10.13125/CH/3711
This paper aims to define and set the goals of what it calls a ‘Critical Hermeneutics of Populism’. Starting with the diagnosis of the ascent of rightwing populism being directly tied with the democratic legitimation deficit and the social problems caused by neoliberal policies, it assesses populist phenomena through the lens of hermeneutics. It argues that populism is not an entirely irrational phenomenon and that in spite of some common features of its intrinsic logic, substantive differences exist between left (or progressive) political proposals and their rightwing, exclusionary counterparts. The paper claims that only an assessment of the discourses, values, and practices put forward by each political proposal that can be dubbed ‘populist’ will reveal its perils and promises, and help distinguish which types of populism are lethal to liberal democracy, and which can actually help to deepen it. Finally, it argues that given the interpretative and potentially transformative features of Hermeneutics, a Critical Hermeneutics of populism might be the approach providing us with the best tools to operate such distinctions. 
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Critical Hermeneutics
Towards a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism
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Gonçalo Marcelo
2019/06/01
10.13125/CH/3711
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2533-1825
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urn:nbn:it:unica-24863
Towards a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/download/3711/3323
Critical Hermeneutics, special (2019)                 Articolo presentato il 25/5/2019
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ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 10.13125/CH/3711


       Towards a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism


                                    Gonçalo Marcelo


Abstract
This paper aims to define and set the goals of what it calls a ‘Critical
Hermeneutics of Populism’. Starting with the diagnosis of the ascent of
rightwing populism being directly tied with the democratic legitimation
deficit and the social problems caused by neoliberal policies, it assesses
populist phenomena through the lens of hermeneutics. It argues that
populism is not an entirely irrational phenomenon and that in spite of
some common features of its intrinsic logic, substantive differences ex-
ist between left (or progressive) political proposals and their rightwing,
exclusionary counterparts. The paper claims that only an assessment
of the discourses, values, and practices put forward by each political
proposal that can be dubbed ‘populist’ will reveal its perils and prom-
ises, and help distinguish which types of populism are lethal to liberal
democracy, and which can actually help to deepen it. Finally, it argues
that given the interpretative and potentially transformative features of
Hermeneutics, a Critical Hermeneutics of populism might be the ap-
proach providing us with the best tools to operate such distinctions.
Keywords: Critical Theory, democracy, hermeneutics, populism




1. Introduction
There is hardly a more urgent matter for social and political theory
today than tackling the newfound force of populism. My aim in this
paper is to lay the ground for what could be called a critical hermeneu-
tics of the various, widespread phenomena of populism. But this begs
an explanation. First, here I am using critical hermeneutics as applied
Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




to a social phenomenon, that of populism. As I have argued before
(Marcelo, 2012), following Walzer (1987), the method of interpretation
is not confined to textual hermeneutics in a strict sense, and can rather
serve as a toolbox for social theory, insofar as we can argue for its
superiority if compared to what Walzer calls the methods of ‘discovery’
or ‘invention’. Second, as I shall explain below, ‘critical hermeneutics’
as is understood here should be taken as a specific type of Critical
Theory and so its goals, like in other strands of Critical Theory in the
Frankfurt or closely related traditions, are taken to be both interpreta-
tive and emancipatory. Third, similarly to other critical exercises such
as those prone by post-Kantian philosophy, the use of ‘critique’ entails
a certain type of judgment, whose outcome is a distinction between
different occurrences of a given phenomenon, some of which might be
deemed legitimate, while others will not, and this according to the cri-
teria laid out for what will be a sound response to a given problem.
      Against this backdrop, the first section of the paper will briefly
recall the specificity of populism as a political logic, according to Laclau
(2005). This will serve as a reminder that populism is not necessarily,
as it were, a totally ‘irrational’ phenomenon; quite the contrary, popu-
lism exists because of specific reasons, and it possesses an inner rea-
son itself, to which Laclau precisely calls ‘populist reason’ (2005); un-
derstanding it is key to make a certain path with populism before
grasping which populist phenomena must be fought and which might
actually be a part of a democratic society or a ‘good’ society, to use a
thick concept.
      In the second section, against the backdrop of a recapping of the
purpose of a Critical Theory of society, and the definition of hermeneu-
tics as an intrinsically emancipatory project (following Vattimo and Za-
bala, 2011) the paper briefly spells out the tasks of a Critical Herme-
neutics. In order to do so, a concise historical analogy will be made:
much like the first generation of Frankfurt critical theorists took it as


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an integral part of their task to understand the rise of Fascism through
an analysis of the authoritarian personality (Adorno et. al, 1950; see
also Horkheimer, 1947) and the fascination it exerted on the collective
psyche of those times, so today we need to grasp the implicit and ex-
plicit causes behind the rise of populism, albeit perhaps with new tools.
This is not tantamount to overextend the analogy and to implicitly
claim that we are living today something exactly akin to what happened
in the 1930s or that every populist movement or proposal can be
dubbed ‘fascist’; but it does entail that populism is today begging a
critical understanding and response, much like Fascism and Nazism did
in the 1930s.
    The third section assesses what to some might seem counterintu-
itive: a theoretical proposal aiming to justify political movements that
might arguably be described both as ‘populist’ and ‘progressive’, i.e.,
what Chantal Mouffe proposes to call a ‘leftwing populism’. This third
section will also build on something shown in the in the first section:
populism is not the only problem facing democratic societies and pro-
gressive political options, as we also have to deal with the conse-
quences of decades of neoliberal policies. Finally, my very brief conclu-
sion glimpses at what lies ahead for this attempt at a critical herme-
neutics of populism.


