In the wake of Thomas Frank's bestselling book What's the Matter With Kansas (2004), scholars and citizens are turning to the concept of populism as a way to make sense of the strength and popularity of the far Right in the United States. In order to unravel the puzzle of why working-class voters would enthusiastically support a political party that is committed to cutting taxes for the wealthy, dismantling popular social programs, and subsidizing corporate welfare, scholars need to jettison the old Marxist-inspired paradigm that assumes that political identities are products of economic interests. At least that is one of the lessons of Ernesto Laclau's fascinating book.

Laclau's On Populist Reason and Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, an edited collection inspired by his approach, do not focus on contemporary American politics. The contribution of these two books, instead, is that they provide a systematic theoretical reflection on the concept of populism, enriched by empirical discussions of Peronism, George Wallace, the new Right in English Canada, the United Democratic Front (UDF) in South Africa, the Communist Party in post–World War II Italy, and the British Tories under William Hague. By putting populism in an international, historical, and theoretical context, these two books provide tools not only for analyzing right-wing hegemony in the United States but also for understanding populism as a fundamental political category.

Laclau's starting point is his claim that populism is not an ideology or a type of movement with a particular social base. Rather, it is a political logic, which functions by creating chains of equivalence among heterogeneous identities and interests. In other words, “the people” does not exist prior to the populist movement but instead is constituted as a political subject through the movement. This process has both a positive and negative dimension. The negative moment describes the way that the category of the people emerges through opposition to elites. Laclau describes this as “the formation of an internal antagonistic frontier separating the ‘people’ from power” (p. 74). Second, the unity of the people emerges through mutual identification with some powerful symbol or ideal. He calls this an empty signifier. The empty signifier is important because it makes it possible to build chains of equivalence between opposed and sometimes contradictory demands.

According to Laclau, the dominant approach to populism in the scholarly literature is misleading because it tries to find some stable social basis for populism. Typically, empirically oriented scholars study several examples of populism and then define it as a movement of disaffected agrarians or urban workers facing modernization. Inevitably, there are numerous cases of populism that fail to meet even the most expansive or flexible list of criteria. This inability to develop a workable typology or definition leads to the conclusion that populism is vague, incoherent, or merely rhetorical. From Laclau's perspective, the apparent incoherence of populism is its most salient characteristic. Populism is the attempt to organize identities on an essentially contested and fluid terrain, the terrain of politics itself. What appears as incoherence is actually a reflection of the logic of politics itself: the fact that the range of possible alliances (or chains of equivalence) cannot be determined in advance. From this perspective, rhetoric is not something epiphenomenal, but rather the cement that holds populism together. Rhetorical devices such as “freedom” or “justice” (or what Laclau calls empty signifiers) unify diverse groups with different interests and make it possible for them to imagine themselves as a unified collectivity. In other words, the people—the subject of populism—is constituted through rhetoric.

Laclau's approach to populism is both theoretically compelling and useful in thinking about contemporary politics. His writing style, however, may be frustrating for readers without training in linguistics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, or poststructuralist theory. Consider his summary of his study: “I have isolated equivalential relations hegemonically represented through empty signifiers; displacements of the internal frontiers through the production of floating signifiers; and a constitutive heterogeneity which makes dialectical retrievals impossible and gives its true centrality to political articulation” (p. 156). Behind the opacity of this jargon, however, is a compelling message, and one that public intellectuals such as George Lakoff have been spreading to Democratic Party activists through more accessible books like Don't Think of An Elephant (2004). Political identities are constituted through narrative frames that incite emotional attachment and give meaning to indeterminate concepts such as fairness and family values.

Does On Populist Reason provide a more nuanced and theoretically richer treatment of these issues than the popular version of this argument? I believe that Laclau makes an important contribution to the theoretical debate by exploring the controversial position that populism, as he defines it, becomes almost a synonym for democratic politics. Typically, scholars have treated democracy and populism as opposed to each other. Many populist movements have coalesced around charismatic leaders with little patience for traditional institutions or checks and balances, and this has led to the widespread perception of democracy and populism as antithetical. But Laclau recognizes that the very concept of democracy, understood as popular sovereignty, implies the existence of “the people,” a political subject that can only be constituted by building chains of equivalence to unify heterogeneous elements. Thus populism becomes a dimension of the democratic imaginary.

The title of the book Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, a collection of essays edited by Francisco Panizza, seemed to promise further reflection on this intriguing issue. Unfortunately, with the exception of the introduction and the excellent contribution of Benjamin Arditi, “Populism as an Internal Periphery of Democratic Politics,” this promise goes unfulfilled. Arditi concludes that populism is a dimension of modern politics that expresses itself in both democratic and antidemocratic forms. He calls populism the “internal periphery” because of the way that its attempt to achieve popular sovereignty undermines the institutional forms of democracy. The slippage occurs because of the ambivalent nature of representation. When parliamentary representation is perceived as corrupt or unworkable, the people embrace symbolic representation, an alternative that produces the effect of “virtual immediacy,” an imaginary identification that suspends the distance between citizen and leader. For Arditi, populism can manifest itself as an aspect of democratic rhetoric as well as at the turbulent edges and as the threatening underside of democratic politics.

Most of the other essays in the book apply Laclau's theoretical framework to the analysis of particular populist movements. These essays treat such varied phenomena as the mobilization of the Greek Orthodox community in opposition to the Greek state's removal of religion from identity cards (Yannis Stavrakakis) to the nationalist imaginary in Palestine and the former Yugoslavia (Glenn Bowman). The sheer variety seems to confirm Laclau's suggestion that populism is not an ideology but rather a political logic, or perhaps the logic of democratic politics itself.

Given the constraints of space, it is impossible to even summarize the themes of each of these essays. Instead, I will simply note that the contributions are generally interesting and accessible to the nonspecialist. One virtue of the collection is a higher degree of thematic and theoretical consistency than is usually found in edited collections. The downside of this consistency is that many of the essays start by repeating the same points, particularly the inadequacy of traditional definitions of populism and the superiority of Laclau's approach.

My main criticism of the collection, however, is the absence of any comparative work that would link the theoretical analysis of the concept with empirical studies of individual cases. After reading about right-wing populism in Canada, Britain, and the United States, I found myself wondering why the same political project became hegemonic in the United States whereas it had mixed success in Canada and Britain. This question is not only an avenue for further empirical research but also a lacuna that raises questions for Laclau's theory. Laclau repeatedly insists that the articulation of populist identities is best characterized by its contingency. Thoroughly excising his own Marxist roots, he argues that the social composition or economic structure of a society does not determine the outcome of populist mobilization. Nevertheless, it seems worth exploring whether there was something about the social structure of the United States (racial, economic, or otherwise) that made right-wing populism hegemonic when it remained marginal in both Western Europe and Canada. Similar comparative work might be instructive in Latin America, where the concept of populism has been even more important for understanding the cycles of democratic and authoritarian politics. Single case studies, however, cannot illuminate this issue very well.

On Populist Reason and Populism and the Mirror of Democracy are interesting because of the insight they provide into contemporary politics. They also draw attention to the way that populism exposes the tension between liberalism and democracy. Over a hundred year ago, Tocqueville made a similar point when he warned of the dangers of democratic despotism. Renewed theoretical reflection on the concept of populism helps deepen our understanding of democracy.