AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM

Authoritarian populism (AP) is a sociopolitical transformation of the capitalist state based on weakening democratic institutions through popular consent. Stuart Hall originally coined the term to characterize the political project of Thatcherism. More than a rhetorical device used by charismatic leaders in search of electoral support, Hall understood AP as a field of ideological struggle where a wide array of conservative social and political forces aimed to shift state power towards “authoritarianism” following the breakdown of the post-war Keynesian consensus. For Hall, those forces succeeded by developing a discursive repertoire that articulated “free market” doctrines (i.e. competitive individualism over collective welfare) with moral panics (e.g. the fear of immigrants, trade-unions and youth subcultures) to impose a reactionary sense of crisis unto “the people”. 

Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Hall engaged with Marxist theories like Louis Althusser’s conceptualization of ideological state apparatuses and Ernesto Laclau’s theorization of populism as a discursive articulation of popular identities. Hall critically contributed to these perspectives by demonstrating that it was not only “public” (i.e. the state and political parties) but also “private” (e.g. neoliberal think-tanks and the mass media) apparatuses that had shifted the whole political spectrum to the right and, by neutralizing the emancipatory potential of populism, harnessed the “popular” idiom of the “people/power bloc” contradiction to the practices of the dominant classes. In this sense, AP compliments Nicos Poulantzas’ concept of authoritarian statism (AS), which, according to Hall, accurately captured the state’s evolution towards disciplinary power but not the ideological struggles that aimed to exploit the contradictions of the social-democratic left in power. 

Bob Jessop et al. (1988) argued that AP is too focused on ideological mobilization to the detriment of an institutional analysis of governmental power. Notwithstanding this relevant critique, various authors have argued that taken together AP and AS constitute the two most important analytical tools to map the history of Thatcherism and its enduring legacy in “Third Way” politics. More recently, they are also held as valuable tools to examine what has been classified as “authoritarian neoliberalism” (Bruff 2014). They allow to map the intersection between neoliberal and neoconservative political rationalities and to understand how authoritarian ideas and practices normally attributed to the far-right have always been integrated in the historical trajectory of the neoliberal state. 

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———. 1988a. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso. 

———. 1988b. «The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists». In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 35–57. London: Macmillan Education. 

———. 2011. «The Neo-Liberal Revolution». Cultural Studies 25 (6): 705–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.619886. 

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Jessop, Bob. 2015. «Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism: Dead But Not Buried». British Politics 10 (1): 16–30. https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2014.22 

Jessop, Bob, Kevin Bonnett, Simon Bromley, and Tom Ling. 1988. Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations. Polity Press. 

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Saull, Richard. 2018. «Racism and Far Right Imaginaries Within Neo-Liberal Political Economy». New Political Economy 23 (5): 588–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1417370  

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