methodologies has led to a narrowing of the space for historical inquiry, as scholars are often presented with a binary choice between realist and poststructuralist approaches, with the question of objectivity serving as the intractable divide. To the extent that scholars have carved out a middle ground, it has rested on contextualist approaches, though these too have been vulnerable to the critique of objectivity. In this article, I articulate the principles of a fourth position, rooted in the methodology of Max Weber and the idea of reflexive verstehen (understanding), a mode of investigation which seeks an empathetic understanding of historical subjectivities while foregrounding the researcher’s subjective orientation to the inquiry. The Weberian alternative, I argue, navigates a unique path around the gauntlet of scientific objectivity. It offers the possibility of historical understanding that is rooted in subjective understanding, but by virtue of submitting to a process of evaluation and incorporating an element of reflexivity can claim the status of scientific knowledge. It also enables an “event” driven approach to historical inquiry that expands where we can look for historical knowledge. In doing so it both improves the quality of historical understanding and increases its scope.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"734 - 763"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44050746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic governance typically deploys policy frameworks linked to a model of the economy, but how a policy model is established and changes are questions that continue to puzzle analysts. The authority of the neoliberal model has been explained by the durability of the policy ecology of professional economists and policymakers, but this paper shows that a wider lens on agents and a longer time horizon reveals the emergence of an alternative policy model since the Great Recession that has influenced the new administration in Washington. This paper adapts arguments from the sociology of fields and movements and from pragmatist theories of action to show how the institutional redoubts of policymaking can be breached. Individuals and groups that institutions frame as passive takers of rules and fillers of roles in fact innovate in their daily lives. Social justice organizations have mobilized this dispersed mundane resource to expand the scope for action, but it required time for social learning and organizational innovation. Since 2009, social justice organizations and allies among unions, think tanks, and foundations have coalesced to win employment policy reforms by state and local governments. Their alternative narrative of an equitable economy has been increasingly adopted by Washington policy experts and the Biden Democratic Party. A key to whether the new configuration engineers a change in the national neoliberal model is the degree to which the new Democratic administration’s decisions are oriented by the equitable growth model.
{"title":"How Policy Models Change: Insurgent Narratives of Policy Authority since the Great Recession","authors":"Stephen Amberg","doi":"10.1086/721232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721232","url":null,"abstract":"Economic governance typically deploys policy frameworks linked to a model of the economy, but how a policy model is established and changes are questions that continue to puzzle analysts. The authority of the neoliberal model has been explained by the durability of the policy ecology of professional economists and policymakers, but this paper shows that a wider lens on agents and a longer time horizon reveals the emergence of an alternative policy model since the Great Recession that has influenced the new administration in Washington. This paper adapts arguments from the sociology of fields and movements and from pragmatist theories of action to show how the institutional redoubts of policymaking can be breached. Individuals and groups that institutions frame as passive takers of rules and fillers of roles in fact innovate in their daily lives. Social justice organizations have mobilized this dispersed mundane resource to expand the scope for action, but it required time for social learning and organizational innovation. Since 2009, social justice organizations and allies among unions, think tanks, and foundations have coalesced to win employment policy reforms by state and local governments. Their alternative narrative of an equitable economy has been increasingly adopted by Washington policy experts and the Biden Democratic Party. A key to whether the new configuration engineers a change in the national neoliberal model is the degree to which the new Democratic administration’s decisions are oriented by the equitable growth model.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"684 - 708"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45349448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scholars researching populism often stress how little consensus there is on a general definition of the term. Depending on the discipline or perspective, definitions can contradict each other, especially when applied to empirical cases. Populism can, for instance, be described as a category of political movement, ideology, strategy, leadership style, form of political communication, and more. Depending on a given perspective, different aspects connected to distinctive dimensions of politics are privileged. This situation gives rise to one crucial question: Are we talking about the same thing? Attempting to overcome disparities in the field, two approaches have been particularly successful in finding a common ground on populism research: the minimal ideational definition as a “thin-centered ideology,” and the ontological notion of populism as a discourse articulation. Although these approaches are useful, they share one limitation: the assumption of coherence (i.e., that populism affects ideology, political communication, and organization form coherently). Looking at empirical cases, it becomes clear that populism can affect each of these dimensions in differentmanners and degrees. Political actors adopting populismmight develop populist communication without necessarily strongly embracing populist ideology or building a populist organization form. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi is a good example for this incoherence since his communication is typically populist, but the ideology adopted is weak in populist content. Neither the minimal nor the ontological approach can account for such incoherence; populism is a multidimensional and gradual phenomenon that does not coherently permeate politics.
