REVIEWS

Jan-Werner Mller, What Is Populism?

University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia 2016, 16.99, hardback
123 pp, 978 0 8122 4898 2

Marco DEramo

THEY, THE PEOPLE

In the political-science literature on populism, it has long been a common-

place procedure to begin by declaring that no one knows what it is. Fifty
years ago, at a famous conference held at the London School of Economics,
Richard Hofstadter announced as much in the title of his talk, Everyone Is
Talking about Populism, but No One Can Define It, while Isaiah Berlin cau-
tioned against falling prey to a Cinderella complex, the notion that there
exists a shoethe word populismfor which somewhere there must exist
a foot. But once it has been said in every possible way that no one knows
what populism is, suddenlywith scant explanation as to why or how
each thinker knows very well what it is, or rather takes it as given. He or she
offers no robust definition of its characteristics (for the various populisms
are very much in contradiction with one another), or its doctrine (there is no
one populist doctrine) or its political programme (the different populisms
clash with one another on fundamental issues), but focuses instead on the
threats it poses. Jan-Werner Mllers slender work is no exception.
We simply do not have anything like a theory of populism, he announces
at the outset, going on to claim in the next paragraph that his book will help
usthe referent is taken as readrecognize and deal with it. Populism,
Mller explains, cannot be defined by a set of policies, which may be very
diverse, nor by mere opposition to established elites, however common that
may be as a trait, since it is not confined to populists. The true differentia
specifica of populism lie elsewhere, in a constitutive hostility to pluralism

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and all that follows from this. Put simply, populists do not claim We are
the 99 per cent. What they imply instead is We are the 100 per cent.
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In addition, populists always define the people as righteous and morally

pure; anyone who disagrees can be dismissed as immoral and not really
part of the people at all. Populism is, therefore, an exclusionary form of
identity politics. What follows from this is that populism tends to pose a
danger to democracy .
Recognizing, nevertheless, that we are the 100 per cent coincides rather
closely with the founding claim of the social contractwe, the people may
also have its exclusionsMller qualifies further. The general will, properly
understood, requires actual participation by citizens, whereas the populist
divines it on the basis of his or her preconception of the people. Though pop-
ulists may seem to be demanding greater participation, through referenda,
etc., this is in fact undermined by their moralized antipluralism. For inher-
ent in populism is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, in which
the normal presuppositions of democratic discoursecontested meanings
and loyalties, fallibility, the rights of minorities as well as majorities, and
so onare suspended in the name of a presumptive essential homogene-
ity. So once ensconced in government, populists become authoritarian. The
hallmarks of their style in power are three: colonization of the state, mass
clientelism and corruption, and the systematic repression of civil society.
Others may practise the same, but what is distinctive about populists is
that they can do so quite openly. They claim they have a moral justification
for their conduct.
What political forces fall under this description? Mller opensanother
standard move in writings on the P-wordby listing the diverse array of
figures and movements commonly labelled today as populist: Sanders and
Trump, Syriza and Erdoans akp, Podemos and Le Pen, Farage and Occupy
Wall Street, Di Blasio and Geert Wilders, followed by Elizabeth Warren, Jrg
Haider and Viktor Orbn. After a few pages, however, the figures from the
left largely disappear. In practice, the great bulk of the illustrations in What
Is Populism? come from figures and movements of the right. Readers may at
first be surprised to find that Mllers book, in contravention of Anglophone
political-science norms, does not include a name index. But once they have
patiently crafted their own, home-made list of dramatis personae, the asym-
metries become glaring. Jrg Haider, Silvio Berlusconi and the Tea Party all
receive five mentions in the main text, Geert Wilders six, and Recep Tayyip
Erdoan seven. Marine Le Pen is mentioned thrice, while George Wallace
makes eight appearances and Donald Trump twelve. The central protagonist
of Mllers story, Viktor Orbn, appears no fewer than fourteen times. On
the left, there is only the ogre of Chvez.
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Indeed, as Mller himself goes on to explain, many of the features he

