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The Populist Century. Pierre RosanvallonЧитать онлайн книгу.

The Populist Century - Pierre  Rosanvallon


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a theory of democracy, a mode of representation, a politics and a philosophy of economics, and a regime of passions and emotions. The conception of the people, based on the distinction between “them” and “us,” is the element that has been most often analyzed. I shall enrich the usual description, however, first by shoring it up with an analysis of the tension between the people as a civic body and the people as a social body, and second by showing how the term “people” has acquired a renewed capacity to shape the social world in an age of individualism based on singularities. The populist theory of democracy is based, for its part, on three elements: a preference for direct democracy (illustrated by the glorification of the referendum process); a polarized and hyper-electoralist vision of the sovereignty of the people that rejects intermediary bodies and aims to domesticate non-elective institutions (such as constitutional courts and independent authorities); and an understanding of the general will as capable of expressing itself spontaneously. The populist conception of representation is in turn linked with the foregrounding of the figure of a “leader standing for the people,” an individual who manifests a perceptible quality of embodiment, as a remedy for the existing state of unsatisfactory representation. National protectionism is another constitutive element of the populist ideology, moreover, provided that it is understood as not limited to economic policy. National protectionism is in fact more deeply inscribed in a sovereignist vision of reconstructing the political will and ensuring the security of a population. The economic sphere is thus in this respect eminently political. Finally, the political culture of populism is explicitly attached to the mobilization of a set of emotions and passions whose importance is recognized and theorized here. I shall distinguish among emotions related to intellection (destined to make the world more readable through recourse to what are essentially conspiracy narratives), emotions related to action (rejectionism), and emotions related to status (the feeling of being abandoned, of being invisible). Populism has recognized the role of affects in politics and used them in pioneering ways, going well beyond the traditional recipes for seduction. Once the ideal type of populism has been fleshed out on the basis of these five elements, we shall examine the diversity of populisms, taking particular care to analyze the distinction between populisms on the left and those on the right.

      Does populism have a history? While the answer to a question formulated in such general terms can only be in the affirmative, it must immediately be qualified, for that history can be conceptualized in three very different ways. First, one can simply consider the history of the word “populism”: this is the simplest approach and the one most commonly encountered. I shall wait to present its essential elements in an annex to this book, for it contributes relatively little to an understanding of our present situation. The word has in fact been used in three different contexts that are entirely unrelated to one another and only weakly related to what populism has come to mean today.

      A decade later, it was in America that a People’s Party, whose supporters were commonly labeled populists, saw the light of day. This movement for the most part mobilized the world of small farmers on the Great Plains who were on the warpath against the big railroad companies and the big banks to which they had become indebted. The movement met with a certain degree of success in the early 1890s, but it never managed to reach a national audience, despite its resonant denunciation of corruption in politics and its call for a more direct democracy. (These themes were beginning to emerge everywhere in the country; they eventually gave rise to the Progressive Movement, which succeeded in developing a whole set of political reforms – the organization of primaries, the possibility of recalling elected officials, the recourse to referendums by popular initiative – that would be implemented in the Western states.) The People’s Party was an authentic popular movement, but it remained confined to a geographically circumscribed agricultural world; it failed to extend its appeal to working-class voters. None of the American populists appears to have been aware, moreover, of the earlier use of the term in Russia.

      The word made its third appearance in France in 1929, in an entirely different and completely unrelated context. The “Manifesto of the Populist Novel” published that year was a strictly literary event: in the tradition of the naturalist movement, the manifesto urged French novelists to focus more on depicting popular milieus. Forerunners such as Émile Zola and contemporaries such as Marcel Pagnol and Eugène Dabit were evoked in support of this literary populism. There were no interactions at all between this third “populist” movement and either of its predecessors, nor did any of the three prefigure contemporary uses of the term populism, contrary to what ill-informed references sometimes suggest.


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