Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-sjtt6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-17T14:08:49.219Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction: The Crowd in the History of Political Thought—A Conversation in a Socratic Spirit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2023

S. N. Jaffe  and
Guillermo Graíño Ferrer
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The article introduces a symposium, “The Crowd in the History of Political Thought,” which is being published as a two-part special issue. The articles are by American and European scholars with disparate interests and approaches to the history of political thought. Some engage contemporary questions, while others offer interpretive analyses. Today, commentators, scholars, and pundits alike ignore the history of political thought to the detriment of their understanding of populism. Many thinkers have reflected on democratic health and sickness. The articles here furnish a partial catalog of the quarrels associated with this inherited vocabulary. The tradition itself is best conceived of as an unfinished Socratic conversation. In this issue, articles on Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle orbit the original democracy at Athens, the backdrop for reflections on popular rule of so many thinkers. The final article on Josephus moves away from the experience of the Greek polis toward the more contemporary preoccupations of the second issue.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 85 , Issue 2 , Spring 2023 , pp. 145 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

As guest coeditors of this special issue, we warmly thank our fellow guest coeditor, Susan D. Collins. Her expertise and editorial assistance have significantly improved the articles of this first issue.

References

1 Key works that appeal to the history of political thought in their assessments of populism include Crick, Bernard, “Populism, Politics, and Democracy,” Democratization 12, no. 5 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Urbinati, Nadia, “The Populist Phenomenon,” Raisons Politiques 51, no. 3 (2013)Google Scholar; Canovan, Margaret, The People (Cambridge: Polity, 2005)Google Scholar; Delsol, Chantal, Populisme: Les demeurés de l'histoire (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2015)Google Scholar; and Spector, Céline, No Demos? Souveraineté et démocratie à l’épreuve de l'Europe (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2021)Google Scholar.

2 Original symposium participants were Carlo Altini, Annelien de Dijn, Luc Foisneau, Guillermo Graíño Ferrer, Montserrat Herrero, S. N. Jaffe, Tae-Yeoun Keum, John McCormick, Neville Morley, Clifford Orwin, Eva Piirimäe, Arlene Saxonhouse, Vasileios Syros, and Camila Vergara.

3 In addition to the two-strand theory, which focuses on the relationship between liberalism and democracy, some have argued that contemporary populism is nourished by rival visions of democracy itself. Canovan, Margaret, “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47, no. 1 (1999): 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Among social scientists, the question of the character of the populist appeal is itself not free of controversy. In Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)Google Scholar, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart attribute the rise of populism to older, authoritarian-inclined citizens, who seek to stop cultural change. Armin Schäfer, by contrast argues that the voting data suggests that younger citizens are actually more likely to support authoritarian populists. “Cultural Backlash? How (Not) to Explain the Rise of Authoritarian Populism,” British Journal of Political Science 52, no. 4 (2022): 1977–93Google Scholar.