Abstract
In this paper, I argue for two claims. The first is that all social and political thinking lies along a continuum and that the structure of each thought along the continuum is that of a basic desire for self-determination. Self-determination, I argued, occurs in a variety of ways including, importantly, at a variety of levels of intention. On the one hand, there are the relatively unreflective ways of understanding oneself as autonomous. I attributed this way of thinking of the Neo-Aristotelian conception of practical reason which is characteristic of conservatism. On the other side of the continuum, there is a rigoristic version of Kantian moral philosophy in which, to be autonomous, one must act exclusively from duty or from purely economic motivation. The second claims is that populism can be understood as a clash between different practical conceptions of autonomy which are brought into conflict as a result of the process of modern rationalization. This clash can, I argued, be clarified and also alleviated by appreciating that what the values which stand opposed in the “us vs. them” of populism and liberalism are based on a fundamentally similar conception of the value of autonomy but have come into conflict by sometime contingent historical processes which can be undone or steered in a different direction.
Introduction
It has been observed in various theoretical registers that power tends to consolidate itself, whether as Weberian rationalization, Gramscian hegemony or according to Foucault’s theory of power. The process of consolidation proceeds by depriving other forms of power of their normative basis, sometimes by simply assimilating previous forms, sometimes by repressing them. As the dominant power increases, the changes for new forms of power to supplant them grow dimmer and dimmer. Thus, for instance, Weber concluded that uninspired bureaucracy would be the fate of the West, modified only by the heroic politician who cares little if “from his point of view [the world] is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer.” 1
Should a source of power be disruptive to the existing hegemonic power, that disruptive, it must be supposed, should be sought as developing from the same root system as the disrupted power for only by drawing on the same normative well as the current systems so could it marshal enough power to supplant the dominant conception. Populism, but also fascism, are cases in point. Fascism has long been understood as an outcropping of capitalism which was essentially sympathetic to it yet also, in some senses, antithetical to it. 2 Populism has likewise been seen as having its roots in democratic forms of government. The point has been made, for instance, by Margaret Canovan’s seminal analysis of populism and rational liberal politics as “two squabbling Siamese twins.” 3 For Canovan, rational politics depends on populism and populism depends on rational politics in the sense that the people must always make up the core of democracy but for democracy to operate, it requires bureaucratization which is essentially anti-democratic. In a more radical vein, Laclau has suggested that populism is the essence of the political in the sense that the people only constitute themselves when rising up against the everyday operation of the state. 4 As if in acknowledgment of the point that populism springs from the same roots as liberalism, Lara has pointed out that even the term “populism” is used as a way of seeking to squelch it. 5
If populism and modern liberal democratic politics really do share the same roots, it is worth reflecting on the norms common to both. I propose this by moving to deeper level of analysis, the conception of the social which underlies the political. 6 So this paper is not primarily about populism but about the sources of populism and other non or anti-liberal social movements. I understand the social to be made up of all those intersubjective relations which are not immediately connected to questions of governance, statecraft, voting, political parties etc. Positively, the social is the place where people related to each other personally or through group affiliation. The social is thus prior to the political in the sense that the political is a more generalized reflection on the social, just as the social is itself a more generalized reflection on the personal. But the difference between the social and the political, as I shall argue in Part III of this paper, is also fluid.
I propose to examine the social through two different analytic lenses, the logical and the dynamic or genealogical. In parts II and III of this paper, I shall argue that at the logical level, that is, at the very level of the structure of thought, all modern conceptions of the social understand the subject as autonomous, as seeking generally to pursuing their own ends according to their own lights and powers. Meaning, as Weber says, is subjectively self-authorizing. 7 The core of this logico-conceptual analysis is borrowed from the conception of thought presented in psychoanalytic theory, in particular in Freud and Ignacio Matte Blanco. The second analytic lens is the genealogical or dynamic conception of the subject. At this level, the concept of autonomy is practically implemented which means including and excluding certain sorts of norms from what is socially condoned. This level allows us to see the subject and the group in potential conflict with what they see as a heteronomous social or political order. Just so, Part IV of the paper is concerned with the ways in which the just mentioned tendency of power to become hegemonic or simply to rationalize itself leads to a reification of social structures. Such reifications are likely to prompt social opposition which can the morph into political opposition to the status quo, as articulated in the understanding of populism as essentially an ideological conflict of the people confronting the elites. 8 This general definition will also serve as the understanding of populism for this paper.
The two central claims of this paper are as follows: (1) from a logical point of view, divergent political movements can be understood as rooted in a common conception of subjects as self-determining their social relations. This self-conception, I shall argue, is best understood through a psychoanalytic model of the psyche in which unconscious or less consciously reflected desires for satisfactions coexist on a continuum with more highly reflected instrumental goals. 9 (2) From a genealogical or dynamic point of view, different concrete conceptions of autonomy can come into conflict with each other. This means that one particular conception of autonomy establishes itself as hegemonic. Other conceptions of the social must then oppose the hegemonic conception but can only do so by partially articulating themselves in the terms of the dominant conception. This problem makes them look irrational from the conception of the dominant conception. Populism is a manifestation of this conflict.
