ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on the novelties that Ernesto Laclau's approach introduces in wider debates over the ambiguous relationship of populism with democracy. It analyzes the democratic claims of Laclau's theory of populism, outlines the logic of operation of populist processes of identification, and critically reviews the main tenets of Laclau's conceptual model. Laclau seeks to place populism as a key category of contemporary political and democratic theory. In Laclau's rendering, populism is openly dissociated from its pathological status as an authoritarian menace that threatens the foundations of liberal democratic regimes. His argument against representative democracy and in support of populism is a contemporary rendition of Carl Schmitt's contraposition between the logic of representation and that of identification as opposing ways of reaching political unity. Laclau's theory of populism describes the specifics of an unmediated process of political identification.
