240510 VO Thinking with the People: Theories of Populism (P2) (2023S)

In recent years, the concept of "populism" has regained analytical relevance across social sciences, despite the long standing rejections of it as either too simplistic or as a synonym for nationalist crowds and right-wing demagoguery. Thus, immense theories have been produced about left-wing and right-wing populist movements, their “autocratic” and “democratic” versions, as well as about how populist politics gets reshaped amidst neoliberalism, digitalisation and environmental crisis. Starting from this variety, this course examines popular and populist politics by focusing on how the figure of “the people” has been conjured in different social movements and formations, as well as by analysing how it has been rendered by competing social theories. As William Mazzarella has put it, anthropology has always been a populist discipline inasmuch as it saw itself as speaking in the name of the “people” itself. And yet, like populism, anthropology was not always willing to give away its commitment to a liberal consensus that renders populism as deficient. In this “democracy’s paradox”, as some have put it, populism has a chance for dislodging some of the crucial assumptions about how persons should be tied into a social totality. By looking at various social science theories in concert with ethnographies of popular engagement, this course examines how populist unity is constructed out of differences, and what can anthropological theory that thinks “with” the people, and not just “for” them, look like.

The course starts by examining Peter Worsley’s understanding of the role of populism in anticolonial struggles for liberation, as well as with Canovan’s analysis of the usage of the “people” notion in nineteenth century Russian narodniki movement and in the United States. We then step into analysis of the role of articulation of shared common sense as explored in the post-Marxist works of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, and then explore more recent anthropological reactions for or against them. Some of other sessions explore the distinctions between autocratic and democratic populism (Stuart Hall’s writings on the rise of Thatcherism in Britain), the role of leaders in Argentinian Peronism and other Latin American movements, the Red Shirts movement in Thailand, as well as competing understandings of popular mobilisation in communist revolutions in post-WWII Eastern Europe. Ethnographies that we will cover also examine the articulation of workers’ movements with right-wing, digitalisation of “people’s will” through algorithms in Italy, Indian elections culture, and the rise of agrarian and eco-populisms.

By the end of the course, the students should:
1) Have a deeper understanding of different shapes that popular actions can take, the way they mobilise, and the way they create internal conflicts
2) Understand the main rifts in social theories about populism, and have critical awareness of everyday disparagements of populist reason;
3) Explore both the “multitude” in populist crowds and the ways they strive to achieve unity, by examining the roles of gender, class, race and age;
4) Recognize how populism is, in Worsley’s definition of it, a dimension of all politics.