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‘People’, Politicians and Populism1

Part of: Populism In Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Margaret Canovan
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IF THE ZOOLOGISTS ARE TO BE BELIEVED, THIS WORLD appears very different to members of different species of animals. Flowers conceal patterns and markings that are visible only to insects; dogs inhabit a world reeking with enticing scents; the bats' Lebenswelt echoes with highly significant squeaks. Something rather similar is true of political animals as well. The political world that faces the true-blue Tory has contours different from those that present themselves to the militant socialist, while what the liberal sees as the manifest data of politics is different again. Each of them, contemplating the common political world, has his attention caught and held by certain phenomena beside which others fade into insignificance. It is not surprising, therefore, that each has resort to a different key concept to sum up his experience. For the ideal-typical conservative, the basic datum of political experience is the totality of the historic political community, the nation. Like Rousseau's patriot, from the moment he opens his eyes he sees his country, and to the day of his death he never sees anything else. The socialist, by contrast, his attention held by a different range of experiences, wonders how anyone can fad to recognize the importance of social classes and the rift between them, while the liberal in his turn suspects the others of being deliberately obtuse when they refuse to see that distinct and different individuals are the basic components of political reality.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1984 , pp. 312 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1984

References

2 Hamilton, Alexander, quoted in A Memoir of Theophilus Parsons, Boston, 1859, p. 109.Google Scholar

3 ‘Considerations sur le Gouvernement Pologne’, de, in The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Vaughan, C. E., Oxford University Press, 1962, Vol. II, p. 437.Google Scholar

4 Canovan, M., ‘Two Strategies for the Study of Populism’, Political Studies XXX 4, 12 1982;Google Scholar Canovan, M., Populism, London, Junction Books, 1981, pp. 294–8.Google Scholar See also Laclau, E., ‘Towards a Theory of Populism’, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism - Fascism - Populism, London, New Left Books, 1977.Google Scholar On the range and elusiveness of populism, see Ionescu, G. and Gellner, E., Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.Google Scholar

5 See e. g. Burke, E., ‘Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs’, Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, London, Holdsworth & Ball, 1834, Vol. I, pp. 524–5.Google Scholar

6 This phrase, like so much overtly inegalitarian language, seems to have gone out of currency during the Second World War.

7 See Braden, Su, Artists and People, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978,Google Scholar passim.

8 For comments on the significance of this, see Sartori, G., Democratic Theory, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1962, p. 18.Google Scholar

9 Sir Barker, E., Reflections on Government, London, Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 1.Google Scholar

13 N. Pollack (ed.), The Populist Mind, Indianopolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1967, p. 337.

14 Goodwyn, L., Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America, New York, Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 192.Google Scholar

15 e. Newfield, g. J. and Greenfield, J., A Populist Manifesto: The Making of a New Majority, New York, Praeger, 1972.Google Scholar

16 Rovere, R. H., Senator Joe McCarthy, London, Methuen, 1960, p. 22.Google Scholar

17 Lipset, S. M. and Raab, E., The Politics of Unreason, London, Heinernann, 1971, p. 350.Google Scholar

18 The Times, 5 October 1981.

19 Those connoisseurs of diplomatic vagueness, the drafters of United Nations declarations, maintain in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that all ‘peoples’ (rather than ‘nations’) have the right to self-determination. ( Joyce, J. A., The New Politics of Human Rights, London, Macmillan, 1978, p. 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar)

20 Speeches by Tony Benn, Nottingham, Spokesman Books, 1974, p. 116.

21 Benn, T., Arguments for Democracy, London, Jonathan Cape, 1981, pp. xi-xiii.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., pp. 6, 17, 38, 103. On occasion, ‘the people’ can shrink still further. Mr Benn is reported to have claimed that Arthur Scargill was ‘the authentic voice of the British people’. (The Observer, 29 November 1981.)

23 This accounts for one of the peculiarities of radical populist rhetoric, the fact that ‘the people’ seem to be both weak and strong. One moment they are the underdogs, poor inoffensive creatures, constantly oppressed; the next, they are the mighty army of humanity against which no oppressor can stand.

24 See Canovan, M., Populism, and ‘Two Strategies for the Study of Populism’, Political Studies, XXX, 4, 12 1982.Google Scholar

25 Clemens, John, Poils, Politics and Populism, Aldershot, Gower, 1983.Google Scholar Clemens’s book is not only about ‘populism’ (by which he understands, in essence, government in accordance with the people’s wishes as expressed in opinion polls): it is itself a manifesto of anti-elitist populism.

26 Williams, S., Politics is for People, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 The recent suggestion, in a gardening periodical, that unemployment and crime could be reduced at a stroke by setting the young jobless to tend Britain’s neglected gardens, has the sort of earnest, commonsensical dottiness so often attributed to populist economic nostrums.

28 An assumption which has an eerie similarity to the unanimity of all rational men assumed by respected neo-Kantian philosophers like Rawls and Habermas.

29 See Harry Lazer’s illuminating article on ‘British Populism: The Labour Party and the Common Market Parliamentary Debate’, op. cit.