Civil Society, Populism and Liberalism
- PDF / 333,991 Bytes
- 16 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 79 Downloads / 230 Views
Civil Society, Populism and Liberalism Thomas Osborne 1 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
This paper considers the threats that various kinds of populism might be said to pose to the ideal of a civil society that mediates between ‘private’ and family life and the state. Although it is difficult to generalise about populisms, just about all—whether on left or right—share a hostility to ‘intermediate’ powers. Of course civil society is exactly what could be called a forum for intermediate powers. In contrast, populists often tend to emphasise a vision of immediate power in the sense of the possibility of the direct expression of the people’s will in political institutions. Populists, of whatever pitch, often tend to invoke a partisan state that will be on the side of the people (however defined) rather than a putatively neutral ‘liberal’ state that stands over and against civil society. These factors make most populisms more or less generically hostile to liberalism, understood not in ideological terms but more as a doctrine which emphasises the necessity of mediating power through institutions. Very often, populism is a threat to the idea of civil society understood as a concept integral to liberal political theory, as a means of balancing the state and its wider interlocutors. In this paper, various means, largely inspired by the writings of Tocqueville on the one hand and Paul Hirst on the other, are suggested for addressing aspects of this predicament. Keywords Civil society . Democracy . Liberalism . Populism The question of the fate—and possible future—of civil society today, the question central to all the papers in this collection, raises the question of populism for a simple reason. Just about all understandings of civil society and its merits stress the importance of intermediate powers: civil society as made up of various kinds of association, civil society as existing between the state and the demos, and so on. Populism on the other hand, however difficult it is to generalise about its many varieties, tends to entail the invocation of immediate powers (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017; Muller 2016; Foreign Affairs 2016). The political theorist Nadia Urbaniti has described this basic populist emphasis nicely as the ideal of ‘direct representation’, an
* Thomas Osborne [email protected]
1
SPAIS (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies), University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Osborne
oxymoron, certainly, but one which captures much of the gist of many populisms whether of left or right (Urbaniti 2015). This emphasis on direct power as being very basic to just about all populisms, however, means that if we are to have a definition of populism at all, on the one hand it is going to be quite generalising with all the risks that involves, and on the other hand it has to be, if it is to work as a generalisation at all, basically negative. In other words, populism, on this conception anyway, is more a relational than a substantive category; what populisms have in common is negative, lying in wh
Data Loading...