Methodological questions
Approaches to populism, which in this paper stands in for other anti-liberal conceptions of the social and political, come in a number of flavors: historical accounts, empirical accounts, and those concerning themselves with how populism plays within what is broadly understood as the democratic political framework. 10
My approach is conceptual in the sense that it seeks to locate both populism and liberalism within a common framework of mindedness or the basic rules of thought. There are two versions of this conceptual reading, the logical and the dynamic or genealogical. The logico-conceptual underlies the genealogical approach, found in Canovan, for instance, or in Arditi in which populism is traced back conceptually basic social arrangements within liberalism which are insufficient and therefore indirectly provoke the emergence of populism. 11 The genealogical method consists in pointing to the irrational core of the currently dominant conception thereby making space for a change in conception of social relations. This is the case, for instance, in Marx’s discussion of the irrationality of commodity exchange or in Nietzsche’s inversion of Christian morality as slave morality. 12
The limits of the genealogical approach and the reason it needs supplementation by the logical approach is that the genealogical approach begins in the middle of the conflict which it is trying to gain insight into. There is usually no original explanatory structure for the onset of this false way of thinking (ideology). Rather, evidence for the genealogical method comes from the self-evident need to explain current conditions in a different way than is currently on offer. But that depends precisely on the ability both to see current conditions as flawed in the first place and to think that another way of life is possible.
The logico-conceptual analysis is able to show what the two genealogical approach and the thinking it criticizes share. The central achievement of psychoanalysis (from the point of view of this analysis) is to offer a way of mediating between two conflicting conceptions of the subject, which we may preliminarily call rational and irrational, in such a way that the true point of difference may be ascertained.
Psychoanalysis expands on Weber’s fundamental distinction between the subjective meaning of an individual’s action which may be meaningful for the subject but appear as irrational to those who do not share their meaning, and the need for a rational reconstruction of human behavior in terms of instrumental rationality for the purposes of social analysis. 13 Weber here already countenances the necessity of seeing radically subjective meaning as located at one end of the spectrum and readily intelligible instrumental meaning at the other end. Yet while Weber thinks that subjective meaning is inaccessible, psychoanalysis offers a complex account of what goes on when we see someone engaging in apparently subjective behavior.
One of the key discover of psychoanalysis is, of course, the unconscious. The unconscious, far from being the seat of irrationality as romantic thinkers tended to believe, is understood as following as set of rules which are intelligible in themselves but do not conform to the instrumental logic of conscious logical thought. Psychoanalysis shows that all thinking is located along a continuum from the laws to the unconscious to the laws of highly abstract rational deliberation, for instance, in Rawls’ original position. I shall argue that it is by appreciating the continuity of meaningful behavior from unconscious motivations to deliberate rational decision-making that we can make sense of a larger set of behaviors than are currently accessible to social scientific research and theoretical inquiry.
The conceptual approach proceeds from an understanding of the subject as seeks to realize that their meaning in the terms they in some deep sense freely choose or have come to see as their own. Seeing to accomplish one’s goals, whatever they are, that is, whether they are intelligible to others or not, is based on the ability to determine oneself. The understanding of autonomy is kept intentionally general in order to accommodate both Kant and Hegel as well as the expressivism found, instance, in the work of Charles Taylor and more neo-Kantian approaches like those of Rawls and Christine Korsgaard. 14 Autonomy as a theory of freedom is principally opposed to any sort of determinism. The theory of autonomy rejects to the idea that there could be a fundamental limit to the subject’s authority, imposed, for instance, by scientific, religious, or even moral knowledge. Thus autonomy is fundamentally opposed to versions of utilitarianism which substitute the authority of the scientist for that of the agent.
The understanding of the subject as autonomous also extends to unconscious levels of thought. Though unconscious thoughts are not intentional and or autonomous in the usual sense, they express certain aspects of the self which are so basic to the subject that the subject would no longer consider themselves without them. Feeling of historical and locational continuity might be acknowledged as constitutive of the self even if they are not considered to be intentional as such. Thus, though I may only half realize it, my unreflective support of my mother’s political party may provide the deep unconscious or semi-conscious satisfaction of feeling myself uphold my mother’s world view, a world view which I have since made my own. And as Freud points out, we are often deeply invested in norms which are hard to articulate. 15 I will return to this when we discuss the Neo-Aristotelian or conservative dimension of subjectivity in Part II. Nevertheless it is possible to understand even unconsciously motivated behaviors, as Weber proposed, according to a minimal definition of instrumental reason. Such meaning may or may not be empirically available to the subject or the researcher but is, in principle, possible to find.
The theoretical commitment to the centrality of the subject’s self-determination lies at the basis of all modern philosophy to the extent that it recognizes the individual subject as having a will. Autonomy is basic to liberalism, of course, but it is also basic to Marxism, at least in its humanist version. It is also basic, I will argue, to other forms of non-liberal thinking to the extent that these use the language and hold out the promise of freedom. A central point I wish to make and which will emerge as we work through the issue is that because they are such vague concepts, personal autonomy and freedom can be given meaning at various levels of thought from the simple feeling of autonomy to the very complex working out of what autonomy means in complex moral and political contexts.
We deem it “rational” for a baby to cry when they desire food in the sense that crying is the means for the infant to achieve the ends which are proper to them, attaining food. Freud shows us that it is also “rational” in the sense of an expression of an autonomous self, for those who are bereft to go through a period of mourning so that they can gather up the emotional energy they have invested in the love object and, eventually, invest it in a new love object. The activity of mourning is rational and autonomous in the wider sense in which the subject thereby expresses their wish to continue to be able to be autonomous. Why should social and political structures be treated any differently?
