The people of now: how populism understands the people’s relationship to politics

Scott, Jake Anthony (2023). The people of now: how populism understands the people’s relationship to politics. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to understand how populism understands its own core constituency of ‘the people’, and how this understanding relates to the history of political thought. A central claim of the thesis is that ‘the people’ is a persistent and permanent feature of political thinking, regardless of whether that thinking is ‘populist’, but that populism has thrown into sharp relief the tension surrounding the question of who ‘the people’ is composed of. In the introductory chapter, the two main challenges through which the thesis works are identified: how does populism understand the identity of the people? And second, what are the conditions that make populism a realisable phenomenon?
The thesis thus avoids presenting a clear definition of populism until the concluding chapter. This is because, as the literature review shows, the definitions of populism presented usually reflect the normative commitments of those defining. Instead, the concept of ‘the people’ in the history of political thought is examined to established the traditions and conditions of thought that have allowed what analysts call ‘populism’ to emerge. Thus, whilst the literature review reveals a broad consensus on the study of populism in the present literature, and therefore useful points of reference to use when discussing ‘populism’, no single definition is adopted to avoid prescription.
As a result, this thesis offers a definition of populism ‘through’ an analysis of ‘peoplehood’. This is done by undertaking a conceptual analysis approach to a broad number of political theorists, and how they have theorised ‘the people’ in relation to politics, subdivided into three distinct categories: spatiality; temporality; and corporality. These categories are identified in the introduction, which also shows that analyses of peoplehood – populist or otherwise – typically make the error of privileging one of the three categories, either subsuming the other categories under that privileged category, or neglecting the others altogether.
Thereafter, the thesis proceeds along the following structure: a chapter is given over to each category delineated, of each of which the internal structure includes discussions of genealogical developments to identifying latent ‘schools’ of thought in each category, followed by the ‘populist’ interpretation of each category thus far. A final chapter then discusses the developments analysed thus far, and summarises the preceding arguments, to make room for an analysis of populism in relation to each of those categories identified in order to arrive at a theoretical understanding of this phenomenon, and how populism understands the people’s relation to politics. A new framework of peoplehood is offered, drawing on the morphological work of Michael Freeden, which creates space for an understanding of all forms of peoplehood, be they populist, democratic, or otherwise, but in this thesis allows for an innovative, unique, and highly flexible definition of populism to be presented.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):