Leonardo Fiorespino currently teaches ethics at the University of New York in Prague (UNYP). His research focuses on contemporary democratic theory, populism, and normativity in political theory. His recent book, Radical Democracy and Populism: A Thin Red Line?, seeks to identify the dividing line between populism and ‘radical’ democratic theories, exploring whether such a line even exists. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Fiorespino discusses potential methodological concerns confronting his project, his motivations for writing the book, and the impact he hopes it will have on debates surrounding populism and democracy.
What is your work about?
My current work is mainly focused on contemporary democratic theory and populism. In the book I recently published, Radical Democracy and Populism: A Thin Red Line?, my aim was to identify the dividing line, if any, between populism and ‘radical’ democratic theories, which superficially share a general bottom-up approach to politics and to the idea of popular sovereignty. How are their respective claims for popular sovereignty different? Are they? And where does the ‘thin red line’ between them lie? Those were the fundamental questions guiding my endeavour.
At least at first sight, important methodological doubts seemed to arise, which I attempted to dissipate in the introduction, such as the problem of commensurability: if populism is a political phenomenon characterized by a specific political discourse, how can it be commensurable with sophisticated political philosophies theorizing democracy? How can they be meaningfully compared? Secondly, what does ‘radical democracy’ even mean? Once I laid down the methodological building blocks, I moved on to analyze the most prominent contemporary theories of democracy, notably deliberative democracy, participatory democracy, contemporary ‘neo-Roman’ republicanism, and agonistic democracy. I examined the ideas of their most influential advocates, including John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Carole Pateman, Benjamin Barber, Philip Pettit, Richard Bellamy, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, William Connolly. The main purpose of such analysis was to reconstruct the conception of the ‘sovereign people’ and of popular sovereignty that informs and is developed by the philosophers discussed.
As for the second horn of the comparison, namely populism, I reconstructed the burgeoning political philosophical debate on the topic—a challenging operation, given the plurality of positions and approaches flourished in the last years. This discussion was never meant to provide one more putatively original definition of populism; rather, as I put it in the introductory chapter, my goal was “to achieve a compact and consistent definition of the concept by starting from its most settled and conspicuous features, such as the Manichean attitude, the apodictic attribution of moral, political, cultural authoritativeness to an intrinsically virtuous ‘people’ […]”. Defining populism, of course, also involved outlining the physiognomy of the ‘populist people’, i.e., of the people as presupposed by the populists. With such a definition at hand, I was finally able to carry out the intended comparison between populism and democracy, in the form of a comparison between the conceptions of the people and popular sovereignty assumed and defended by populists and democrats. The outcome, briefly put, is that the ‘thin red line’ is not so thin after all: the conceptions of the people adopted are so radically incompatible as to undergird two completely distinct concepts, which are fully external to each other. My conclusions contest many widespread assumptions on the relationship of populism and democracy, which are often seen as intersecting at some point, most famously in the definition of populism as ‘illiberal democracy’, or of populism as the ‘mythical content’ of democracy, its ‘redemptive myth’. My claim is that the homogeneity and intrinsic moral virtuousness of the ‘populist people’ are foreign to the ‘democratic people’, inescapably united and heterogeneous, singular and plural. Such difference produces two utterly incompatible concepts.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
At the time when I began conceiving my research, back in 2017, the debate on populism was among the most heated and wide-ranging, both in political theory/philosophy and in the broader public sphere. Brexit had just shaken the European Union, while Trump had been freshly elected President of the United States; the democratic deficits of Orbán’s Hungary and Erdoğan’s Turkey were there for everyone to see, as well as the discursive style and categories employed by their leaders; in my country, Italy, movements strongly appealing to the ‘people/elite’ dichotomy were on a rise which led them to important electoral successes shortly thereafter; and European ‘populist’ figures, especially from the right-wing, had big projects of banding together in an international alliance of sorts.
In the academic field, Jan-Werner Müller had just published his influential work on populism as well as Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser; Chantal Mouffe talked and wrote about ‘left populism’, and several prominent scholars began showing interest in the topic, resulting in important publications shortly thereafter, such as Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy, Nadia Urbinati’s Me the People, Albert Weale’s The Will of the People, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Backlash, and countless others. Conferences, seminars, and panels on the degenerations of democracy and the crisis of liberal-democracy abounded, and top scientific journals devoted special issues to the matter.
Like many others, I was intrigued by the challenge of tracking down the basic claim of this much-debated political phenomenon; i.e., that ingredient which seemed to pull together under the category of ‘populists’ political actors deeply different from each other, such as the few listed above. What is it that elicits the perception of some commonality among parties, movements, and leaders so various? Moreover, it should be added that it was not just a matter of ‘perception’. In the last decade, ‘populism’ has not only been used as a label attributed to political actors by journalists and observers; it was also fiercely appropriated by several leaders, claiming that as long as a populist is someone who serves ‘the people’, they were proud to call themselves such.
