![]() This majority is by definition not identical with everyone in the polity. Populists claim that the majority is the people, including the legal sovereign. Urbinati cites Aristotle, who distinguished between majority rule – a way to make decisions – and ‘the regime of the majority’, in which the majority simple governs and ‘does not tolerate opposition and tries to conceal it as much as it can, when it does not liquidate it altogether’ (98). Rather, the majority becomes the people itself. In populism, the majority is no longer a way to make temporary decisions in a diverse society. Populism is dangerous because it denies and attacks this pluralism. This would rob democracy of its open-endedness, its ‘indeterminacy’ (92) – ‘the people’ is a symbol that sanctions majority decisions, but has no permanent identity. In this arena, most actors claim to speak in the name of the people, but they rarely claim that only they can speak for the people, or that they are the people. ‘Representative democracy has an endogenous disposition to generate dissent and conflict along partisan lines voting regulates this dissent and conflict, but it never resolves it’ (166). This is necessary, because it allows the majority to change its shape and change its mind. ![]() She separates ‘will’ (voting) and ‘opinion’ (assessment and judgment) (7). Urbinati distinguishes between deliberation and decision-making in representative democracy. In order for majority rule to avoid violating political autonomy, all citizens must be equal before the law and must have an equal right to determine the politics of the commonwealth and be heard they cannot be frozen in any specific social determination, such as ‘‘the few’’ and ‘‘the many’’ (89). Citing Hans Kelsen, Urbinati writes that: Democracy must permit the possibility of a loyal opposition and new, different majorities. Majority rule is a decision-making process that grants one particular constellation of interests the power to govern (which is not the same as sovereignty) for a set period of time, but not forever. The actual body of citizens is an assembly of multiple interests engaged in permanent contestation. In a true democracy, the idea of the ‘sovereign people’, the community of citizens who hold ultimate power and legitimating authority, is a fictio iuris (88). Urbinati evokes ‘an interpretation of democracy that has political liberty and pluralism at its core’ (91). Urbinati devotes the heart of the book to explaining how representative democracy is meant to work and the political theory that underpins it. Though some of her observations are echoed by other authors, her work stands out for its explanation of democratic theory and the ways populism both fits into and deforms our representative systems. Her work is an examination of populism as political theory, comparing it to the (idealised) theory of representative democracy that we associate with the ideal democracies of the late-twentieth-century West. Urbinati examines populism as a form – and perversion – of representative democracy. Nadia Urbinati, who holds a chair in political theory at Columbia University, finds her own perspective in Me The People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. ![]() Some academics focus on defining populism as an ideology, like Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser others, like Benjamin Moffitt, talk about the populist style of communication while Catherine Fieschi talks about populist epistemology, the ways populists decide what is authentic knowledge. For political scientists and other academics, this may be more challenging now that definitions of populism are starting to converge around the importance of the conflict between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. So it is not surprising that scholars writing about populism face a problem common to journalists: trying to find a new angle on a topic everyone is talking about. Populism is more than an ideology or an object of study it is the news. Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. This is a rich work, brimming with ideas about the nature of representative government, how we conceive of it and how populism interacts with these, writes Ben Margulies, and is recommended to university students and scholars seeking to learn more about democratic and populist theory. In Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy, Nadia Urbinati examines populism as a form – and deformation – of representative democracy.
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