Populism’s analytical elusiveness stems from theory’s own limited tools

Evidence

I would like, right from the beginning, to advance a hypothesis which will guide our theoretical exploration: that the impasse that Political Theory experiences in relation to populism is far from accidental, for it is rooted in the limitation of the ontological tools currently available to political analysis; that ‘populism’, as the locus of a theoretical stumbling block, reflects some of the limits inherent in the ways in which Political Theory has approached the question of how social agents ‘totalize’ the ensemble of their political experience. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 9

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Dichotomous simplification and imprecision are the very condition of political action — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 62; Moral condemnation has driven supposedly objective analyses of populism — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 58; Populism is social democracy in times of group disorganization — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 297 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The theory-empirics contamination visible in populism is the essence of politics #expands (0.80) — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 440