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Populism and 'unpolitics'

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posted on 2023-06-09, 13:26 authored by Paul TaggartPaul Taggart
There is a now an extensive body of scholarship, both conceptual and empirical, that uses populism as an ideology. While we have some convergence here, and it is a welcome convergence, the elements that make up that consensus have omitted and elided over the relationship of populism to politics. This chapter argues that we need to re-insert a fuller sense of populism’s relationship to politics into the definition of populism. To do this, I suggest that populism has, at its core, an implicit assertion of what I will term ‘unpolitics’. And it is the confrontation of this unpolitics with the functioning of representative politics that makes populism so potent and so provocative to contemporary representative democracy. First, I offer a literature review to try and back up the case that the element of politics has dropped out of the consideration of populism. The chapter then offers a definition of unpolitics that contrasts it with other related concepts, and then the chapter considers three different implications of unpolitics for populism relating to populism's tropes of conspiracy theories, quasi-religious parallels and war metaphors.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Publisher

Routledge

Volume

1

Page range

79-87

Pages

192.0

Book title

Populism and the crisis of democracy

Place of publication

London

ISBN

9781138091368

Series

Routledge Advances in Sociology

Department affiliated with

  • Politics Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Sussex European Institute Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • No

Editors

Gregor Fitzi, Bryan Turner, Juergen Mackert

Legacy Posted Date

2018-05-24

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2020-04-30

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2019-03-12

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