Against the ‘science of populism’: grammatical analysis of studies on populism in Italy

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the study of populism has attracted considerable attention in the social sciences. However, this has highlighted certain inherent contradictions in the academic study of politics, which struggles between neutrality and value judgments. Shifting attention away from the representational content toward the actual usage of the term ‘populist’, the essay shows how part of the abundant academic literature on populism fails to address the problem of value judgment effectively. Despite its purported refusal to pathologize, academic analysis employs the term more often than not as a way to label new political parties or movements in terms of deviancy. It thus supports the political aim of incumbents who would like to dismiss such parties/movements as defective political actors. Taking the Italian literature on populism as a case study, we show not only how the moral connotation implicit in ‘populism’ is not neutralized in academic study but also how it constitutes a strategic aspect of the analysis. Our essay shows how ‘populism’ as a moral category allows, on the one hand, the collection in a single category of all the diverse actors emerging in contemporary politics and, on the other hand, the provision of an overall interpretation of these actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• political science
• political language
• value judgment
• disjunctive category pairs

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The article was jointly conceived by both authors, but the single chapters are split as follows: Enrico Caniglia paragraphs 1, 2, 4 and 6; Andrea Spreafico paragraphs 3 and 5. This publication was made possible thanks to the funds: Ricerca di base 2019, ‘Fare politica con le parole. Il ruolo delle coppie categoriali disgiunte nell’agire politico’, resp. Enrico Caniglia, Department of Political Sciences, University of Perugia, Italy.

2 In the nineteenth-century, the general sense of those political experiences that were first labeled as populism was that of a positive qualification of grassroots political instances; however, today it undoubtedly stigmatizes such instances (Collovald, 2005). The fact that its first meanings were by no means negative cannot justify its ‘neutral’ use, since a word’s meaning is obviously not determined by its origins, but rather by its current use (Greiffenhagen & Sharrock, 2007). Etymology can shed light on the origin of words, but it cannot define their current meaning.

3 The use of the ‘list effect’ (Sacks, 1995) is typical of the scientist of populism, and consists in homogenizing those political groups, which actually have very different, if not conflicting, positions, ideologies and requirements. By putting them on a single list – ‘populist parties, movements and leaders [are …] Bossi and Salvini’s Lega, Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the 5 Star Movement and Renzi’s Democratic Party’ (Biancalana, 2020, p. 216) – a suggestion is made that these actors are all manifestations of one and same thing. Thus, the shortcomings of some of them – such as racist extremism or authoritarian leaderism – are implicitly extended to others.

4 Also, this idea of populism as a ‘style’ points out an additional ambiguity of the Italian science of populism: while for the 5SM members, ‘anti-establishment’ is simply their political program, scholars see it as rhetoric (Caiani & Della Porta, 2012), but Caiani and Della Porta don’t give us the criteria with which they distinguish what is propaganda and what is political program.

5 The term may also have taken its cue from the continuous appeal to the people, which, as we have seen, characterizes new actors, but it essentially serves to brand this appeal as caricatural, rhetorical and deceptive.

6 Damiano Palano (2019) reminds us that ‘populism’, in the discrediting sense which is currently widespread in the Italian political and journalistic debate, paradoxically comes from the academic debate. In particular, it comes from some essays by Edward Shils, Seymour Lipset and others, appeared in the 1950s, which put disparate movements together – from Ku Klux Klan to McCarthyism, from communism to Longism – in terms of threats to American liberal democratic institutions.

7 Furthermore, disqualifying category associations never stop expanding or changing, and simultaneously transform the value connotation of those words that once had another, at least partially different one, to the point of involving, for instance, ‘nation’ or creating partially new ones. We may mention ‘sovereignist’, to be understood now, in different contexts, as ‘sinister defender of national interests’ or as an enemy of ‘cosmopolitanism’, however uncritical this may be, under economy’s dominion over politics.

8 One way to illustrate this point could be through this story, where George represents the social and political scientist: George has built a canvas with his own hands, and has then painted it light blue. Later, with some brushstrokes, he has painted white dots, then green lines (this line is social inequality, he said, while this one is power, and this other one is a social subject), pink lines (this is capitalism, that one is a social class, that one is an emancipation and the one over there is a technique) and some black circles (that one is the social conflict, while the other one …). When he stopped painting, he finally turned to his wife and said: you see, now I will conduct a study on this painting and then I will tell you how to improve this sort of landscape, starting from how it looks now.

