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Ernesto Laclau Verso, London, 2005, 76pp.ISBN: 1 85984 651 3
; Populism and the Mirror of Democracy
Francisco Panizza (ed)Verso, London, 2005, 358pp.ISBN: 1 85984 489 8.
One consequence of the so-called war against terror is that the line between 'left' and 'right' is ever more blurred. Opposition to the Iraq invasion, for instance, united Trotskyists, Jacques Chirac, the British Liberal Democrats, and the Pope; support for the war set Europhile Tony Blair against his EU partners and brought former dissidents such as Christopher Hitchens into the same camp as George W. Bush. In part this confusion reflects an increasingly evident tension between the politics of specificity (multiculturalism and identity claims) on the one hand, and a (liberal, secular) politics of universalism on the other. The French debate over the permissibility of religious symbols or clothing in schools is perhaps the clearest symptom of this tension. Arguably, disagreements over globalization have similar roots. Equally, however, the difficulty of locating political positions results, first, from the marginalization of class from political debate and, second, from the extreme malleability of political discourse in a mediatized era of sound bite and spin.
For some, the current prevalence of uncertainty, ambiguity, and rhetoric indicates the decline of politics. For Ernesto Laclau, by contrast, it is better described as 'the arrival at a fully political era' (On Populist Reason , p. 222). The vagueness, slipperiness, and superficiality characteristic of the discourse of leaders such as Blair and Bush have long been dismissed as anti-political, populist gestures. Laclau, however, wants to revindicate populism, seeing it as 'the very essence of the political' (p. 222) and 'the construction of a 'people'' as 'the political operation par excellence' (p. 153).
On Populist Reason returns to many of the concerns of Laclau's first book, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory , whose final section is 'Towards a Theory of Populism.' Much has changed in Laclau's thought since that book's publication in 1977, but his analysis of populism remains remarkably consistent. In 1977 as much as in 2005, Laclau rejects analyses of populism that focus on its ideological content. For the problem of populism is precisely that it embraces a range of diverse and often contradictory political beliefs; reciprocally, movements as...