ABSTRACT
The chapter analyses the different notions of the people that are at the heart of populist discourse, starting from a revisiting of a passage of Book IV of Aristotle’s Politics, from which it is possible to derive the elements for a stipulative redefinition of the notion. Aristotle identifies a particular form of democracy in which ‘the masses are sovereign, not the law’ and the demos acts as ‘one’ and is the ‘master of everything’, apart from when it is stirred up by demagogues, who are the ‘masters – in turn – of popular opinion’. If the direct and emotional relation between the leader and ‘his/her’ people, imagined as a compact and homogeneous mass, represents the heart of populism, in the modern epoch the figure of the people takes on different guises: the sovereign people, the people as class, the people as nation, the people as public (Meny e Surel, Manin, Calise).
In the second part of the chapter, some key passages in Italian history will be revisited on the basis of the aforementioned categories. The choice of the Founding Fathers to opt for an almost ‘pure’ form of parliamentarism and for a proportional electoral system gave the early Republic strong antidotes to populism. The ’48 Constitution appears inspired by a model of ‘mediated’ democracy (Duverger), in which the unity of the people is confirmed at the legal level and is hence artificial, while de facto the people is dissolved in a plurality of political forces that mobilize citizens around diverse interests and worldviews. Within such an institutional framework, parties compete in politics, and even if they aspire to hegemony, in reality they pursue – in a Kelsenian way – a compromise with the representatives of other ideologies and interests. We are hence far away from Laclau’s conception (and of Rancière) of the people as a ‘part’ that pretends to be considered as the ‘only legitimate totality’. With the majoritarian turn in the early 1990s, the conditions for a form of ‘immediate’ democracy or ‘direct’ form of democracy are however created, which leads to a drastic simplification and polarization of the political field. It is only then that the political game shifts terrain, also in Italy, towards populism, with leaders that appeal to ‘peoples’ variously characterized in a key of anti-politics, ethno-nationalism, or that of a television audience.