9 We would add that even the progress of technocracy can go in the direction just indicated, where decisions should not be left in the ‘unreliable’ hands of the people; not to mention the unparalleled efficiency of algorithms.

10 Several names which are used to define political actors or groups in academic studies derive from eminently political classification systems, where they used to perform a polemical task. For instance, categories such as ‘reactionary’, ‘conservative’, ‘radical’ or ‘extremist’ were not developed by the groups that were designated as such, but by their opponents. They originally were, and some still are, derogatory terms aimed at discrediting opponents and fighting them even with words.

11 An example is the Weber-Troeltsch classification that distinguishes religious organizations between ‘sects’ and ‘churches’. This classification is generally taken as a simple description of a state of affairs: it tells us that there are ‘sects’ and ‘churches’, in the world. However, although to many it may seem natural to describe Pentecostals or Neocathecumenals as ‘sects’, none of these religious organizations would define itself as such. This classification has historically always implied a negative judgement or at least a decrease in value. It is well-known that, in the past, the dominant religious institutions derogatorily referred to dissident positions as ‘sects’. This is why, still today, by classifying a religious organization as a ‘sect’, we also characterize it negatively, to the same extent that defining it as a ‘church’ legitimizes it and makes it respectable.

12 Although they present themselves as descriptive terms, the members of a disjunctive pair do not inform us about the features of the observed phenomena, but rather about the observers' characteristics – their assumptions, ideologies, theories, value options. For instance, it is possible to deduce one’s political inclination (whether he/she is pro-Israel or pro-Palestinians) by the way he/she describes the 1948 Israeli-Palestinian war, whether ‘independence war’ or ‘war of conquest’ (Jalbert, 1999). This does not mean that these terms can never be used and that we should opt for more politically correct words; we simply must be aware that every time we use them, we are not providing a mere description, but we are also making a value judgement.

13 See Inigo Erréjon’s doubts about the expression ‘left populism’ (Mouffe & Errejon, 2017, pp. 196–197).

14 It is not by chance that, in Italy, the term ‘anti-politics’ has the same nature as ‘populism’; it is even more blatantly evaluative and, needless to say, enjoys great success in Italian political studies (see e.g., Biorcio, 2015). It is indeed a curious way to define the political action of those who contest or criticize mainstream actors. This term seems to suggest that, while mainstream parties simply do politics, those who politically oppose them do anti-politics instead, as if mainstream parties were, sic et simpliciter, politics. Therefore, there is no way to criticize mainstream politics without the risk of being singled out as anti-political or as someone who wants the ‘end of politics’ – an obscurely ambiguous expression, which however emerges here and there, in the Italian science of populism.

15 In the last years, a new generation of scholars (Formenti, 2016; Padoan, 2017) seems to point out that the time when the main theoretical reference was Cas Mudde – a scholar who identified populism with extreme right-wing movements – is gradually coming to an end, also in Italy. This is partly due to the success of the M5S, which is not easy to fit into an extreme right-wing organization, but above all, it is due to the reformulation of ‘populism’ as a left perspective, by Laclau and Mouffe. The latter seems to open a new phase, that is more varied, from an interpretative perspective, and far from the monotonous concept of ‘populism as a threat’. However, such reformulation appears to be just as politicized as the previous one: the only difference is that it presents a positive evaluation of populism, instead of negative.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Enrico Caniglia

Enrico Caniglia is Associate Professor of Sociology of Cultural Processes at the University of Perugia (Italy), where he teaches Sociology of Language and Sociology of Deviance. He is interested in Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis. His current research is focused on political oratory, political communication, news interview and newspaper texts. Among his last publications: – (with A. Spreafico) The Difficulties of Emancipatory Sociology, Éditions Universitaires Européennes, 2019. – (coeditor with A. Spreafico and F. Zanettin) Harvey Sacks. Fare sociologia, Edizioni Altravista, 2017.

Andrea Spreafico

Andrea Spreafico is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Roma Tre University (Italy), where he teaches Advanced Sociological Theory and Social Research Methods. His current research interests are mostly focused on Social Interaction, Ethnomethodology, Social Theory. He is Associate Member of ‘Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux’/ EHESS-CNRS, Paris. He is the author of: – (with E. Caniglia) The Difficulties of Emancipatory Sociology, Éditions Universitaires Européennes, 2019. – (with C. Mariotti) Community, in Harris P., Bitonti A., Fleisher C.S. and Skorkjær Binderkrantz A. (Eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Interest Groups, Lobbying and Public Affairs, Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2021.