PEOPLE

The people, in a common understanding, represents a community of equal human beings, with equal rights and duties, living together on a certain territory, with common institutions and self-awareness. But the people mean more and the American and French Revolutions of 1776 and 1789 respectively gave new meaning to the people. The two revolutions also give political meaning to the people, who become sovereign and the source of political legitimacy.  

For populists, as researches shows, the real people mean a part of the entire population. According to their vision, the people mean the majority of the population that is not part of the privileged elite, or the common people, who share the same values, beliefs and often the same ethnicity in opposition to the elite group, financially and morally corrupt and subservient to foreign interests. In this populist understanding, the people is discursively constructed and represent a homogeneous group made up of individuals with similar, even identical, characteristics, and similar demands in opposition to an elite, also homogeneous and always outside the people (Canovan 2005, Mudde 2017, Muller 2016). 

Another essential component in populist rhetoric is the restoration of the sovereignty of the people against the elites who have hijacked it and the elimination of institutions that limit the will and sovereignty of the people. But the popular sovereignty claimed by populists actually means the will of the majority given the people imagined and constructed by populists. On the contrary, the concept of people’s sovereignty brought about by the aforementioned revolutions meant equal political rights for men and consecrated the victory of the many, the people, over the few, meaning the aristocracy. Later on, with the birth of national states, the people’s sovereignty has become essential and this transformation brought with it the abstraction, because the people became a political concept (Rosanvallon 2002, Urbinati 2019).  

The emergence of the national state and the challenges brought by the Industrial Revolution charged ideologically the notion of the people because in the Marxist ideology the proletariat represent the category of the people. According to this vision, the people is represented by the underdog by those deprived who toil with their hands and have no part, those condemned to live in slums (Ranciere 2011). 

Birnbaum Pierre, Le people et le gros, Paris, Grasset, 1979. 

Canovan Margaret, The people, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2005. 

Deze Alexandre, « Le populisme ou l’introuvable cendrillon. Autour des quelques ouvrages récents » dans le Revue française de science politique, 2004, vol. 54, pp. 179-199. 

Laclau Ernesto, « Logiques de la construction politique et identités populaires » dans Jean-Louis Laville et Jose Luis Coraggio (éditeurs), Les Gauches du XXIe siècle. Un dialogue Nord-Sud, Lormont, Le Bord de l’eau, 2016. 

Mouffe Chantal et Inigo Errejon, Construire un peuple. Pour une radicalisation de la démocratie, Paris, Cerf, 2017. 

Mudde Cas, The populist radical right: a reader, Routledge studies in extremism and democracy, New York, ed. Routledge, 2017. 

Muller Jan-Werner, Qu’est-ce que le populisme ?  Gallimard, Collection Folio Essais, traduction de l’allemand par Frederic Joly, 2016. 

Ranciere Jacques, Staging the People: The proletariat and his double, Verso, 2011. 

Rosanvallon Pierre, Le people introuvable : Histoire de la Représentation démocratique en France, Folio Histoire, 2002.  

Rosanvallon Pierre, “Penser le populisme,” La vie des idees, 2011, https://laviedesidees.fr/Penser-le-populisme. 

Rosanvallon Pierre, Le siècle de populisme, Seuil, 2020.  

De la Torre Carlos, « The People, Populism, and The Leader’s Semi-Embodied Power », dans le Rubrica Contemporanea, 2013, vol.  2, no. 3, pp. 5–20. 

Urbinati Nadia, Me the People. How populism transforms democracy, London, Harvard University Press, 2019. 

Yves Meny & Yves Surel, Par le peuple, pour le peuple. Le populisme et les démocraties, édition Fayard, 2000.