Populism?

The rise of the Front National/Rassemblement National in France, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Jair Bolsonaro have generated widespread laments at the dangers of populism, of working-class xenophobia and racism. Rancière argues that populism is an empty concept that merely rehearses a fear of the polloi or demos that can be traced back through nineteenth-century sociology and counter-revolutionary thought to Plato’s political philosophy. Ironically, Rancière has himself been accused of populism, notably by the sociologist Didier Eribon, who draws on Bourdieusian sociology in his accounts of the supposedly ‘omnipresent’ nature of working-class racism. This chapter examines Rancière’s critique of the notion of populism and the debate between him and sociologists like Eribon and his colleagues Édouard Louis and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, who accuse him of a naïve idealism and populism. It analyses Rancière’s alternative account of new forms of racism, examining his notions of ‘cold-blooded racism’ and ‘racism from above’. It explores Rancière’s claims that the spectre of populism is one key element in a new mode of ‘consensus government’ that legitimates a technocratic mode of governance through the promise of protection against a range of threats, from populist reaction through Islamist terrorism to health and climate crises. The chapter ends with an analysis of his alternative proposals regarding a ‘community of dissensus’.