
- This event has passed.
Pedro Pinheiro // Left-Wing Populism: What People?
October 31, 2024 @ 15:00 - 17:00

Bio: Pedro Pinheiro is a PhD researcher at CEPS. His research project is entitled “Left-wing populism: an investigation on a subversive dissent”, and is supervised by Professor Giuseppe Ballacci (University of Minho) and co-supervised by Alexandre Franco de Sá (University of Coimbra). His research interests are wide inside the fields of political philosophy, so that would include populism, representation, history of ideas, sovereignty, constituent power, antagonism, agonistic democracy, liberal democracy.
Abstract: In response to the current crisis of the democratic left, Chantal Mouffe suggests that populism offers a way for the left to advance and deepen democracy. I argue, however, that the way in which left-wing populism conceives of “the people” undermines the very concept of popular sovereignty and makes it impossible to think of “the people” in democratic terms. This paper situates the populist notion of “the people” within the historical context of popular sovereignty in order to highlight its undemocratic tendencies. Specifically, I argue that left-wing populism’s approach to representation erases any meaningful existence of the people as sovereign. Let’s see how my argument gets structured. The left populist dynamics, marked by an anti-essentialism that sees society as fluid and open, sees “the people” as a collection of particles that can be assembled and disassembled without any pre-existing model. This leads to the disintegration of the concept of the people, which arises from the rejection of sovereignty, the assumption that there are no pre-political societies, and the belief that each individual is simply a unit of interest driven by an insatiable desire (Spinoza’s conatus). In the absence of an essentialised sovereignty, of a pre-political dynamic and with the elevation of the status of passions, individuals become agents of public discontent, forming an imaginary demos through discursive-affective formations centred on demands or a leader who embodies “the people” as an ever-shifting emotional identity dependent on its opposite for a definition.Since “the people” are seen as having no inherent essence, their unity in left-wing populism exists only in the relationship between the representative and the contingently represented. “The represented depends on the representative for the constitution of his or her own identity” (Laclau, 2007: 158) (“¡Chávez ya no soy yo! ¡Chávez es un pueblo! Chávez somos millones, tú también eres Chávez.”). The limitations of reducing the concept of “the people” to mere contingency can be seen in three keyways. First, by focusing on the struggle against established power by an indeterminate constituent power defined by its leader, left-wing populism relies on political polarisation to create “the people”. Second, it moralises politics, giving the people a moral and epistemological status as inherently good, just, oppressed and victimised, as if their demands and identities represent truth and ethics. Third, its emphasis on identity-based activism elevates race, gender and sex to essential political attributes, distancing left-wing populism from liberalism while marginalising opponents who fall outside its narrow definition of democratic pluralism. This session will contour the theory behind left-wing populism and expose its undemocratic foundations. Ultimately, this populist conception of “the people” not only prevents the hypothesis of representation, but also weakens liberal democracy’s ability to uphold the very rights and freedoms that populism claims to champion. In this session, left-wing populism is portrayed as a strategy that does not seek equality, but rather power.