The theory-empirics contamination visible in populism is the essence of politics

Evidence

In the second place, however, if that distinction is actually going to inform concrete analysis, it cannot be considered as a transcendentally fixed entelechy whose presence in concrete situations we simply have to trace, but as a fertile terrain on which concrete analysis and transcendental exploration have to feed each other endlessly. There is no concrete analysis which can be downgraded to the status of empirical research without theoretical impact; conversely, there is no transcendental exploration which is absolutely ‘pure’, without the presence of an excess of what its categories can master – an excess which contaminates the transcendental horizon with an impure empiricism. Populism, for political analysis, is one of the privileged places of emergence of this contamination. In an article full of interest, Margaret Canovan has used Michael Oakshott’s distinction between redemptive and pragmatic politics to characterize the ‘no-terrain’ within which populist politics is constructed. I fully agree with that view; and for reasons that I hope have been made clear enough in the preceding pages, I see this grey area of contamination not as some kind of marginal political phenomenon, but as the very essence of the political. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 440

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Populist reason is political reason itself, not a deviant form. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 444; Populism’s analytical elusiveness stems from theory’s own limited tools — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 9