ABSTRACT
The examination of the conundrum of "the parts" and "the whole" that populism epitomizes will lead to argue in what follows that populism epitomizes not so much the claim of "a part" representing "the whole". This chapter describes the "spirit" of populism as party-cracy and analyzes critically the two main interpretations of populism. It explores the antiestablishment as a democratic condition and shows how the populist interpretation transforms it and makes it the foundation of party-cracy. Populism represents a redirection of the notion of the people; it is a phenomenology of substitution of the whole with one of its parts, yet not a claim of universality. The success of its plan would entail replacing the people's procedural meaning and thus the principled generality of the law with a socially substantive one that is the expression of a part only.
