Back to the future: towards a materialist theory of populism

Abstract

This article proposes a critical review of the theory of populism developed in On Populist Reason, based on a discussion of two of its main problems: its formalist ahistoricism and its normative deficit, biases that prevent both the effective knowledge of populist formations as well as the theoretical precision of the political and ideology. We will argue that these are two intimately related problems that depend on the Post-Marxist theoretical problematic Ernesto Laclau has adhered to since the early 1980s. We will then analyse the arguments deployed in two of the essays compiled in the 1978 book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. There, Laclau conducts his enquiry into populism and political ideologies from a very different, Marxist-Althusserian problematic. We will proceed to establish its status as a structure of thought that enables a field of enquiry that makes possible the conceptual specification of populism insofar as it inscribes it in a materialist theory of ideology.