Ernesto Laclau — On Populist Reason

64 published claims from this book.

• A class becomes a people when its name outweighs its concept.
• A people fails to emerge under both excessive difference and total equivalence
• A people imposed homogenously from power is radical but never populist
• An empty signifier can be captured and reinscribed by opposing sectors
• An entirely empty signifier yields fragile popular unity held by leader love alone
• Any antagonistic class must internally bear something of the lumpenproletariat.
• Capitalist domination is hegemonic construction, not self-deriving logic.
• Class antagonism cannot be deduced from the concept of capital.
• Class is a contingent articulation of demands, not an ultimate core.
• Constructing a people reveals representation as the primary terrain of social objectivity
• Counter-hegemony works by reattaching emptied signifiers to their original meanings.
• Crowd theory’s insights only failed due to rigid dichotomies
• Defeated populism is absorbed hierarchically into the ruling order
• Demand meanings get fixed only through hegemonic struggles over frontiers.
• Democracy and populism both depend on producing an empty signifier
• Dichotomous simplification and imprecision are the very condition of political action
• Discourse fuses language and action, dissolving any ideology-movement split
• Dissolving certainty may usher a fully political era rather than politics’ end
• Empty signifiers cannot be reduced to any concept they name.
• Ethnopopulism collapses the plebs-populus distinction that general populism requires.
• Fascism becomes intelligible only when condemnation yields to explanation.
• Freud allowed groups to gain the individual’s traits through organization
• Freud defined groups by shared object replacing the ego ideal
• Freud resolved the social bond as brotherly identification plus father-love
• Group unity dissolves as members’ lived demands grow heterogeneous.
• History is discontinuous hegemonic succession, not teleological advance.
• Ideas spread only across terrain prepared by prior slow imitation
• Ideological emptiness in populism is itself a performative act with social rationality
• Internationalist uniformity prevented communist parties from becoming populist.
• Le Bon identified affirmation, repetition, and contagion as crowd persuasion devices
• Le Bon saw word-image dissociation as a perversion of language, not inherent to it
• Leaders are accepted only when embodying features shared with followers
• Liberalism and democracy are only contingently articulated, not necessarily linked
• Longer equivalential chains make the enemy’s identity less stable.
• Marginal groups gain a political will only through representation itself
• Mass-society theory evolved by reconciling homogeneity with differentiation
• Moral condemnation has driven supposedly objective analyses of populism
• Naming heterogeneous demands performatively creates their unity.
• No social group has an a priori privileged revolutionary role.
• Populism expresses ambivalence toward industrial modernity from its periphery
• Populism is a permanent possibility of political structuration, not a deviance
• Populism’s analytical elusiveness stems from theory’s own limited tools
• Populist reason is political reason itself, not a deviant form.
• Populists promised rival sectors opposing economic remedies simultaneously
• Rational self-interest calculation presupposes a defined identity
• Rationalist social science systematically demotes affect in identity formation.
• Repeated assertions eventually become believed because their authorship is forgotten
• Representation transforms the identity of those represented, not merely transmits their will
• Rhetorical devices become instruments of social rationality, not mere decoration
• Rulers can make odious things acceptable simply by renaming them
• Seizing power destroys the ambiguity that sustained a leader’s unifying role
• Socialists avoided the word crowd, favoring collective solidarity instead
• Suggestion was an unexplained mechanism that supposedly explained everything about crowds
• Taine denied social goals could explain revolutionary crowd violence
• The lumpenproletariat’s scandal is that its identity depends on articulation.
• The people emerges through an act creating new order.
• The people is constituted politically, not given sociologically.
• The political act is divided between ontic content and ontological function.
• The proletariat’s historical insider status required expelling the lumpenproletariat as outsider.
• The theory-empirics contamination visible in populism is the essence of politics
• Typical populist movements blend egalitarian and authoritarian elements
• Unaffirmed assertions can express truths incommensurable with dominant discourse
• Universalist populisms are possible when demands cut across ethnic identities.
• Worker demands arise from outside capital’s own logic.