Conservativism and Neo-Aristotelian skepticism about reason
The difference between the less reflective conservative and the more reflective restrictive liberal perspective can be made thought the familiar distinction introduced by Ferdinand Tönnies, and adopted by Weber, that between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. “All kinds of social co-existence that are familiar, comfortable and exclusive are to be understood as belonging to Gemeinschaft,” writes Tönnies. 16 Gesellschaft, by contrast, is for Tönnies a negative concept in which everyone is out for themselves and no-one does anything that does not make them better off. 17 For Tönnies as for Weber, Vergesellschaftung (sociation) is “based on rational agreement arrived at through mutual consent.” 18
The championing of community over society can be found, for instance, in Burke’s opposition to the French revolutionaries endorse a tyrannical conception of the “rights of men” which admits “no temperament and no compromise.” 19 Against this, Burke championed what Weber would later call traditional authority, the specificity of the “rights of Englishmen,” not abstractly derived but rather passed down from forefathers. 20 In these laws, Burke contends, we see practice wisdom rather than theoretical acumen.
Another, more philosophical way in which this thought has been articulated stems from the communitarianism of the 1980s and 1990s, which arose largely out of a critique of the Rawlsian liberal. MacIntyre has, for instance, proposed that “the best type of human life […] is lived by those engaged in constructing and sustaining forms of community directed towards the shared achievement.” 21 MacIntyre’s conception of the good life comes close to what Charles Taylor has sought to articulate through the term recognition. Recognition—for Taylor a successor concept to honor—works by constructing a reciprocal relation between members of a community without stripping that community of its essential historical connections. 22 Michael Sandel speaks of a society being a community if it is constituted by a shared self-understanding. 23
At the conceptual level, then, any opposition to restrictive liberalism’s monopoly of reason in politics must be formulated in terms of a skepticism about reason’s ability to ground an adequate social organization. 24 Such a conception must claim that social organization need not reduce the individual to self-interest or the moral law but can rather accept the individual as a collection of vaguely organized interests. Oakeshott and MacIntyre argue that the Neo-Aristotelian model of the self which can do the work of holding the subject together while doing without the metaphysics of free choice. This model recommends itself because of Aristotle’s claim that the good can be spoken of in different ways, hence does not require a unified principle. 25 The Neo-Aristotelian view is meant to permit a more local and relatively unreflected conception of the self in society compatible with, as I shall argue in the next section, psychoanalytic theory.
Oakeshott proposes that we make a mistake when we reduce human behavior to a series of intentional actions. Rather, he suggests, actions are only intelligible from within the midst of a practice. It is the practice, Oakeshott argues, which both allows us to formulate the problem and the solution. 26 “A cook is not a man, Oakeshott writes, who first has a vision of a pie and then tries to make it; he is a man skilled in cookery, and both his projects and his achievements spring from that skill.” 27 Thus people’s actions are determined to a significant part by the tradition of that very activity, by the “faithfulness to the knowledge we have of how to conduct the specific activity we are engaged in.” 28 For Oakeshott, human activity thus takes place within a pattern which is more or less apparent. Laws, traditions, institutions are examples of patterns of behavior. The fundamental point is that human moral activity begins in coherence, in the patterns we grow up in and also remains coherent by virtue of those very patterns. 29 Coherence, however, does not require the idea of determinate certainty. 30
While it may be clear enough on this view that a full theory of proper behavior, duty is needed, it is also the case that such a theory is not possible since for Oakeshott any rules are at best approximations of patterns. Politically this translates into a conception of the role of government consisting “in the informal adjustments of interests to one another which are designed to release those who are apt to collide from the mutual frustration of a collision.” 31 Government is not founded upon a metaphysical idea but rather in ritual, a common way of doing things rooted in shared values. 32
If Oakeshott is right that the individual and society can be conceived of as governed by what one might term a “soft” or less reflective belief system and a corresponding “soft” or less strict conception of reason, then we might also think of human interaction as governed by terms which are not of their own making but which influence and even guide their decisions making.
Restrictive liberalism
At the other end of the spectrum lies a conception I have titled “restrictive liberalism” but which could also be called rationalism were it not for the fact that some of its most hard nosed versions are explicitly empiricist in orientation. This form of thinking needs perhaps less elaboration since it constitutes the avowed tendency of western thinking itself. However, two version of this type of highly reflective thinking should be distinguished: the reduction of rational behavior to duty has already been mentioned, the other is version is the equally familiar reduction of rational behavior to self-interest. By highly reflective, I mean both deliberately thought out and also abstract and universalistic. In many cases, it is by extending the thought to the universal that the threshold of rational thought is attained.
The modern working out of the concept of duty is generally attributed to Kant whether in its rigoristic version or not. The rigoristic version of the categorical imperative, which may here stand in for one radical reflective tendency in modern thinking hold that actions are only good to the extent that they have completely expunged all particular inclination from the motivation for action. This has led to the idea that an action is only good if it is done against one’s inclination. 33
The other version of a highly reflective conception of the grounds of action originates in Hobbes’ elevation of the natural tendency for life to preserve itself into the fundamental character of reason. Once biological life is made a principle of reason it follows quickly for Hobbes that society is the best way of preserving life thought a division of labor between a ruler and those who work. 34 Locke then takes the decisive step to show that the sole purpose of the social contract is to safeguard economic activity. 35 So is all human activity reduced to instrumental reason.