ascribes to populism do not apply to the movements of the left. Could the

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harmless Bernie Sanders be a threat to democracy, after all? Who really
thinks the Occupy Wall Street movement promoted an exclusionary identity
politics, or that Syriza suppressed civil society? Have any Podemos mayors
in Spain been indicted for a corrupt mass clientelismand can Di Blasio
really be accused of accepting representative democracy only when he wins,
and rejecting it when others are triumphant? As Mller avers, he will not
be so indiscriminate. Sanders, it turns out, represents a more wholesome
phenomenon, a left-wing egalitarianismperhaps, who knows, a reinven-
tion of Social Democracy. Syriza, while admittedly culpable for a moment,
as Mller put it in the London Review of Books (August 2015), of a high-risk
political strategy that could be described as populist, can now be cleared of
the charge, while Podemos has yet to succumb to any such temptation.
The circularity of (exclusionary) definition and (selective) exemplifica-
tion is patent. In a footnote buried at the back, Mller himself notes in an
unguarded moment that the obvious danger here is circularity: one builds
characteristics one finds politically, morally or even aesthetically distasteful
into ones definition of populism only to find that populism and democracy
are differentor getting a very clear-cut normative picture only by painting
contrasts in a highly partisan way. He proceeds undeterred to do exactly
this. After all, populist is nearly always a term applied by others; virtually no
one defines themselves by that name today, just as no one calls themselves
a terrorist. Eventually, however, Mller is forced to explain that his strained
characterization of populism must exclude the one movement in the history
of the modern West that did actually define itself as populist, the late nine-
teenth-century Peoples Party of the United States. Since the Peoples Party
could also speak of the common or plain people, the adjectives redeeming
it, one of the results of the analysis presented so farcounter-intuitive as it
may seemis that the party in us history that explicitly called itself popu-
list was in fact not populist. Counter-intuitive indeed: we might as well
devise a concept of communism that excluded Marx.
Matters are no better when Mller moves to the region, evidently less
familiar to him, that has produced both the most striking movements and
the most original theorists of what would come to be called populism: Latin
America. Lzaro Cardenasdid he systematically repress civil society?
Getulio Vargas or Juan Pernwhatever their other vices, were they great
moralizers? Mller carefully avoids addressing the problems that historic
figures like these pose for his conceptual grid. Contemporary leaders like
Lula also disappear from view, to prevent reality interfering with Mllers
ideal-typical misconstruction. Chvez is demonized without pretence
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of empirical inquiry, the Bolivarian constitution dismissed as a mere par-

tisan instrument, for example, when it has provided the main framework
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for the organized opposition. Liberals often pride themselves on being to

politics what Popper was to epistemology, the entire elaboration of his Logic
of Scientific Discovery revolving around the idea of falsifiability. Mller takes
self-falsification in his stride. After repeatedly saying that populists are
sworn enemies of pluralism, practice exclusionary identity politics and seek
to limit constitutional rights, he tucks away in an endnote the awkward fact
that Evo Morales, treated elsewhere as yet another Latin American populist,
has attempted an inclusionary approach, not least in drafting a new con-
stitution for Bolivia. His committed constitutionalism offered many new
basic rights (including the right to the good life and rights for nature itself);
Morales also sought to recognize previously excluded minorities by declar-
ing Bolivia a plurinational state.
The admission has no incidence on his argument, whose principle
throughout is avoidance of anything that might unsettle it. Bibliographically,
it is not that Mller has read too narrowly; his references are numerous
enough (in fact, they form in many ways the most instructive and inter-
esting part of his book, at once for what they mention and how they do
so, and for what they dont). But he never confronts the theses of thinkers
who have espoused differing or opposing ideas. Telling, for example, is the
way he ignores the work of a thinker as centrally relevant to his subject as
Ernesto Laclau, who puts in an anodyne appearance just once, in an another
inconspicuous endnote. His construction of populism relies on the very
methodological fail-safe procedure he attributes to it, contending that the
way populists define the people renders their political claims immune to
empirical refutation.
In todays inflated currency, prevailing uses and abuses of the term
have a striking asymmetry: even genuine (neo-) fascists are rarely called
such, but delicately ranked as populists, while anyone to the left of (post-)
social-democracy can also be enrolled as populist, and thereby tainted with
totalitarianism, in yet another demonstration that, notwithstanding myriad
announcements of its demise, the prospect of socialism continues to alarm
rulers rather more than fascism does. Mller, however, does not play this
game. What he writes is:

