A Critical Contribution to the Evaluation of Contemporary Populism Literature

Abstract

This article argues that the hegemony of liberal and empirical political science in contemporary populism literature is hardly new. It is the re-articulation of the dominant populism understanding directed by American social scientists within the context of the Cold War. The concept of populism in the 1950s American revisionism school debates has been freed from its historical contexts and gathered pejorative connotations. Contemporary literature transformed the Cold War idea of twin totalitarianism into the theory of extremes after the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism in the 1980s and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In this way, any deviation from the centrist policies of neoliberal democracy is labelled as populism and thus is considered a threat. Due to this normative tendency, which is hegemonic, contemporary literature on populism has provided significant contributions to the analysis of the subjects of populism and what to do with the increasing power of populist actors. Still, no coincidence, it remains silent on the social context of populist power relations. Responding to this discrepancy, populism has to be integrated with an analysis of unified power relations proposed by the dialectical-materialist approaches.