Again, neither of these two tendencies of thought exist in their pure form in a generalized way: not everything can be reduced to duty or self-interest, but both represent a tendency or even an ideal of rational thought. But the implication of both sorts of thinking suggests that to be properly rational, whatever tradition one finds oneself in is to be as committed to one of these two principles of reflection as possible.
A second general point to be made here is that the reduction of human agency to one principle has made it possible, at least in the case of self-interest, for that principle to take on a universal value which transcends the individual, for instance, in economic analysis. Economic analysis, in particular welfare economics, seeks to establish an equilibrium between different agent which means necessarily telling agents how they should behave. 36 This tendency, however, was already present in Hobbes’ reliance on the sovereign to regulate the people according to what are their proper interests, namely, staying alive.
Psychoanalysis: Making the irrationality rational
I have just now argued that there are two competing conceptions of social organization at work in modern political thought, one a liberal reflective and universalistic version, the other a more communal and less reflected version which I have associated with the Neo-Aristotelian view of a people in a tradition. What I would like to do in this part of the paper is to provide a little more detail about the structure of thought as it develops along the continuum from less reflective to more reflective, from more particular to more universal. The point is that there is no intrinsically rational or irrational way of thinking about the world or even the self but only different ways of doing so. This continuum will then, in the final part of the paper, make it possible to see how the reification of certain thought structures can lead to types of thinking which are struggle to hold together different commitments as has often been observed of those pursuing anti-liberal programs like populism and fascism. It should be noted that the particular versions of liberalism and conservatism in circulation today are not exempt from this criticism either, though it holds perhaps to a lesser degree.
Let me propose that psychoanalysis as the enlightenment project committed to rational scientific inquiry into the non-rational is a perfect model through which to enlarge the conceptual space we are seeking. One of the key achivements of psychoanalysis is to have been able to give a rational account of what appears non-rational, namely, the unconscious, affect, and drives, and so to a rational account of what has not traditionally been understood as rational. But, as psychoanalysis, Matte Blanco, on whose work I here rely as much as on Freud’s, has pointed out the project of making the unconscious rationally intelligible itself yields an expanded account of what constitutes rationality. So rationality is here seen also from the perspective of what is at least differently rational. These laws of the unconscious and of emotion are revealed to have a logic of their own, a logic which does not conform to the narrow conception logic taught in introductory textbooks to logic. One might also think of the relation between the two logics as the relation between inferential logic and rhetoric as Laclau has suggested for the purposes of his own analysis. 37
Because the less reflected coincides with what is less conscious, it appears to consciousness as not emerging from it, but rather from the emotional side of the human subject. The purpose of this analysis is, however, to show that emotional thinking is actually continuous with conscious thinking just at a different intensity. I will thus use emotional as synonym for unconscious or less reflected. 38
The psychoanalytic model which I am about to introduce creates conceptual space in which to accommodate those less reflected emotional social relation which are deemed non-rational by restrictive liberalism but which are, from a different perspective, quite logical in the sense that, for instance, we can speak of a logic of preference for the familiar over the unfamiliar or for the tried over the untried, as in Oakeshott’s famous statement of what it means to be conservative. 39 Oakeshott also puts this distinction in terms of what is profitable and what is enjoyed. 40 If the human being is more than their rational choice (narrowly conceived), however, we can understand why someone might vote for a candidate with whom they feel an emotional connection despite the fact that this candidate may not be helpful to their pocketbook. 41
Matte Blanco’s theory of the logic of affect
Let us turn first to the psychoanalytic conception of the logic of the emotion before applying this theory to the logic of social relations at the end of this part of the paper. The aim here is to give an account of the logic of what lies below, as it were, rational conscious thought and what is thus, in a certain sense, also the logic of the tradition discussed by both Oakeshott.
Let us begin with perhaps the most familiar feature of the unconscious which operates according to what Freud terms the primary processes. 42 As Freud argues in The Interpretation of Dreams, the dream, which is the royal road to the unconscious, operates according to the processes of displacement and of condensation. 43 Displacement is the process whereby a feature of one person is displaced onto another as when I, still angry from an altercation with a stranger, yell at my partner. Condensation is the collapse of certain separate characteristics into one characteristic as in the thought that someone from France must necessarily be a snob. 44
Matte Blanco proposes that the features of unconscious/emotional thinking, which also include the ability to hold both p and non-p at the same time (the denial of the principle of non-contradiction) and the absence of space and time, can be grasped by applying set theory. For Matte Blanco, the unconscious has two principles: the principle of generalization and the principle of symmetry. The principle of generalization states that at the unconscious or emotional thinking treats every individual thing as if it were a member or an element of a set or class which contains its members. 45 So, for instance, a person who is Mexican will be treated as if they represented all Mexicans, and all Mexicans will be treated as identical to the more general class of Latin Americans. This thought structure thus turns into an amplification of particular features into their maximal range. A small worry can in this way become an existential threat. But a feeling of love also tends toward loving all the qualities of the object of affection. 46
The principle of symmetry states that the converse of any relation is identical to the relation. In ordinary scientific logical thinking, a thing is distinguished by its features which makes it possible to identify or determine objects according to their properties. Traditionally “Freud is Austrian” means that Freud is an instance of the general class of people who are Austrian. In symmetrical thinking, however, the particular and the class are cross-identified (exist in a symmetrical relation) so that the subclass of Freud is identical to the entire class of Austrians. But not only that, since there is no difference between the Freud and the class of Austrians, all members of the class of Austrians are also identical to Freud. So, for instance, all Austrians are now thought of as bespectacled with an interest in people’s mothers and sexual histories.
