Power without Responsibility: Populism, Narcisism and the Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism

ABSTRACT

In recent years, much attention has been paid to the rise of political populism and its relationship to neoliberalism and neoconservatism hitherto dominant in the West. In particular, some have speculated that populism is a reaction against the failures of the neoliberal internationalist project, or capitalist globalization. Even so, clearly the new populists on the political Right do not stand opposed to, or outside, capitalism itself. Theirs is not a revolutionary project but a post-crisis reactionary one, demonstrating once again capitalism’s tendency to reproduce and, if necessary, reinvent itself. But if this is the case, and if populism is the political face of this new era of capitalism, what is its cultural-ideological manifestation? This essay suggests that technological developments, not least in the area of social media and its associated individualization of knowledge-sharing, may be driven by precisely the same logic as drives political populism, and may thus be a major part of the culture-ideology that reinforces the new capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Commodification
• late capitalism
• populism
• techno-individualization
• narcissism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor

Dr Darren J. O’Byrne is Reader in Sociology and Human Rights at the University of Roehampton, London, UK, where he is also Director of the Crucible Centre for Human Rights Research. He has published widely on globalization, the sociology of rights, and critical theory. His most recent monograph, Human Rights in a Globalizing World, was published by Palgrave in 2015. More recently he has been writing about the rise of populist politics and the apocalyptic discourse of globalization.

Notes

1 Though published in English translation in 1989, the essay in question was first presented in 1982 at a forum held by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Frankfurt.