Populism as a way of understanding the history of politics

Bacon was wrong about this, at least in one sense. Political discords, quarrels and factions, conducted ‘openly and audaciously’, constituted a – arguably the – dominant, and certainly the most novel, theme of English constitutional culture from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. The tradition of resistance and rebellion was a sign that significant numbers of people routinely lost faith – or never had any – in actually existing government. Yet in an important sense that tradition was underpinned by ‘reverence for government’ – as common opinion thought it ought to be constituted.

Ernesto Laclau argues that ‘populism’ is not a particular type of political movement like, for example, liberalism or socialism; it is a way of thinking about politics and political processes that applies to all the political movements of modernity. Part of its usefulness is that it frees us from the ‘top down’ or ‘bottom up’ alternatives that have tended to dominate historiographical thought and practice. Laclau's populist perspective posits a changing ensemble or constellation of differences. The top-down/bottom-up perspectives are residues of outmoded hierarchical perspectives. Instead of viewing constitutional history from the points of view of states, ruling classes and dominant ideologies, it is approached as movements within a collectivity in the process of constituting and providing legitimacy for itself.