An important consequence of the principle of symmetry is also the absence of negation. 47 The absence of negation means that at the emotional level two thoughts which would contradict each other at a higher order of reasoning can exist side by side. It is, for instance, quite possible to like and dislike the same person. Another features is the replacement of external reality by psychic reality as when what one wishes were the case is taken to be real 48 (“Alternative facts,” for instance).
This leads me to one final point. Matte Blanco also notes that the ideal of behaving purely rational, that is, of strictly applying inferential logic to one’s life is in the extreme version really a defense mechanism against reality which is much more complicated than can be grasped by means of inferential logic. 49 So here too we have an echo of Laclau’s point that to treat our emotions or desires as irrational rather than as a constitutive element of our collective lives is to fail to appreciate the human subject.
Generalization, maximization, and irradiation
In analogy to Matte Blanco’s sketch of individual’s emotional life, I would now like to suggest that the community structures itself around three core psychic phenomena also identified by Matte Blanco, that of generalization, that of maximization, and that of irradiation.
Emotions generalize in the sense that a community tends to distinguish itself from its enemies. 50 This is an example of the famous “if you aren’t with us, you’re against us” logic which is so frequently deployed in the rhetoric of social movements. There are only real Americans and everyone else. 51 Generalization proceeds according to the logic of condensation and displacement as well as by denying negation. Thus generalizing, for instance, about who the “real” Americans are means to displace certain features of a person in order either to include or to exclude them from the category. Thus, for instance, one might speak of west coast liberals, denying the substantive areas of conservative voters from Orange County to San Diego county or speak of the east coast establishment. 52 One might also include in the idea of the people someone who is would otherwise be seen as the product of the hated elite by displacing their Wallstreet connections (a feature that seems to others salient) in favor of their love of MacDonald’s fast-food (a seemingly unimportant detail). The logic of the generalization means that the community coalesces around those elements which are already important to it rather than those which are important to another community.
Emotions also maximize or idealize a particular object’s qualities. In the grips of emotion, an object will thus tend to appear maximally hateful or maximally good. 53 Thus the community will construct certain sorts of features as maximally good, say apple pie or, in a different direction, the state ownership of the means of production. Maximization as condensation shows how almost the entire constitution can be understood as serving only to uphold the US second amendment which affirms the right to bear arms. And displacement makes it possible to ignore the part of the second amendment which gives individual the right to bear arms “when part of a militia.”
Finally, emotions irradiate, that is to say, they carry consequences to their most extreme conclusion as well as treating all possibilities as essentially equivalent. 54 Irradiation shows how the smallest change, say the desegregation of a school, can appear to upend an entire community’s way of life. Alternatively, irradiation can explain how a community’s belief in something as good and important can remain so despite the fact that what appears to others as an increasing countervailing force is destroying that way of life. Arlie Hochschild has, for instance, painted a compelling portrait of tea party supporters in Louisiana who reject government intervention despite being constantly confronted with the devastation wrought by petrochemical plants along the Gulf coast. 55 Irradiation shows how a community’s thinking about a certain feature of life, say coal mining, can remain unchanged despite the fact that this feature of life has long ceased having the economic importance once accorded to it.
Five levels of social organization
In this concluding subsection, I want to make use of the psychoanalytic conception to sketch how populism and other anti-liberal movements might emerge in conceptual space. The dynamic of this emergence will be discussed in the final part of the paper. As I shall argue, the movement from the universalist to the particularist community is characterized by the gradual substitution of one sort of logic by another sort of logic. This means that the difference between the universal conception of society and the local conception of community is not one of greater or lesser rationality but rather of different sorts of organization principles according to which the community is constituted. One might also think of the difference as one in which society is understood as a constellation of different features and one in which different elements of society form a system. What I present here is an logico-analytic reconstruction which does not imply that the fact that liberalism and conservatism exist on a continuum does mean that all views of community and society are equally conducive to a peaceful coexistence. Peaceful existence is a dynamic question, a question of how different actual conceptions of the self in society fit with other actual conceptions.
The different levels are, of course, fluid and represent heuristic approximations of a general structure. They should be understood as always existing side by side with one element becoming stronger as the other recedes. People are not exclusively located at one level. One may have a highly developed and self-conscious understanding of oneself at in one sphere of life yet a quite unreflected understanding of one’s relations in another part. The general purpose of this typology seeks to understand the individual or the group from the perspective of their own understanding their purpose.
I now propose five levels in the way a community can be conceived, from the most universalistic and potentially systematic conception of the social contract to the most unreflected or particularist conception of a community of one. I mean these different conceptions to be conceptions of the same Western society conceived in different ways. The question in levels one through three is who “we, the people” are. These levels are the most important for our analysis of populism.