one implication of the analysis presented in this book is that National

Socialism and Italian Fascism need to be understood as populist move-
mentseven though, I hasten to add, they were not just populist movements
but also exhibited traits that are not inevitable elements of populism as such:
racism, a glorification of violence, and a radical leadership principle.
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Given the exclusionary identity politics, systematic repression of civil

society, and importance of charisma that he does argue are intrinsic to pop-

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ulism, would it be altogether unfair to say that in Mllers eyes, fascism is a
sort of populism-plus? Certainly, the only philosophers he cites to illustrate
populist arguments are the Italian idealist Giovanni GentileFascisms
official theoristand the German philo-Nazi Carl Schmitt, while the exam-
ple he repeatedly uses to fix the identitarian nature of populist politics is
George Wallaces racist inaugural speech as governor of AlabamaIn the
name of the greatest people that ever trod this earth, I say: segregation now;
segregation tomorrow; segregation forever.
Typically, such circular thinking is not the only flaw of political-science
literature on the P-word. Another suggests its limited acquaintance with
scholastic philosophy, the logic of Port Royal, or modern linguistics. That can
be surmised from Mllers title. What Is Populism? raises two questions, one
concerning the pronoun and the other the verb. To ask what is presumes
that populism is, if not a thing, then at least an entity of which the verb to
be can become the predicate. This conviction in its turn rests on confidence
that the concepts we use arein scholastic terminologyuniversals with
their own independent reality. Yet all modern thought is based on the nomi-
nalist conviction that denies any such reality to universals, relegating them
to thought; and it is this nominalism that allows us to consider the history of
the concepts we employ across their emergence, their changes in meaning
and potential or eventual disappearance. We may borrow an example from
Benedict Andersons memoir, A Life Beyond Boundaries (2016), in which he
recounts an episode that changed his professional life. He was sitting at his
desk at Cornell University when he became aware of two professors talking
in the corridor. One of them was Allan Bloom:

What I overhead Bloom say was this: Well, you know that the ancient Greeks,
even Plato and Aristotle, had no concept of power as we know it today.
This casual lunch-hour comment seeped into my mind and stayed there. It
had never occurred to me that the two philosophical masters, whom we were
always told to revere as the founders of Western Thought, had no idea of
power in their heads. Dubious at first, I rushed to the library to consult a
Classical Greek dictionary. I could find tyranny, democracy, aristocracy,
monarchy, city, army, etc., but no entry for any abstract or general concept
of power.

So power is not a concept that existed then and for all time. It is not a
Platonic idea. Before a certain moment it had not even been thought of, and
then it was thought, elaborated, transformed, until it was possible to articu-
late a phenomenology of this concept. Anderson goes on to show that the
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concept of politics such as we use it is also a product of modernity (to my

knowledge, the founder of modern political science, Niccol Machiavelli,
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never used the word politics). There are many more examples: another
of the much-inflated terms of our epoch, identity, has only a very recent
history in its current usage. The same goes for populism. So the appropri-
ate question would not be What is populism? but rather When did this
term appear? How has its meaning changed? Who uses it? When? Why?
To what purpose? But in order to do so we have to free ourselves of the
realist illusion (to use scholastic terminology once more), and give up the
search for the foot that perfectly fits the shoe; abandon the belief that there
is an essence of populism (just as chauvinists think there is an essence
of Frenchness or Britishness) and take on board at least something of
what William of Ockham left to us. Indeed, one day historians of political
thought may wonder what we ever meant, at the dawn of the third millen-
nium, by this category they no longer use and whose meaning they find
hard to grasp.
Another weakness in the run of political-science literature on populism is
its apparent unfamiliarity with either feminist viewpoint thinking or recent
trends in sociological research. The former highlights the site of enuncia-
tion of any discourse, contending that each and every statement takes on its
full meaning only when we identify the social, cultural and gender position
from which it is uttered. Excesses of self-positioning can, of course, lead
to a self-indulgent exhibitionism. But the underlying requirement does not
differ from the call for reflexivity to be found in the sociologies of Gouldner
and later Bourdieu. Both argue that sociologists cannot rigorously produce
knowledge of the social world without a commitment to knowledge of
themselvesthe biographical origins of their work, their objective position
in society, their life-trajectory. Reflexivity is the labour in which social sci-
ence, taking itself as an object, makes use of its own tools to understand and
monitor itself. Rarely do we find it in works of political science or political
philosophy: the overwhelming majority of authors adopt the fictitious pos-
ture of speaking from a neutral, socially indeterminate site above the fray,
innocent of ties to any specific group or individual interest. Here the fic-
tion is that the site of enunciation is at once a political hyperuranium from
whose heights various earthly phenomena (populisms, for example) can be
observed, and a social limbo entirely indifferent to the strategies of any agent
in a given field (in this case, academic specialists in politics).
The characteristic sites of enunciation of political science itself have, of
course, changed over the last two centuries. Until the early 1800s it was
normally optimatesmembers of the ruling classwho wrote about poli-
tics. Later, individuals from the subaltern classes came to the study of power
relations, too, entering the fray from a peripheral position. Here, only two
 deramo: Populism 135

