Populism and critical theory: On Arato and Cohen

Introduction

The book contains an extraordinary condensation of important themes regarding populism. It brings social and political science together with normative philosophy, something badly needed today in critical theory to advance its theoretical-empirical approach. But it is precisely the kind of interpretation of critical theory presented in the book that is the focus of these brief comments. In particular, I mainly ask about the relation to second-generation critical theory. In this context, the comments particularly address kinds and levels of cultural structure that make possible the form of normative reconstruction offered by critical theory, and examine how these appear – or do not appear – in the book, together with outlining the implications for the approach. Specifically, I will address three main dimensions arising in the book. These are (a) Immanent Critique; (b) The counterfactual status of ideals; (c) The methodology of ideal type analysis.

Immanent critique and immanent transcendence

The authors do not address in depth the basis of their account of immanent critique. They relatively briefly characterise it as (a) engaging in an immanent critique of the counterfactual status of ideals in the light of problematic forms of democratic institutionalisation; and (b) engaging in an immanent critique of the – invariable – authoritarianism of populism in power as the ultimate truth of its logic. The first, (a), suggests critically engaging with those counterfactual ideals that regulate the actual; and the second, (b) suggests that the populist version of (a) results in a bad actual political world – the authoritarian populist one.

In this account of immanent critique, it is not clear that the authors have in mind the immanent-transcendent ‘detranscendentalization’ of Kant’s transcendental ideas of reason historically prevalent in critical theory. In any case, more explicit consideration of it has implications for the strategy pursued in the book. Adorno, who is most associated with the idea of immanent critique in critical theory, claimed in Against Epistemology that in confronting immanent philosophy with its own untruth immanent critique must know the truth transcendently – or at least, one supposes, its direction of travel – in order to commence (Adorno 1982). In other words, to criticise untruth, immanent critique to get going must have a sense of what is true, and the latter kind of possible truth gains its claimed validity from its status as a transcendent idea (of reason). It is a transcendent idea that is nonetheless immanently anchored; we do not know exactly where further thought as to what is true of the object might lead, but we have the confidence that it is in principle further cognisable in certain directions. Gradually, if the insight or critique is to be realised, what is in principle cognisable become ‘really’ cognised as rational conjectures, and thus guides reconstructive critique. This figure of thought not alone applies to Adorno, but also Horkheimer and Marcuse.

Further, as is well-known, Habermas developed the figure of immanent-transcendence, for example in Truth and Justification, in line with his account of communicative reason (Habermas, 2003). The three formal pragmatic presuppositions of communication are analogues to Kant’s ideas of reason. But the sharp dualism of transcendent and immanent in Kant is dialectically mediated by an immanent-transcendent architectonic rooted in social practices. Cognitively, in the use of these practices from a position within the world we can reach for a perspective beyond the existent world. Here, dialectical mediation means communicative argumentation. So, the very core of Habermas’s theory is immanent-transcendence.

Further along this line, Piet Strydom has developed the idea of a suite of transcendently operating – in the above sense – cognitive principles relevant to normative culture (Strydom 2011). These principle are capacities that enable the continuation of immanent thinking in a variety of registers, for example, legitimacy, legality, freedom, publicity, plurality, beyond what already counts as knowledge, employing the frame of what in critical theory is understood as ‘excess’ or ‘surplus’. Such cognitive principles are formed through socio-cultural evolution and are part of the organic endowment of human individuals and the cultural endowment of collective human social forms (Strydom 2023). O’Mahony along similar lines has advanced an account of reasoning and validity. The emphasis is on abductive conjectures – the imaginatively creative – and how they reveal what is not yet known but cognisable. Such conjectures, whether in general social or scientific reasoning, provisionally claim a modal validity – what could be beyond what is the case – and, as such, are emergent themes within existing ideals, or stand as radical new ideals in their own right (O’Mahony 2023).

