ABSTRACT
Since the late nineteenth century, the term populist has been used to characterise a diversity of social and political movements often contradictory to each other. From the anti-tsarist populism in Russia, through the Latin American populism of the 1950s, until arriving at the current European movements, their diversity is great but there are also many commonalities. Among these commonalities are: they usually begin in periods of crisis, they usually redefine/use the notion of “the people”, they are sustained by charismatic leaders and generate a specific set of politics of sensibilities as a guarantor of their “connection” with people. The main objective of this chapter is to make clear how the populism of recent years, through the globalisation of a regime of emotionalisation, can be understood as the highest stage of the global development of neoliberalism. To achieve this objective, the following argumentative strategy has been selected: a) a synthesis of the reasons why populism is connected with neoliberalism; b) showing the place of compensations as a central content of populism today; and c) examining the existence of a lumpen progressivism and lumpen democracy as the other form of populism. Based on the arguments, the chapter ends by showing how populism is a politics of sensibilities forming the highest stage of neoliberalism.
