Populism. Benjamin Moffitt
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Название: Populism

Автор: Benjamin Moffitt

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Афоризмы и цитаты

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isbn: 9781509534340

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СКАЧАТЬ anarchism, and fascism. For those who had worked on populism for years, usually toiling away in the subfields of area studies, comparative politics, party politics or political theory, this was quite a surprise.

      The popularity of the term has been something of a double-edged sword, however. While the expansion of the field is in many ways most welcome, with new insights and methods being brought to bear on the topic from fields including political psychology, political communications and media studies, it is also true that populism ‘has become the buzzword of the year mostly because it is very often poorly defined and wrongly used’ – not only in popular discussions, but in academic discussions as well – as leading scholar of populism Cas Mudde (2017b) put it in the Guardian. As a consequence, newcomers to the topic may be understandably confused by the plethora of bad definitions that plague the term: where does one even begin, if you want to understand populism? Is it synonymous with racism? Is it left wing or right wing? Is it the same as authoritarianism? Is it good or bad for democracy? How are we supposed to make sense of this mess?

      What makes this study different from other introductory texts on the topic of populism that have been released in recent years is that it offers the first accessible introduction to populism as a concept in political theory. While other texts have tended to lead through a focus on empirical data, theory a secondary concern, here the key conceptual battles over the meaning and normative content of populism remain primary, through focus on the arguments of such influential thinkers as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Cas Mudde, Jan-Werner Müller and Margaret Canovan. The aim is to demonstrate that debates about populism are never just about the cases at hand (for example, whether Trump is a menace to democracy or not), but rather that these debates and questions act as a prism through which key assumptions and normative arguments about contemporary democracy itself are played out in a rough-and-tumble style. In a time characterised by ‘the global rise of populism’ (Moffitt 2016), it is important we get to terms with what is truly at stake in these debates.

      But never fear: this book is not just about what different scholars have argued about when it comes to populism. It assumes that you are reading it because you are probably interested in real-world political developments that have been subsumed under the heading of ‘populism’ in recent years, and hence it draws on evocative examples of populism across the globe, primarily from the last two decades, to illustrate, flesh out, challenge and make sense of the conceptual arguments at play. It should be noted that the book’s primarily contemporary focus means that it does not attempt to read populism back into history – say, by looking at the role of the demos in ancient Athens – but rather chooses to concentrate its attention on what has actually been called (or called itself) populist, given that this is presumably what the reader is most interested in at this particular, ‘populist’ moment.

      In order to work towards these outlined goals, the book is structured to introduce you to the core definitional debates at play in the literature on populism, before moving on to central normative and ideological debates about populism’s relationship to other core concepts in political theory. It proceeds as follows.

      The following three chapters explore populism’s relationship to other key ‘isms’ at the core of debates in contemporary political theory: nationalism, nativism, socialism and liberalism. Chapter 3 addresses the relationship between populism, nationalism and nativism, which are commonly conflated in the academic literature or treated as synonymous terms in popular discussions. However, this chapter argues that populism and nationalism, while both drawing on the key signifier ‘the people’, adopt different characterisations of ‘the people’ and ultimately target different enemies. To explore this situation, the chapter examines how right- and left-wing populists draw on nationalism in distinct ways: it argues that left-wing populists tend to use a civic form of nationalism, whereas right-wing populists tend to use an ethnic one – or what might better be understood as nativism. In making this argument, the chapter also examines cases of populism that do not fit into the ‘national’ box – including municipal and regional subtypes of populism at a subnational level (e.g. the cases of Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford, and of Lega Nord (Northern League) in Italy) and international and transnational populism at a supranational level (e.g. the cooperation between populists in Europe and Latin America, and the transnational populist case of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) – and shows that the association between nationalism and populism, or even between populism and the national, is far from automatic.