Incompatible Sovereigns: Populism, Democracy and the Two Peoples

Organized by the Department of Political Philosophy and Globalization Research, Institute of Philosophy CAS

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Abstract

The meeting will be the occasion to discuss Leonardo Fiorespino’s book Radical DemocracyThe meeting will be the occasion to discuss Leonardo Fiorespino’s book Radical Democracyand Populism: A Thin Red Line? (Springer, 2022). The aim of the book is to investigate theproblematic relationship between populism and democracy, by comparing the conceptionsof ‘the people’ and popular sovereignty which they presuppose. Whereas democratic theoryinvariably assumes a people intended as simultaneously plural and united, populism appearsto conceive of the people as a moral whole, internally undifferentiated. The book examinesthe implications of this incompatibility for the relationship between populism and democracy,and calls into question major ways of relating the two concepts: for instance, it argues thatpopulism cannot be made to overlap with “illiberal democracy”, a “democratic myth”, a crudeelectoral majoritarianism, nor does it amount to hiding undemocratic policies into democraticjustifications. Populism’s homogeneity and intrinsic righteousness preclude the task ofspecifying what it means for a multitude of heterogeneous individuals to share sovereignpower. Such specification, on the other hand, is essential to both democratic theory andpractice, and the book attempts to reconstruct it systematically. The presentation will end withsome remarks on the possible implications of this argument for democratic theory.