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question of populism's ‘thin ideology’ still haunts the dominantly inductive theorizations and the related ‘classification dilemma’. Moreover, the suggestion that ‘cultural populism’ might have relevance for ‘political populism’ has been explicitly rejected. Superficially, this difference can be easily explained. Prominent relationships between aesthetic Modernism and Italian fascism were hardly difficult to find. Marinetti's Italian Futurists foreshadowed fascist views in their manifestos and later sought support from Mussolini's regime, though with
Critical theory and demagogic populism provides a detailed analysis of the relevance of the Frankfurt School’s work to understanding contemporary populism. It draws on the research that the Institute for Social Research conducted concerning domestic demagogues during its period of ‘exile’ in the USA. The book argues that the figure of the demagogue has been neglected in both orthodox ‘populism studies’ and in existing critical approaches to populism such as that of Ernesto Laclau. Demagogic ‘capture’ of populist movements and their legacies is thus a contingent prospect for ‘left’ and ‘right’ populist movements. An account of ‘modern demagogy’ is thus detailed, from the Institute’s own dedicated demagogy studies through to their dialogue with Weber’s work on charismatic leadership, the US liberal critique of demagogy and Freud’s group psychology. The Institute’s linkage of ‘modern demagogy’ to the culture industry speaks to the underestimation in ‘populism studies’ of the significance of two other ‘modern phenomena. The first is ‘cultural populism’ – the appeal to a folkloric understanding of ‘the people’ and/or ‘their culture’. The second is the pivotal role of modern means of communication, not only in the recent prominence of social media but demagogic exploitation of all media since the rise of literacy and the widening of the suffrage in the nineteenth century. The dialectical dimensions of these processes are also highlighted in reconstructing the Institute’s work and in extending these analyses through to the present. The book so concludes by weighing up potential counter-demagogic forces within and beyond the culture industry.
English radicalism has been a deep-rooted but minority tradition in the political culture since at least the seventeenth century. The central aim of this book is to examine, in historical and political context, a range of key events and individuals that exemplify English radicalism in the twentieth century. This analysis is preceded by defining precisely what has constituted this tradition; and by the main outline of the development of the tradition from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Three of the main currents of English radicalism in the twentieth century have been the labour movement, the women’s movement and the peace movement. These are discussed in some detail, as a framework for the detailed consideration of ten key representative figures of the tradition in the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ellen Wilkinson, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson, Michael Foot, Joan Maynard, Stuart Hall, Tony Benn and Nicolas Walter. The question of ‘agency’ – of how to bring about radical change in a predominantly conservative society and culture – has been a fundamental issue for English radicals. It is argued that, in the twentieth century, many of the important achievements in progressive politics have taken place in and through extra-parliamentary movements, as well as through formal political parties and organisations – the Labour Party and other socialist organisations – and on occasion, through libertarian and anarchist politics. The final chapter considers the continuing relevance of this political tradition in the early twenty-first century, and reviews its challenges and prospects.
: the integral transformative role for demagogic populism of what Adorno calls the ‘physiognomics’ of modern media – notably ‘time coincidence’ and ‘space ubiquity’ – which render the culture industry pivotal; the related question of cultural populism and of course the social psychological dimensions of modern demagogy which Adorno regards as a form of ‘psychotechnics’. Chapters 2 and 3 provide an account of the Institute's full theorization of ‘modern demagogy’. The reconstruction in this chapter and the following
sphere has not received comparable attention from the later Habermas. Indeed, one of the ironies here is that in his autocritique of this aspect of his work he embraced Stuart Hall's framework of ‘decoding’ media messages as an improvement on ‘the older explanatory models still assuming linear causal processes’. 21 However, by this point (1989), the legacy of Hall's work had been transformed into the cultural populism detailed in Chapter 6 . Habermas displays no awareness that an almost identical reception model had
) or an increasingly free-floating and eventually empty signifier (Laclau). For a critical social formalist analysis of demagogic populism, we need to more fully integrate the role of the culture industry – and modern means of communication more broadly. Standing in the path of such an integration is the phenomenon of ‘cultural populism’. As the next chapter details, this fraught term refers to both thoeretical blockades to critical theory's influence and a deepened understanding of the links between the Gramscian national-popular and the
Question’ (Lawrence and Wishart, 1997), p. 9. 67 Ibid., p. 206, referencing the argument made by J. McGuigan, Cultural Populism (Routledge, 1992). 68 J. McGuigan, draft manuscript for a forthcoming biography of Raymond Williams. I am grateful to Jim McGuigan for permission to quote from this draft. 69 Ibid., chapter 9, citing Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Verso, 1989). p. 155. 70 Williams, The Politics of Modernism, p. 157. 71 McGuigan’s view, according to Tom Steele, is that Hall’s particular focus upon issues of race and
: ‘The market is not a neutral instrument, it is a political arrangement’ (1997: 16). From this standpoint, he deconstructs both political and cultural populism. He argues that the superficially attractive notion that ‘popular choice’ dictates both political power and popular culture, that politicians simply represent the people and that popular culture is simply popular expression, is ‘highly suspect’. This is because ‘“the people” are as much a rhetorical as a political fact. Politics is in large part an attempt to secure pre-eminence for one version of the people
is expressed as between ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’, rather than between ‘democracy’ and ‘ultrademocracy’. Our concern here is therefore with the rather paradoxical phenomenon of top-down initiatives aimed at the opposite of standardisation, or anti-élitist views promoted by a socio-political élite. In this argument, political and social inequalities underlie cultural populism, and the latter reinforces the former. Social convergence or levelling has had important effects on language in this period. Linguistic levelling processes can be seen as running in opposition
). OED Online. <http://dictionary.oed.com.lcproxy.shu.ac.uk/cgi/entry/50002810>, accessed 20 January 2006. 60 Priestley, Wilderness, p. 148. 3047 Priestleys England 5/4/07 12:31 Page 191 ‘Now we must live up to ourselves’ 191 61 Priestley, Moments, p. 51. 62 Ibid., p. 139. 63 See Nick Tiratsoo, ‘Popular politics, affluence, and the Labour Party in the 1950s’, in Anthony Gorst et al. (eds), Contemporary British History 1931–1961: Politics and the Limits of Policy (London: Pinter, 1991); Laing, Representations of Working Class Life; and Jim McGuigan, Cultural