Now, this kind of immanent-transcendently structured, linguistic, future-oriented intersubjectivity is largely absent from the book, which remains confined, if compellingly, to a social scientific and political philosophical framework of another kind. This choice has consequences for understanding the subtlety of generative processes, especially the sources of populist pathologies and their resonance in lifeworlds. When I speak of generative processes – think also abductive or creative – I have in mind the modal quality of becoming of a future society that exceeds what is presently atualized or even potentially actualizable in the normative logic of current forms of life. This is the core concern of immanent-transcendent critique reaching beyond the quite widespread and restrictive understanding of immanent critique, and bears on multiple vectors of contemporary social change, manifested in de-colonising mentalities, in feminism, in ecology, in post-materialism, in peace movements and much else. These seek social innovation and face corresponding opposition, springing from ethnoccentrism, religion, social conservatism, male and heterosexual domination, materialism, and war that concatenate in forms of right-wing populism.

One notable consequence for the book of limitations in this way of thinking manifests itself in the substantial absence of a cosmopolitan perspective, occluded by the extent of the focus on territorial political systems. Creative forces – which do not mean only ‘good’ forces – and collective learning processes, including regressive learning processes, are shaping a world in which existing territorial order centred on the nation-state (particularly the western nation-state) more and more loses its autonomy. This increasingly post-national world, culturally anticipated even more than materially emerging, is a core component of understanding populism. It is that which especially right populism reacts against, that is, against the cosmopolitan and universal form of the discourse of human rights. But this can only be understood as an evolving global struggle whose core terrain is as much beyond as within existing political systems. This dimension, that of possible supra-national futures, is underdeveloped in the book.

Whether critique is understood as only immanent or immanent-transcendent clearly also has implications for understanding what critique is. For Habermas, similar to Adorno above, in the immanent-transcendent figure, validity comes before critique, critique is oriented by validity. This is at the core of the reconstructive idea of critique which is also shared by Honneth. For example, what is alienation alienation from, what is pathology a deviation from? For example, an ideal variation, such as that of extending the ideal of publicity in the direction of public deliberation, or, even further, cosmopolitan public deliberation, is not a question of a small modification of an existing ideal, but entails a radical multi-facetted generative process that requires abductive thinking and intellectual reflection on this thinking (reflexivity). Or, taking an opposite example, the inability to explicitly explore the cosmopolitan – to my mind, the single most important element in the issue culture of Brexit – reveals a generative deficit that does not directly appear in Brexit discourse but saturates it indirectly. Cosmopolitanism thus mostly existed there, still inexplicitly exists there – as endorsement or denial – in modes of subjectivation (habits of feeling) that result in transcendental agitation of thought and argumentation processes with potential social-practical consequences. In Brexit, for example, the particular kind of populist movement engaged in creative innovation (or regressive innovation perhaps) around sovereignty, control, legality, freedom, and authenticity and blocked collective learning around publicity, cosmopolitanism, critique and responsibility. The crucial point here is that a new discourse is being formed with profound implications. It is part of a new societal stake, a term used by Touraine to describe the battle for control of historicity that, in my version, takes on the form of techno-conservatism vs radical pluralism (O’Mahony 2014).

The counterfactual

The account given of the counterfactual in the book affirms Dahl’s use of the democratic counterfactual and Taylor’s account of democracy as a telic system. At a later stage, it emphases the regulative ideal of the ‘popular’ and the plurality of democracies (civil society) and, negatively, it opposes Laclaus’s account of the ‘people’, which – Laclau’s – can also be read as a counterfactual position in its balancing of differences and equivalences. Out of this comes an understanding of democracy as a permanent developmental order (the capacity for innovation within ideals) and a telic order that would directionally indicate the ideals that must guide that development.

This is different from Laclau on several levels. Laclau’s account in Populist Reason is expressly not telic (Laclau 2005). It is neither Hegelian in that sense nor guided by Kant’s transcendental ideas of reason (in its declaration, at least). Further, the authors are opposed to Laclau’s account of shifting hegemony. They deny the permanence of antagonism (friend/foe), which ultimately sees democracy only as a form of domination, and claim that democracy is telic in the Hegelian sense of Taylor, that is, it fosters normative modalities of consensus, compromise and reconciliation.

