Populism, (post) hegemony and democracy: rethinking populism without hegemony

Abstract

This article proposes that the use of the notion of hegemony in the argument about populism and its democratizing capacity in Ernesto Laclau's work implies an undemocratic lag that subtracts the potential for emancipation and expansion of political participation. Laclau's argumentation includes as an inescapable horizon of the articulation of a populist movement the formation of a hegemony that is capable of contesting political power and that configures a chain of equivalences between unsatisfied social demands. Consequently, this article reviews two fronts of criticism of Laclau s argument about hegemony in populism: one that comes from the American academy and is led by Alberto Moreiras and another that comes from Argentine sociology with which Laclau interacted: Gerardo Aboy Carlés and Emilio de Ípola. The sense of reviewing these criticisms is to rethink populism without hegemony to find a way that overcomes the difficulties that from different fronts are attached to Laclau's work. In the wake of the authors who have advanced from Laclau populism to republican populism, in different versions of combination, the hypothesis that will be defended from now on is that any transition from populism to a democratic scenario requires detaching from the idea of hegemony and therefore, populism can be re-categorized around its ability to solve unsatisfied demands and broaden institutional political participation, in what I will call transformative populism.