Philosophical universalism
The first or most inferentially logical level is that of universalism, that of concepts like freedom, liberty, equality, and justice. It is readily acknowledged that these ideals are abstractions as in the famous American and French constitutions of the 18th Century or indeed of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The society of “the people” is organized around the idea that all are fundamentally equal and have the identical capacity to determine themselves. 56 This level corresponds to Kantian autonomy or to Hobbes’ first natural law. Here, “the people” are the set of rational humans, a society in which people free to contract with each other. Choice itself is the exclusive source of normative bonds.
Political universalism
The second level might be said to be that of universalist politics of the liberal democratic state: the idea is that the government represents “the people” according to a set of political procedures in which different regions or communities delegate one of their own to represent them and to make decisions about how the country as a whole should be run under the ideas of justice, equality and freedom, which are here implemented. This level is also the level of the idealized enlightenment public realm in which ideas are freely exchanged, as for instance in Rawls' reflective equilibrium. 57 But here at the second level, we already find local notions creeping in: who should or can be part of the discussions in the public realm? Are non-citizens “people” in the sense of the above constitutional ideal are children? Such questions necessarily particularize social organization, making it local and temporal.
Rational-emotional politics
This level is constituted by the interface between universalism and more particular conceptions of community. This is the level at which Oakeshott’s conception of community is, I believe, located, as well as many common sense ideas about liberalism as privileging choice over coercion (but without any metaphysical foundation). 58 The key characteristic of this level is that here the particular group conceives of itself as the community because of a shared practice and a shared history in a fairly unreflective way. This natural self-identification is now an implicit rational criterion, what it means, for instance, to be a reasonably careful Englishman (in Oakeshott’s example). 59 The group identification here is multifaceted, one identifies as an American, as cis-gendered, as gay, as Black, as a Beatles fan but also as a socialist, and, perhaps with some unease, as a love of fine wines.
Because of the way the logic of the emotions works membership in the group or community is not necessarily organized by readily identifiable legal or social status and can constitute itself across the “objective” social identifiers of race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexual orientation, and identification. Being part of the group is in many cases itself sufficient to be part of the group. Particular grievances or aspirations determine the community or party. 60 But the groupings one finds oneself part of do not have to be consistently organized according to some external rational schema. Conflicts between different socially normative commitments are par for the course of an ordinary human life.
Under-reflected and over-reflected groups
In the fourth level, the group beholden to unconscious desires and commitments without being able/willing to make sense of these. The individual or group simply accepts the contingency of their condition. This is level, then, at which history holds excessive sway over us. At this level, for whatever unconscious-historical reasons, racial identity, say, is experienced as more defining of the subject than other forms of identity in such a way that racial identity now impedes other forms of group formation. The not uncomplicated but largely benign conflicts of the ordinary emotional-rational associations at the previous level now inhibit groups formations. The effect is that the subject experiences certain conceptions of grouping as necessary and others as prohibited or inconceivable. The need for certain groupings may, of course, remain a private need. But in a politicized society like ours, it is not unusual for certain desires to translate into political conceptions. 61
Depending on one’s definition, one might want to locate populism at either this level or at the preceding one. Those who see in populism a legitimate opposition to the irrational dominance of the capitalist status quo will do the later, locating the liberal world order at that level. 62 Those, the vast majority, who find the picture of liberalism to have been sketched at levels two and three, will probably locate populism at the fourth level. The field of populism studies is wide enough to accommodate both.
Idiosyncratic groups
Finally, at the lowest level, we have the idiosyncratic level at which the group consists of only a few or even just a single member. These groups are held together almost exclusively by emotional ties which have been accepted as such. This is the level of splinter groups which have little political sway but constitute a powerful force on those not otherwise committed to a particular form of political identification. The bonds of entry into these groupings are high, requiring an extreme commitment both emotionally and “rationally.” This is the level of far right militias, conspiracy theory enthusiasts and other secret societies. These groups no longer consider themselves properly “the people” though they may style themselves the vanguard, as authentic or in some other way exemplary.
Rationalization
Let us turn again to Weber to see the deeper level of the problem. Weber’s central contention is that modern rationalization has produce the social organization of bureaucratic society in such a way that to conceive of older forms of social organization now seems all but impossible.
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As Weber puts it in the context of religion’s relegation to the sidelines by intellectuals: The general result of the modern form of thoroughly rationalizing the conception of the world and of the way of life, theoretically and practically, in a purposive manner, has been that religion has been shifted into the realm of the irrational. This has been the more the case the further the purposive type of rationalization has progressed, if one takes the standpoint of an intellectual articulation of an image of the world.
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The same fate that befell religion has also befallen the idea of the “unreflected” community. In modernity, the idea of community can no longer be conceived of on pain of breaking with the very story modernity tells about itself, namely, that society must become more rational and can only become so based on the restrictively liberal conception of the atomistic or autonomous subject as freely choosing.