{"title":"For a Complex Concept of Populism","authors":"P. Diehl","doi":"10.1086/720076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720076","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars researching populism often stress how little consensus there is on a general definition of the term. Depending on the discipline or perspective, definitions can contradict each other, especially when applied to empirical cases. Populism can, for instance, be described as a category of political movement, ideology, strategy, leadership style, form of political communication, and more. Depending on a given perspective, different aspects connected to distinctive dimensions of politics are privileged. This situation gives rise to one crucial question: Are we talking about the same thing? Attempting to overcome disparities in the field, two approaches have been particularly successful in finding a common ground on populism research: the minimal ideational definition as a “thin-centered ideology,” and the ontological notion of populism as a discourse articulation. Although these approaches are useful, they share one limitation: the assumption of coherence (i.e., that populism affects ideology, political communication, and organization form coherently). Looking at empirical cases, it becomes clear that populism can affect each of these dimensions in differentmanners and degrees. Political actors adopting populismmight develop populist communication without necessarily strongly embracing populist ideology or building a populist organization form. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi is a good example for this incoherence since his communication is typically populist, but the ideology adopted is weak in populist content. Neither the minimal nor the ontological approach can account for such incoherence; populism is a multidimensional and gradual phenomenon that does not coherently permeate politics.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"509 - 518"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45854067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Populism is arguably the defining political phenomenon of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and it also is perhaps the defining academic publishing phenomenon in political science of the same period. An enormous amount of research has been produced on the topic in recent years, but strangely, one important aspect of populism has remained largely ignored: the visual and aesthetic aspects of populism. This is striking, not only as it is widely acknowledged we are living in a world characterized by a “pictorial turn” where images shape our political reality, but also because some of the most salient cases of populism in recent years have used the visual as a core aspect of their appeal: from Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” caps to UKIP’s incendiary anti-migrant billboards to Hugo Chávez’s iconic red beret. Given this context, I make the case for studying the visual politics of populism. I first articulate why images matter in populism, then delineate the benefits of taking into account the visual from the perspectives of the analytical dimensions of populism discussed in this symposium, and outline potential methodological approaches for tackling the visual in future work on populism.
{"title":"Taking Account of the Visual Politics of Populism","authors":"B. Moffitt","doi":"10.1086/719829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719829","url":null,"abstract":"Populism is arguably the defining political phenomenon of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and it also is perhaps the defining academic publishing phenomenon in political science of the same period. An enormous amount of research has been produced on the topic in recent years, but strangely, one important aspect of populism has remained largely ignored: the visual and aesthetic aspects of populism. This is striking, not only as it is widely acknowledged we are living in a world characterized by a “pictorial turn” where images shape our political reality, but also because some of the most salient cases of populism in recent years have used the visual as a core aspect of their appeal: from Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” caps to UKIP’s incendiary anti-migrant billboards to Hugo Chávez’s iconic red beret. Given this context, I make the case for studying the visual politics of populism. I first articulate why images matter in populism, then delineate the benefits of taking into account the visual from the perspectives of the analytical dimensions of populism discussed in this symposium, and outline potential methodological approaches for tackling the visual in future work on populism.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"557 - 564"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43693692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Populism is a political phenomenon that always builds on communication aimed at establishing a close relationship to “the people.” Thus, a transdisciplinary and methodologically transversal analytical approach that combines political theory and linguistics is recommended for its study. Politolinguistics adopts such a perspective. It takes seriously that political action is, for themost part, linguistic and, in the broader sense, multimodal semiotic action. The present essay deals with the basic communicative infrastructure of populism. In order to bridge various strands of populism research and to differentiate themultidimensional approach to populism spelled out by Paula Diehl, I demonstrate that the communicative dimension is at the core of any populism and closely interplays both with the ideological and organizational dimension of the political phenomenon.
{"title":"A Politolinguistic Approach to Populism","authors":"M. Reisigl","doi":"10.1086/720014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720014","url":null,"abstract":"Populism is a political phenomenon that always builds on communication aimed at establishing a close relationship to “the people.” Thus, a transdisciplinary and methodologically transversal analytical approach that combines political theory and linguistics is recommended for its study. Politolinguistics adopts such a perspective. It takes seriously that political action is, for themost part, linguistic and, in the broader sense, multimodal semiotic action. The present essay deals with the basic communicative infrastructure of populism. In order to bridge various strands of populism research and to differentiate themultidimensional approach to populism spelled out by Paula Diehl, I demonstrate that the communicative dimension is at the core of any populism and closely interplays both with the ideological and organizational dimension of the political phenomenon.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"547 - 556"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41531475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
T his essay questions assertions that conceptual debates on populism have for the most part been resolved, and that scholars should focus on empirical re-search to accumulate knowledge. While the cacophony of de fi nitions of the past has been reduced, there is still no agreement on what populism is. There are two broad epistemological approaches. Positivist-oriented scholars consider that populism is a phenomenon and a reality of the social world. They have developed minimal de fi nitions that can travel across time and space and de fi ne populism in contrast to what it is not. Non-positivist scholars argue that populism is a heuristic of the scholarly community, and that theory co-constitutes empirical reality. They refuse to reduce the complexity of populism to a de fi nition of one or two sentences, 1 argue that populism is a gradation and not a binary concept, 2 and contend that because the term is used to make normative arguments about democracy, citizenship, or national belonging it will continue to be contested.
{"title":"The Complex Constructions of the People and the Leader in Populism","authors":"C. de la Torre","doi":"10.1086/719920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719920","url":null,"abstract":"T his essay questions assertions that conceptual debates on populism have for the most part been resolved, and that scholars should focus on empirical re-search to accumulate knowledge. While the cacophony of de fi nitions of the past has been reduced, there is still no agreement on what populism is. There are two broad epistemological approaches. Positivist-oriented scholars consider that populism is a phenomenon and a reality of the social world. They have developed minimal de fi nitions that can travel across time and space and de fi ne populism in contrast to what it is not. Non-positivist scholars argue that populism is a heuristic of the scholarly community, and that theory co-constitutes empirical reality. They refuse to reduce the complexity of populism to a de fi nition of one or two sentences, 1 argue that populism is a gradation and not a binary concept, 2 and contend that because the term is used to make normative arguments about democracy, citizenship, or national belonging it will continue to be contested.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"529 - 537"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49383225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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