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Chapter 4 opens a dialogue between the Institute’s work on demagogy and ‘Gramscian’ analyses of populism and fascism. Critical exegeses are provided of Gramsci’s relevant work and its reworking by Poulantzas and Laclau. A critique of Laclau’s hyperformalist theory of populism is contained within this chapter as it might be considered the ‘de facto’ contemporary critical theory of populism. Stuart Hall’s allied but distinct conception of ‘authoritarian populism’ is also critically assessed.
A detailed reconstruction of the Institute’s full theorization of ‘modern demagogy’ is provided. The use of ‘demagogic’ rather than ‘authoritarian’ in ‘demagogic populism’ is explained as is the division of labour between the demagogy studies and other sections of the Studies in Prejudice project. The reconstruction in this chapter and the following contest the common view that the Institute’s work simply imposed European understandings of fascism onto the US case.
The psychoanalytic dimensions of this analysis are elaborated, notably the key role played by paranoia, false projection and narcissism. Also elaborated is the Institute’s little-known critical engagement with ‘liberal’ propaganda critique and its ‘liberal exposure’ strategy of countering demagogic propaganda with ‘truth’ and the popularization of critical awareness of demagogic ‘devices’. This leads on to the introduction of the relationship that both Lowenthal and Adorno saw between demagogic propaganda and the culture industry.
The scene is set for the book by a brief analysis of the state of play today in orthodox, dominantly political scientific, ‘populism studies’. Its ‘classification dilemma’ is examined via the competing struggles over ‘populism’ and ‘radical right’ formulations. Worsley’s prescient warnings of such dilemmas and his advocacy of Weberian ideal-typification instead is introduced. Also introduced is the ‘original’ Radical Right project by New York intellectuals and its analyses of McCarthyism and US demagogy and populism. A brief discussion of the influence of the Institute on the Radical Right project leads to a synoptic overview of the book.
The concluding chapter returns to the opening dialogue with orthodox approaches, this time focused on how ‘political communication studies’ has addressed the populist surge. The chapter moves from Habermas’s recent, and surprising, re-visitation of his early ‘disintegration’ thesis in discussion of the current state of the public sphere. This enables a socio-conceptual bridging of the Institute’s demagogy research and recent developments in, and of, ‘political communication’. It employs elements of Habermas’s early work to examine the integral relationship between means of communication, the ‘contradictory institutionalization’ of the public sphere, the regulation of the culture industry and demagogic populism. The last of these so emerges as a central component of political communication in the ‘US-centric extraterritorial internet’. Communications policy so emerges as another potential means of redressing demagogic populism.
Chapter 5 develops a synthesis of components of the critical theory and Gramscian traditions. This enables a wider situation of contemporary neoliberalism and a ‘social formalist’ synthesis of the Institute’s analysis of demagogic ‘devices’ and the post-Gramscian understanding of ‘elements’ within populist ‘logics’. The chapter builds from an analysis of the contrasting interpretations of Freud’s Group Psychology by Adorno and Laclau. Both Adorno and Laclau distinguish Freud’s work from the elitist dimensions of Le Bon’s work on the crowd, drawing remarkably different conclusions concerning the implications of Freud’s analysis for demagogic leadership.
This chapter examines how Europe can address its crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century – and perhaps even take advantage of it – by reengaging its citizenry to create a democracy at the supranational level by transforming direct memories of total war into a more durable social imaginary. While collective memories of Europe’s age of total war helped push the Union through two phases of integration, it is clear that they can no longer play this role. This chapter argues that developments such as rising rates of intra-European marriage and the advent of the first generation of Europeans that grew up on a continent of open borders, combined with civic education focusing on teaching national history within its European context, can help ground the intra-European solidarity necessary for a true supranational democracy. In this way it can combat the negative memories spread by populism and reengage the constructive resources of collective memory.
This chapter details the founding of the first European institution, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, and of the European relance of 1957, which brought the European Economic Community (EEC) into existence. Using historical and archival research, it documents how important postwar leaders, particularly the first President of the European High Authority Jean Monnet, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, negotiated their differing memories and opposition from more traditional political actors to create the first European institutions. They all viewed the Second World War as an important historical rupture requiring basic changes to the political architecture of the continent. They believed that Europe’s experience of total war necessitated supranational cooperation as a way of curbing the violent tendencies of nationalism.
This chapter links individual remembrance to the paradigm of collective memory and shows how history played into postwar European politics. Since the end of the Second World War, the remembered past has increasingly been recognised as an important source of stability allowing individuals and communities to integrate new experiences into existing understandings of the past. Although these narrative frameworks help maintain individual and group identities, the chapter develops a critical theory of memory as a resource for rethinking the foundations of political life in the aftermath of historical ruptures. Building on the work of the Frankfurt School, it argues that the experience of total war between 1914 and 1945 created a rupture in European understandings of its past. Despite its many traumatic consequences, this caesura gave political leaders the freedom to rethink the foundations of political order and provided them with the cognitive, motivational, and justificatory resources to reimagine the future.
This chapter sums up the argument, reflecting on the importance of collective memory in the origins and development of the European Union. It also explains fears of a return of fascism by reflecting on the loss of the generations that experienced and had personal memories of the rupture of 1945. The book concludes by reflecting on the continued usefulness and applicability of the Frankfurt School’s approach to critical social research in a period of increasing globalisation, which has been accompanied by a concordant decline of the nation-state. It argues that critical theory – and political theory more generally – is an important resource for analysing the problems of international capitalism and the crisis of the Eurozone, just as it was for understanding the political and economic pathologies of the interwar years.
The first phase of European integration was followed by a period of institutional stagnation lasting through the 1970s. This chapter argues that this Eurosclerosis was the result of a counter-narrative brought to the fore by Charles de Gaulle, who sought to return the state to the centre of political and economic power in Europe. The expansion of Europe beyond its Franco-German core reinforced the Gaullist challenge by forcing Europe to confront new understandings of the past. This was reinforced by the accession of the United Kingdom, whose differing, more triumphalist memories of the war meant that the British took a fundamentally different view of the European project from the start. However, by the mid-1980s a new group of leaders reacted against this challenge to what the chapter refers to as the classic narrative by building on their own childhood memories of the Second World War. Commission President Jacques Delors, French President François Mitterrand, and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl set the second phase of integration in motion with a series of initiatives that once again combined the economic logic of prosperity with the moral logic of cooperation across borders.