paths to legitimacy were available: either subversionturn the subject

upside downor co-optation. Since in the academy the first route is gener-

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ally impassable, with rare exceptions it is the second that has been taken,
affording the conceit of enlightening the powerful, as so many wise Nestors
advising and moderating each passing Agamemnon. The conventional
discourse on populism today is the work of intellectuals fancying themselves
as counsellors to the Prince. Naturally, those who produce it do not regard
themselves as part of the people, to whom they adopt a paternalistic attitude,
surveying them at times with benevolence, more often with impatience and
exasperation, not to speak of alarm. Explaining that the very term people
is a volatile, risky, maybe outright dangerous expression, Mller situates
himself at one end of this spectrum.
Self-conceptions as modern mirrors for princes are seldom avowed. But
there is one unassailable site of enunciation that our current crop of politi-
cal commentators have no trouble in making explicit, indeed like to dwell
on. They are, simply, adults. Their objects are minors. With condescension,
Mller speaks of populists as if they were political teenagers, or younger,
who can be granted a hearing so long as they dont break the furniture or
make too much noise: I suggest that, as long as populists stay within the
lawand dont incite violence, for instanceother political actors (and
members of the media) are under some obligation to engage them. The self-
importance of that large-minded some is a nice touch. Elsewhere, Mller is
brusquer. In contemplating the possibility of exit from the eu, he explained
before the referendum on it, Britain was acting like a selfish and sullen
child, whom other member states could no longer take seriously.
Adulthood as the achievement of maturity is not, of course, an entirely
unpolitical condition of being. But the politics it involves is automatic. What
could it be, other than liberalism? Mller ponders the question of how one
can successfully respond to both populist politicians and their voters. The
pronoun says it all. This is a subject-position that can be taken for granted,
as his next paragraph explains, commending Fukuyama for his verdict that
there are no longer any rivals to liberal democracy at the level of ideas.
What threatens democracy is not any alternative to it, just a negation of it
in the shape of populism. Liberalism and populism, in other words, are
oil and water. There can be no such thing as liberal populism, he goes on.
That would be a blatant contradiction in terms, to be found in America
only because there liberal means something like social-democratic, and
populism suggests an uncompromising version of itwhereas in Europe
populism can never be combined with liberalism. The fact that, precisely
in Europe, unlike in the United States, liberalism has always stood for small
government and the free market, as well as personal liberties, and that these
have plainly been combinable with populism, flamboyantly so in the case
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of the Netherlands, is defined out of existence in a small-print endnote, and

Fortuyns or Wilderss self-definition simply disallowed.
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Not that democracy is only beset by populism. It has problems of its

