Abstract
Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason is written in a way that renders its subject matter a continuation, enhancement and confirmation of his post-Gramscian theory of hegemony. Hegemony is the medium through which populism unfolds and it is often difficult to tell them apart. I address some conceptual knots in Laclau’s arguments. Among them, the problems of using crises as a precondition for populism, of describing the populist plebs as the sole legitimate people, of looking at populism as an analog of all politics and of posing the notion of “demand” as the basic unit of analysis of all politics. I also discuss the claim that the symbolic unification of the group around an individuality is inherent in the formation of a people.
An earlier version of this chapter was published in Constellations, 17(3): 488–497. This is an expanded and more developed take on Laclau’s theory of populism.
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Arditi, B. (2022). Populism Is Hegemony Is Politics? Ernesto Laclau’s Theory of Populism. In: Oswald, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Populism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80803-7_3
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