Politically Minded

It is strange to think that Putin’s strategy of using right-wing extremist political parties to foment disruption and then take advantage -- as he did in Crimea -- could work in southern and western Europe as well. Or that some of the extreme right parties in the European parliament, who work every day to delegitimize the European Union and whose numbers are growing, may be funded by Russia. Yet these possibilities cannot be dismissed. Russia might soon be able to disrupt the EU from within.

The good news is that the general election on 5 October 2014 did not, as some had feared, enthrone a populist strongman in the mould of Hungary's Viktor Orbán, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić. The centre-right GERB (“Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria”) headed by Boyko Borisov, a former bodyguard and police chief known for his macho persona and folksy ways, scored a victory, sweeping about one-third of the votes cast and humiliating its principal rival, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), which trailed far behind with a paltry 15.4%. But proportional representation soured the feat: GERB saw its caucus shrink from 97 to 84 members of parliament. As a result Borisov has no choice but to share power with others in any new cabinet.  The bad news is that Bulgaria got a fragmented legislature, which bodes ill for the government that will follow, whatever its composition.

What do these political forces have in common? In truth, very little. Some are ideologically and politically poles apart. If these parties are politically different, why indiscriminately refer to them as ‘populist’?

Over the past fifteen years or so, the word’s meaning has changed quite considerably. Nowadays, it rarely defines authoritarian regimes which appeal to the masses, but rather designates left-wing or right-wing movements which are seen as challenging the dominant ideas or policies.

I essentially question the epistemological flaws surrounding the uses of the notion: when is it safe to call a politician, a political party or movement ‘populist’?

The stakes are high because to label someone as ‘populist’ is to imply that s/he is somehow a potential or real enemy of representative democracy. My critic refers to the ‘pernicious effects’ of populism which underlines the notion’s very negative connotation. Let me here reply to Catherine Fieschi’s major criticisms.

Cas Mudde, one of the major specialists on the subject, concedes that populism is a ‘thin-centred ideology’.

my argument is that humans are more relational, ‘gift-exchanging animals’ who are naturally disposed to cooperate for mutual benefit. In the following I will attempt to show how such an alternative anthropology can translate into a ‘civil economy’ and transformative policy ideas: rebuilding our economy and embedding welfare in communities.

In the wake of Marcel Mauss’ work on the gift, this model emerged as a legitimate way of rethinking economics: humans are naturally social animals with dispositions to cooperate in the quest for the common good in which all can partake.

Building on Polanyi and G. D. H. Cole’s guild socialism, one can suggest that an embedded model means that elected governments have the duty to create the civic space in which workers, businesses and communities can regulate economic activity and direct the ‘free flow’ of globally mobile capital to productive activities that benefit the many, not the few.

“If men never disagreed about the ends of life, if our ancestors had remained undisturbed in the Garden of Eden, the studies to which the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory is dedicated could scarcely have been conceived,” Isaiah Berlin told his audience at Oxford when he assumed that position in 1958. Philosophy was at its best when it was being contentious, especially when it was being contentious about the meaning and purpose of our common existence. Too much agreement was an abdication of its ethical responsibility

The task of philosophy was not to settle disputes, but to unsettle them, to encourage them, to keep them going. For it was only through disputation that we could resist the rule of experts and machines, the bureaucratic-technocratic society foretold by Saint-Simon and championed by Marx and Engels, a society in which we replace the “government of persons by the administration of things.”

Louis de Bonald pointed to the hard choices that the state would have to make. “In the modern state, we have perfected the administration of things at the expense of the administration of men, and we are far more preoccupied with the material than the moral,” he wrote. “Few governments nurture religion or morality with the same attention that they promote commerce, open communications, keep track of accounts, provide the people with pleasures, etc.” 12