The above remarks on immanent transcendence have consequences for the authors’ conception of the counterfactual. Broadly, I agree with their emphasis on it, which I understand as the convergent immanent dimension represented by ideals rather than transcendently operating cognitive principles, though the ideals are conditioned by the principles. Nonetheless, the conceptual grounding of the counterfactual in the book is not extensively elaborated. In the first place, the distinction must be established between, on the one hand, discursively drawing off latent meta-conceptual cognitive principles, and, on the other, ideals as conscious, immanent action orientations. The latter is the locus of the counterfactual. The risk of not making this distinction in the line of the immanent-transcendent above is the ossification of ideals, occluding insight on their continual, recursive, cognitive conditioning, understanding them as continuously shaped by the ‘higher’ plane of cognitive principles and potential modal learning. In the second place, there is a wide spectrum of ideals that play a part in democracy or its possible (populist) perversion and, especially in turbulent times, their relationship is constantly changing like musical keys. Thus, publicity, responsibility, equality, freedom, legality, legitimacy, sovereignty and critique amongst others play a role. Even a concept as basic as publicity for democracy (the people, the popular), and emphasised by the authors as a distinction from Laclau’s emphasis on the populist, depends upon the wider alignment of interpretations of the other ideals. Concentrating on one principal ideal as the book does, whether called the popular or the people, occludes this wider context. In this sense, we need continuous updates on the ‘genetic code’ of democracy, itself embracing the emergent as well as the instituted.

Returning to the motif of pathology at this point, it seems to me promising to take up the theme of social pathologies – for example, derived from ideals in the Hegelian tradition of Honneth – to explain the phenomenon of populism. For populism, as so clearly shown by the authors, involves both an investment in established democratic ideals and their pathological perversion. But what Honneth’s approach does not do is to adequately address the genesis of pathologies or the ideal formations that ‘regulate’ them. For this, the creative moment of immanent transcendence is required. Then it would follow that the interpretation of social pathologies of reason would be pursued not only relatively statically in terms of established ideals of modernity, as he does, but also as emergent pathologies of reasoning and their validity-based critique. This is the general terrain of discourse ethics, but insufficiently worked out there. But, like pragmatism in general, it involves a genuine epistemic emphasis (Renault 2020).

Ideals stand between their counter-institutional immanent-transcendent production, on the one hand, and, on the other, their realisation in institutionally structured social practices of all kinds. The institutional level is historically fissured by the kinds of crises referenced by the authors, resulting in dysfunctions, contradictions and injustices. But the very existence of these dysfunctions, contradictions and injustices is partly also a product of the implications in practice of existing democratic ideals, for example, the extent of the contemporary societal emphasis on negative freedom. This is why ideals must be critically assessed, for, as the authors show of populism, even apparently justified ideals can be subverted. But, in practice, the overall suite of ideals must be assessed in terms of their cultural dynamics and outcomes, so that not just essentially bad ideals but bad combinations of good ideals can be identified. All of this can form the basis of equivalent research on constitutionalisation processes ongoing in societal contexts. It can show where the configuration of ideals is stable – including the underpinning of constitutional norms – and when it is changing, including the influence of pathologies undermining existing such norms or social innovation extending them.

The ideal type methodology

The ideal type methodology, announced in the introduction and used in the book, focuses on existing territorial political systems rather than any kind of de- or re-territorialisation that might be taking place. This methodological strategy follows an inductive/deductive logic of identifying patterns in factual interpretations that can be aggregated into ideal-types. As such, it is an objectivist methodology where the theorist decides on what belongs where. A balance must be struck in selecting variables between excessive parsimony and excessive inclusiveness. The ideal type methodology has affinities with Merton’s middle range theory. Though Merton is not mentioned directly, the authors, elaborating their macro, meso, micro framework speak of a “middle range level of causality to be understood less in terms of modernisation and its possible stages and more in terms of a crisis theory applicable to societies on different levels of development” (Arato and Cohen 2021, 28).

The authors use the ideal-type methodology in an objectivist manner in keeping with the original Weberian means-end framework, criticised early on by Alfred Schutz, who wanted to emphasise more strongly than Weber how idealtypes were also typifications of actors (Schutz 1932). Schutz emphasised how actors develop interpretive schemes to guide meaning and action. From this vantage point, Merton’s middle range account of inference reproduces the problem. In standard social science theories, hypotheses are inferences that social scientists advance about an objectified external world within a subject-object framework. The ideal-type approach accordingly runs the risk of this kind of objectivist interpretation and the question arises as to how it can be related to an inter-subjectivist, communicative-theoretical approach. In the first place, it is abundantly clear from their wide-ranging and influential contributions over many years that the authors understand well the intersubjective approach, and that it is in some way implied here in the ideal-type constructions that facilitate the dominant causal analysis. Nonetheless, the emphasis of the social scientific causal analysis is mainly on generalisation achieved through structured analysis of facts. Such an analysis, valuable in itself, must still be aligned with the more abstract general level of counterfactual ideals, also stressed in the work and addressed above. Not to do so runs the risk, in terms analysed for critical theory by Apel, of not making explicit how explanation ultimately depends on intersubjective understanding, even and perhaps especially in those cases where understanding has been ideologically or pathologically manipulated (Apel 1984).