This can be seen, again with Weber, in the institution of the rational legal rule in modernity. Legal rule as a pure type represents the far edge of what I have earlier characterized as restrictive liberalism. Traditional rule, by contrast, is “an everyday belief in the sanctity of long-established traditions and the legitimacy of those whose authority derives from these traditions.” 65 Traditional rule maintains a relatively unreflective attitude toward the basis of its authority: in such rule “legitimacy is based on, and believed in, by virtue of the sanctity of long-established orders and ruling powers that have existed ‘time out of mind’.” 66 Legal bureaucratic rule, by contrast, is based on the idea that “any legal norm can be established by agreement” by rational agents and therefore constitutes “a cosmos of abstract rules that have normally been established intentionally.” 67 Moreover, while the traditional rules is in some sense familiar because of the tradition they stand in, the typical legal ruler “adheres to the impersonal order to which his instructions are oriented.” 68 Further, any member of society obeys the law as an abstract citizen, not as a person for whom the law necessarily makes subjective sense. 69
The point is to see that while at the logico-analytic level the abstract rules of modern bureaucratic society are indeed compatible with autonomy in the sense that they allow the subject to implement their rational goal, the fact of being imposed abstractly, “sine ira et studio,” as Weber, following Tacitus, puts it, places legitimate rule in conflict with the traditional order or what I have earlier characterized as conservatism. 70 Indeed, as Weber notes, to impose rules “without hatred or passion” is also to impose rules without “love” or “enthusiasm.” It is merely to impose obligation or duty. “Everyone is treated as if they were in the same actual situation with regard to interest.” 71
But, and this is the important point, at the dynamic level, that is, at the level of not merely thinking about law but at the level of imposing law, making everyone equal is to disregard and therefore also to quash particular forms of social organization in a sense that devalues them. Because, to be law in a practical sense, formal law must be imposed as concrete actual law, formal law becomes adversarial to traditional and relatively unreflected practical laws.
Populism as a response to restrictive liberalism
As we have seen, the ideological reading of populism which also forms the basis of this analysis takes as basic the idea that populism is essentially to be understood as an antagonistic movement in which the “people” are opposed to the “elites.” Much writing on the topic concerns the question of who the “people” are. 72 Often the conclusion is that the “people” are somehow constructed by the interests of either parties or individuals who hope to capitalize on anger and frustration to further their own political success. 73 This analysis, by contrast, focuses on the conditions of the possibility of this very opposition that is, makes it possible that the “people” even come into conflict with the “elites” in the first place. The analysis given so far has suggested that there is no conceptual incompatibility between the people qua citizens and those who, for practical purposes, need to govern them.
The problem emerges, as I have just argued, because the process of social transformation requires that laws expressing the general desire for autonomy must be implemented in new ways. Adorno characterizes this implementation as the standardization of person according to an idea. 74 This may be for external factors like changes in natural environments, semi-external factors like the economy or internal factors like the reevaluation of who is considered the proper subject of autonomy. In each of these cases, it is the need to implement new rules based (based on a vision of autonomy) that will necessarily come into conflict with previously established rules. Since for the past 200 years liberalism is the dominant paradigm, conflict will necessarily be felt to be the fault of liberalism, on both the left and the right. 75
Let us examine the issue by making recourse to the model developed in part III of the paper. In general, the idea is that restrictive liberalism with its emphasis of institutionalized and highly reflective rules is felt to colonize less reflective areas of life. This rationalization makes the ordinary and relatively unproblematic rational-emotional politics (discussed in the model as level three) untenable and forces thinking to retreat to a more basic and less reflective but also potentially more conflicted position, level four of under-reflected and over-reflected groups. The difference between level three and level four might be put by saying that at level three normative commitments need not be articulated but in some reasonable sense internal to the group can be, at level four they cannot be reasonably articulated. To put it differently, rationalization, either or moral or economic, forces people to try to make systematic what cannot be made systematic because, like love or hatred, certain feelings are not the sort of thing that admit of full rational articulation. But this means that rationalization makes problematic certain features of life which had previously been cogent because they had remained unreflected. Family relations are destroyed by being subjected to market relationships, for instance.
From the perspective of the communal for which an less reflective logic or logic of emotion seems perfectly sufficient, liberalism’s attempts to marginalize the community now appears as an attack in the sense that liberalism appears to distort the framework of the community’s values. 76 What is to be understood here is the so-called “doubling down” on certain values that communities experience under pressure from liberalism, whether it be the codification of the Hindu cast system under British rule, or the creation of the pro-life “single issue voter.”
Because of the pressure of rationalization the social becomes political in the sense of explicitly needing to fight for its right to exist as a value. The inchoate norms of the community must now be given voice in a political realm whose basic assumption is that of rational consistency and self-transparency. But the norms of the community are not rationally consistent any more than people’s ordinary moral convictions are. People and communities want different things at the same time, they want to protect themselves and to be welcoming, and they want to support each other and also allow people their individual freedoms. 77 The members of the community thus seem forced either to abandon their myriad values, as restrictive liberalism has, in favor of a higher overarching yet rather anemic notion of freedom as mere choice, justice as consistency and equality as universality, or to endorse a politics which represent merely a sliver of the community’s values which now stands in for the whole unarticulated system of value. 78 Nativism now comes to stand for a whole way of life, at the level of political representation, if not at the personal level, following the logic of generalization. At the social or communal level, this metonymic relation of part for whole represents a tightening of the goals of a given community but does not yet constitute a direct political position.