An intuitive answer to the puzzle was that below all the differences resonated a shared rhetoric focused on ‘the people’ as opposed to ‘the elite’. Hence, the question: what exactly is this rhetoric about? What conception of popular sovereignty does it defend, and what conception of ‘the people’ does it convey? Moreover, and importantly, how is it distinct from those ‘radical’ democratic theories which construe democratic legitimacy as based upon a substantive popular involvement? The question thus formulated seemed especially promising for an understanding of the gist of populism.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
The relationship of populism and democracy is a vexed question, with which many prominent authors grappled; and yet, perhaps the specific challenge of tracing the line dividing the two concepts was never undertaken. The focus was more on the definition of populism. Of course, this also ultimately involved taking some stand on its differences from and similarities with democracy, but more as a necessary by-product of the definitional endeavour than as a goal explicitly targeted. For instance, if I say ‘populism is illiberal democracy’ I am primarily trying to define populism, and only quite collaterally I am saying something on how populism and democracy are related.
I was intrigued by the different angle of my research questions, and in hindsight I think that it stood up to my expectations. The argument I developed is of course not uncontroversial, but it hopefully contributes to conceptual clarity. In the literature, populism and democracy are often construed as overlapping in some way, for instance in the aforementioned definition of populism as illiberal democracy, or of populism as the ‘redemptive myth’ of democracy, or as the ‘logic’ underlying every democratic construction, or as the practice of concealing undemocratic policies below fairly democratic justifications.
By pointing to the marked incompatibility of the conceptions of the people presupposed by democrats and populists, I attempted to undercut those associations, and to reveal the distinctive nature of populism as fully independent of and alternative to democracy. The superficial commitment to a shared signifier, ‘the sovereign people’, is actually a commitment to two very different signifieds: the organic and virtuous people, on the one hand, and on the other the democratic people as a unity of particularities, a united multitude of sorts.
This difference becomes even more evident if one appreciates a very important implication that it bears: given such features of the democratic people, a democratic thought is inevitably forced to account for what it means for such a ‘multitude’ to collectively exercise sovereign power. In doing so, the concept of democracy is specified into a conception. This operation involves resorting to concepts and categories which are apparently external to democracy (say, freedom as non-domination), and which yet actually become constitutive of a conception of democracy. Differently, the populist does not need to embark on such a task: the people is one, single-willed, and sovereign as long as its voice rules unconstrained. Thus, the specifying operation by which the concept of democracy turns into a conception is as foreclosed to the populist as necessary to the democrat. In light of this, my conclusions may bear some potential also for democratic theory, and in my future research I would like to explore further this aspect of my argument.
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
I would like to direct my focus fully towards democratic theory. Whereas in this book the argument on the ‘thin red line’ was largely meant to conceptualize populism, I am now interested in further exploring its implications for democratic theory. In other words, can the conclusions on the distinction between democracy and populism tell us something meaningful also on the former? Or were they ultimately limited to the purpose of better understanding populism as a self-standing concept? My sense is that they bear promising implications also for the concept of democracy, and my future research will be aimed to test the intuitions discussed in the final part of my book.
In particular, I would like to better understand and develop the ‘specifying operation’ by which the concept of democracy is articulated into a conception, discuss this idea with reference to the relevant literature, and evaluate its potential implications for significant debates within democratic theory, such as the relationship of democracy and liberalism. Indeed, one of the upshots of the argument on the ‘thin red line’ seems to be that the alleged tension between democracy and liberalism is better explained as a tension between two different conceptions of democracy, contra the claims of authors who construe democracy and liberalism as intrinsically clashing with each other. Taking a stand on that debate may be one of the destinations of my current research path.
Those are certainly interesting and important questions to explore. Talking about your future research, what directions would you like to take your work now?
In the first place, I hope that my work will stimulate debate over the issue addressed, namely the relationship of populism and democracy. As I said, this problem has not been overlooked, and yet it has been discussed more in the context of attempts to understand and define populism. I hope that my research questions will trigger interest and acquire centrality, so that other scholars will try their hand in addressing them more specifically.
Secondly, I would like my conclusions to enjoy some prominence within the debate I hope to spark, so that populism gets to be better understood as an independent concept, unconnected and incompatible with democracy. The superficial resemblance between populism and democracy is due to their commitment to a shared signifier, ‘the people’, to which they attach two very different meanings.
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The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
Leonardo Fiorespino
Leonardo Fiorespino completed his Ph.D. in political philosophy at University of Rome Tor Vergata in 2021. He is author of Radical Democracy and Populism: A Thin Red Line? (Springer, 2022). He currently teaches ethics at the University of New York in Prague (UNYP). His research focuses on contemporary democratic theory, populism, normativity in political philosophy.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