It might serve the argument better to follow the Kantian logic of schematisation and substitute the term cultural model (macro schemas) for ideal-type – essentially ‘schematically’ integrate the concept and application of ideal-types. A cultural model can occur on many levels and be of many types. They are recursively related to actors’ schemata whose relations they regulate. Ideal schemata – such as are associated with the immanent counterfactual level – are embedded in relational cultural models and, lower down, the relationship between actors of all kinds – including parties and movements – are also embedded in such models. At core, cultural models are not analytic constructs of the theorist but a type of cultural ordering that can be shown to be present in the situation. The theorist’s proposed reconstruction is a reflexive take on this extant cultural model. The emphasis on cultural model involves a social ontological change in the status of culture in social practice and analysis with, at its core, further elaboration of multiple levels of analysis. It carries the assumption that culture is intrinsic to human life forms and not, as often used in the social sciences, merely a downstream variable.

In the distinction between a meta-conceptual conditioning level of transcendently operating cognitive principles and a convergent level of conditioned ideals (Strydom 2023), the overarching frame of cultural structure has already been described. But the conditioned also offers below the level of ideal (the first immanent conditioned level) further levels of (a) semantic-pragmatic and (b) institutional cultural models, (c) positional schemata of actors, and finally (d) abductive variation on positional schemata in the light of new situations (schematisation). I will just concentrate on the first two here as most immediately pertinent to the task to hand.

The former, (a), the semantic-pragmatic model, relates to the coordination, including antagonistic coordination, of normative constructions amidst difference. It can be illustrated – negatively by critique – in the criticism by the authors of Laclau’s exclusive focus on attaining hegemony, They object to his account of ‘populist reason’ as the claim to universality arrogated by the previously subaltern. The semantic-pragmatic model (a) can therefore, in one of its dimensions, be regarded as the space of positional conflict between rival philosophies. More broadly it can be regarded as the space of conflict between rival worldviews, as with Habermas. And the institutional model (b) refers to the level of norm application in a context of justification, following the lead of Günther and others (Günther 1993). I associate this level with the emphasis of the authors on generalised explanation through ideal-type construction, but I see this ideal-type construction as requiring to be analytically understood in terms of the various higher levels that actually condition its structural form in the first place.

The ideal-type construction, as the authors use it, I therefore suggest can be understood as an objectivist reading of the institutional level, which, given the current nature and scope of social scientific analysis, we heavily rely on. Yet, the form of this level is not only influenced by recurrent patterns of actions and events ‘lower down’ in recurrent practices, but the meaning given to these processes ‘higher up’ (in transcendently anchored cognitive principles, in counterfactual ideals, in structuring cultural models). Such sense-making recursively conditions the lower level – the institutional, the material-symbolic – at which the ideal-type manifests itself, ultimately incorporating the ideal-type into these more dynamic and actor-inclusive cultural models, which sometimes stabilise symbolic orders while at other times transforming them driven by changes in their distinctive forms.

Cultural models are discursively generated, including the possibility of them standing as pathological outcomes of such discourse. Building pathological cultural models is conditioned by bad ideals, and what I call ‘repressive hegemony’ serves as one possible outcome, but only one (O’Mahony 2013). That it is only one is analogous to the authors’ critique of Laclau’s domination-centric emphasis on hegemony, which can be sometimes dominant in a cultural model, but the dynamics affecting these models can also lead to democratic outcomes associated with consensus, rational dissensus and compromise on the basis of which the authors correctly and importantly argue against Laclau.

In this way, the action-theoretical, phases-model in the book running from movement to government to regime with its multiple dynamic implications can be shown to have different possible outcomes resulting from the interplay of discursive construction and embedded normatively ordered facticity. Analysis of these outcomes, and the general logic of the situation, should incorporate both creative historical-constructive activities, good and bad, and their deep-lying cultural structuring.