So it is only at the level of political universalism (level 2), I suggest that Oakeshott’s non-liberal community becomes an illiberal or anti-liberal community. That is, it is only when lower levels of social organization are subjected to the standards of political universalism that problems occur. For when rationalization occurs in a particular area of general normative life, the particular platform around which people coalesce must do the work of competing with other political positions in the highly rationalized realm of restrictive liberal politics. The community must now express itself as a movement and even as a party, representing a certain fairly well-specified party platform which must be articulated a platform suitable for all members of the state. This despite the fact that the original historical position was never meant to be universal but was rather simply understood as a way of life.
The liberal political arena thus radicalizes the emotional-historical conceptions unreflectively underlying the community placing undue pressure on certain of them by making some values do work which cannot withstand reflective scrutiny. Just so, traditional ideas of family structure were put under severe pressure by postwar social change leading not just to feminism but a backlash against it the form of the Phyllis Shlafley led opposition to the equal rights amendment. Here, the point was not that equal rights were not in some sense good, but that the amendment was felt to be a direct attack on a conception of community many held dear.
Thus more generally, the live and let live ethos which is evident in Oakeshott’s ethos of the traditional community is radicalized by being turned more rational or more political. Let me illustrate the problem by drawing on Nadia Urbinati’s analysis of the pars pro parte logic of populism. 79 For Urbinati, the anti-elite logic of populism can be understood as a part for the whole logic in which the people or the community assert themselves as the real community against the false other. By asserting themselves as the real community, however, the community appears to make the claim that they are the whole community, the whole people. The community asserts itself as the community by asserting its particular commitments to be standard setting which means that, as Urbinati puts it, the logic of the community is really the return of the faction. 80 This idea is driven, as I have said, by the idea that the community affirms itself as a political community which means that it endorses its way of life as the standard for the correct way of life as such.
While the chauvinism of this metonymic substitution of the part of the state, the community, for the whole is readily apparent, what also needs to be understood is that this metonymic process is in fact a function of the restrictively liberal political arena in which all local communities must operate. In the restrictively liberal universalistic political system, there is no way of making only partial or local claims. Views cannot avoid being articulated as if they were solutions to the organization of the state in general. So the liberal political arena is in part responsible for populism’s totalizing illiberal claims.
From the perspective of liberalism, however, populism or other non-liberal social movements constitute the return of the repressed. In the past, the local community could not adequately be assimilated to rational liberal politics and was therefore left free to persist. Now, however, under increased pressure from liberalism, the community asserts itself as the kernel which could not be made to fit and which now returns to wreak havoc on the whole system. 81
Therapeutic intent
By introducing psychoanalytic conceptions into the understanding of social formations, we are also introducing questions of pathology and of therapy. The goal is to provide the patient with more autonomy in the sense of allowing the individual to conceive of their life in a more variegated way than before, and of allowing them to pursue these options in the (psychologically) mode unimpeded way. Politics too, to the extent that it is not the cynical practice of maintaining the power of those who have it, has this goal: it is meant to make social life “better” by allowing different avenue for the various pursuits of subjective meaning to be created and, to the extent that they take on wider meaning, to be maintained.
Given the Weberian and psychoanalytic assumption that each individual operates according to a core of subjective meaning, any standard for the evaluation of the other cannot arise simply externally to that other. Here again it is the idea of autonomy which provides a crucial point of orientation. The first person perspective which lies at the core of Weber’s conception and that of psychoanalysis holds that, as Canguilhem has pointed out, “it is because the interested party, that is, the sick man, considers it normal that therapeutics aim at it.” 82 So what constitutes a pathology will always depend on the subject themselves, that is, on the perspective they hold about the relative coherence of social norms to them. The understanding of pathology as the lack of the ability to determine oneself provides a standard according to which not only individual norms but also social and political norms can be evaluated.
The task of therapeutic intervention is licensed by the fact that, as we saw in the logico-analytic discussion, all thinking aims at autonomy and that is at the expression and realization of subjective meaning. The dynamic level of analysis showed how conflicts in meaning arose when certain conceptions of autonomy are implemented at the expense of others. Therapeutic intervention would thus consist in trying to create space for an individual’s subjective meaning to coexist with that of other in a way that is less conflictual. The first step would to make it possible for individuals to appreciate that others too strive for autonomy and the expression of their subjective meaning. A second step would be help individuals see that the meaning the hold dear is not necessarily oppositionally related to the meaning of others. A third step would be loosen the normative foundations constraints imposed by the dominant form of political organization in order to make space for alternative conceptions and finally to incorporate these alternative (constructive) conceptions into the overall structure of the polity.
Conclusion
This paper has sought to substantiate two claims. The first is that all social and political thinking lies along a continuum and that the structure of each thought along the continuum is that of a basic desire for self-determination. Self-determination, I argued, occurs in a variety of ways including, importantly, at a variety of levels of intention. On the one hand, there are the relatively unreflective ways of understanding oneself as autonomous. I attributed this way of thinking of the Neo-Aristotelian conception of practical reason which is characteristic of conservatism. On the other side of the continuum, there is a rigoristic version of Kantian moral philosophy in which, to be autonomous, one must act exclusively from duty or from purely economic motivation.
I further argued that populism can be understood as a clash between different practical conceptions of autonomy which are brought into conflict as a result of the process of modern rationalization. This clash can, I argued, be clarified and also alleviated by appreciating that what the values which stand opposed in the “us vs. them” of populism and liberalism are based on a fundamentally similar conception of the value of autonomy but have come into conflict by sometime contingent historical processes which can be undone or steered in a different direction.