own, that can vaguely be invoked. Its champions have to be honest about
the fact that all is not well with existing democracies in Western Europe and
North America. What ails these admirable societies? Western democracies,
Mller allows, are increasingly suffering from the defect that weaker socio
economic groups do not participate in the political process and do not have
their interests represented effectively. In America, too, the country is
changing culturally in ways influenced by social-sexual liberal values to
which a certain percentage of American citizens objects. There are even
in additionsome real material grievances, and not least the sense that
the economic interests of a significant number of Americans are unrepre-
sented in Washington. Why weaker socio-economic groupsno talk of
classes, pleasefail, in a delicate turn of phrase, to participate in the politi-
cal process; which material grievances they might have; and how many
grievers make up a significant company of them, is beyond his remit.
But certainly, there is no cause to give way to populist nonsense here: that
politics has somehow become too distant from the people, that such abu-
sive terms as plutocrats can dispense with scare quotes, or establishment
figures with the inoculation of a cautionary epithetostensiblebefore
them. These do not belong in a liberal vocabulary. What does are obviously
uncontroversial terms like the international community, whose approval
populists must crave.
If such is the general site of enunciation of What Is Populism?, there
is also a more specific one, which provides its conclusion. Formed in
West Germany, Mller has taught for over a decade at Princeton, after a
stint at All Souls; but his primary focus, evident from this book, remains
Europe. There, his worries are two-fold. After the dissolution of commu-
nism in Eastern Europe, German diplomacy under Kohl gave priority to
three countries as candidates for entry into the eu: Poland, Hungary and
the Czech Republic, all Catholic, none Balkan, each lit with ardently pro-
Western leaders. They would form a secure political and economic glacis
for the Federal Republic, as sister states in what could once again be called
by its proper name, Central Europe. Alas, a quarter of a century later, all
three had turned more or less populist, with a further dangerous potential
salient in Austria, in Mllers terms. The Kaczyski twins in Warsaw, Milo
Zeman in Prague, Jrg Haider were bad enough; but the transformation
of Orbn in Budapest was the enda valiant liberal opponent of the com-
munist regime in Hungary while Kohl was secretly bribing it with a billion
Deutschmarks to open its borders with Austria, who after its fall became the
detestable embodiment of everything in Europe that Berlin stood against.
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Small wonder that he is the special bte noire of Mllers portrait of a brutish
populism, perhaps even the original spur to it. But a wider German disap-

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pointment with its erstwhile wards is plain.
Still, populism has raised its ugly head not just in Mitteleuropa of old,
but across the European Union. What accounts for this, and what can be
done about it? The architects of post-war politics in Western Europe, Mller
explains, had learnt from experience to distrust not only any idea of popular
sovereignty, but parliamentary sovereignty too. Determined to ensure there
would be no return to a totalitarian past, they fragmented and insulated
power to constrain democracy, as he had shown in his 2011 book on the
subject, Contesting Democracy. European integration, as it developed, took
this precautionary process even further, adding supranational constraints to
national ones. The unfortunate side-effect of this well-intentioned endeav-
our was to make it peculiarly vulnerable to political actors speaking in the
name of the people as a whole against a system that appears designed to
minimize popular participationappearances, of course, being one thing,
realities another and no doubt better. But why should popular discontent
have swelled since the mid-seventies? Economicor any other kind of
crises offer no explanation, since democracies continually generate crises
and rarely lack the resources to resolve them. No, the answer lies just in
the unnecessarily technocratic way they have been approachedtechnocrats
mirroring populists, the latter claiming there is only one right nation, the
former believing there is only one right solution. Admittedly, the decline of
political parties in Europe has created a vacuum into which both have entered.
But the way out of it is plain: a grand coalition to usher in some sort of new
social contract. What sort, and how it could be brought about, are prudently
left blank. But a grand coalition, at least, is clear and familiar enough. What
better formula for Europe than the wholesome regime in Berlin?
Diagnosis and remedy ring equally hollow. The word neo-liberalism
scarcely ever sullies the pages of this work; capitalism naturally still less.
That the economic order constructed at Maastricht is at the origin of the
widespread contemporary disaffection with the European Union is so banal
an evidence that even liberals now rarely deny it. It is not technocracy, but
a political and financial oligarchythe serried ranks of ministers, bankers
and bureaucrats who have presided over the single currency, the Stability
Pact, the cashiering of successive referendums and the restthat has gutted
the eu of its democratic pretensions. Mller complains that populist consti-
tutions set highly specific policy preferences in stone, when debate about
such preferences would have been the stuff of day-to-day political strug-
gle in non-populist democracies. One wonders whether he has ever read
the market-conforming clauses of the European Constitution rejected by
French and Dutch voters, and reimposed by Merkel and Sarkozy through the
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back door? Does he imagine that writing a 3 per cent deficit ceiling into the
national constitution of every country in the Eurozone, at German behest,
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is no policy preference? As for a grand coalition to heal the ills of Europe,

where are the thriving parties to form it? In Germany itself, their mem-
bers and life have shrivelled as Christian and Social Democracy have bedded
down smugly together, the better to inflict austerity on lesser breeds in the
Union. As for what such a combine might dopoor Rousseau, reduced to
an advertising sticker for an empty can.