2. People, Popularity, Populism
What makes populism so popular? And how do we define it? Is there a
way to really understand it? The answer to these questions hinges on
some specific wagers. To start with, and even though one often evoked
striking feature of populism is its use of affects, the starting point of
any attempt to interpret populism needs to be a refusal to reduce it to
a purely irrational phenomenon. Second, it must also acknowledge the
existence and pertinence of something such as ‘collective identities’




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Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




including the construction of a ‘people’. And while this might seem ob-
vious, at least in the social sciences, it does entail going beyond meth-
odological individualism, which has been prevalent in social theory for
decades.
      This is not to say that ‘the people’ is or can be a unified phenom-
enon, and to believe it is so is misguided; this is one important limita-
tion of many theories of populism, as in their attempts of devising an
agonistic strategy of hegemony, they might forget that every collective
identity has to acknowledge and respect plurality, both internally and
externally.
      Be that as it may, populism is becoming increasingly popular. In
this section I mostly rely on Laclau’s (2005) account of populism, be-
cause it makes the wagers I just evoked. But to understand what is
driving this popularity we have to take a glimpse at the context in which
this is happening. There is a reason why populism often appears in
pejorative fashion, as some sort of scapegoat concept. It is because it
runs counter to the political mainstream. But how has this political
mainstream fared in the public eye in these last few decades? Let us
just take some examples of our Northern Atlantic context.
      After the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union,
something happened within mainstream economic policy and politics.
The acceleration of the globalization processes was in fact determined
by what has come to be (also pejoratively) defined as neoliberalism.
Mouffe (2018) describes the success of neoliberalism, led by the polit-
ical figure of Thatcher, as nothing short of a revolution, in that in suc-
ceeded in creating a new hegemony, with a new language and new
frontiers of what was deemed politically acceptable: thus the T.I.N.A.
(There is No Alternative) discourse. According to Mouffe, it was no sur-
prise that Thatcher admitted ‘Tony Blair’ and the ‘New Labour’ had




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been her ‘greatest achievements’, because what the neoliberal revolu-
tion did was to ‘force [their] opponents to change their minds’
(Thatcher, quoted by Mouffe, 2018: 64).
    What this means is that with the so-called ‘third way’ politics, the
left basically accepted, to great extent, the terms and the policies that
were imposed by increasingly deregulated market capitalism; both in
Western Europe and the US, we witnessed a rise both in income ine-
quality and the precarization of labor, while this abandonment of the
mainstream leftwing parties of sharper critiques of capitalism and the
dismantling of the old social democratic consensus that once led to
strong Welfare states (especially in Europe) was a key factor in what
is sometimes described as a ‘crisis of representation’ in Western de-
mocracies. Over the course of the past few decades more and more
people felt disenfranchised and no longer represented by traditional
political parties. And while the economic expansion of the 1990s helped
to conceal this phenomenon, it eventually burst out into the open with
the subprime crisis – later transformed in the Eurozone’s sovereign
debt crises affecting the peripheral countries with weaker economies –
and the worsening of the social situation in many countries.
    This paved the way for the growth of populism. Appealing to the
discontentment of all those who felt outside of the political mainstream,
movements coalescing around charismatic leaders and who more often
than not put forward simple proposals to complex problems were able
to broaden their base of supporters. Now, all of this would not in itself
be a problem, were it not for the substantive content of the proposals
advanced by these populist movements. Indeed, and mainly in
rightwing populist parties, what we see is the multiplication of enemies
and a growth of racism, xenophobia and hate speech which is, in itself,
unacceptable in liberal democracies.
    However, the lack of rigor with which the concept of ‘populism’
appears in the public sphere, and is mostly derided (in its many forms,


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Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




or even in all its forms) by the so-called ‘elite’, including not only by
traditional mainstream parties but also by what has been dubbed the
‘liberal bubble’ actually has a perverse effect. It is true that right-wing
populism thrives on an anti-intellectual stance; but to automatically
disqualify all populist forms as being ‘irrational’ and the populist base
as being made up of ‘deplorables’ (to quote the way in which Hilary
Clinton once referred to Trump supporters during the Presidential cam-
paign in 2016) is detrimental, as it fuels the anger of all those who feel
misrepresented, while it also conceals the failure of the ‘establishment’
to tackle the social problems brought about by neoliberal policies, and
that fanned the flames of the populist appeal in the first place.
      This is the reason why I argued before (Marcelo, 2018) that rather
than demonizing ‘populism’ in all its forms, we should make an effort
to tackle the social problems leading up to it, while also striving to
distinguish between the substantive content of the values of proposals
of each ‘populist’ movement. While it might be tempting to adopt an
analysis reminiscent of Arendt’s take on Totalitarianism, arguing that
on both sides of the ‘populist spectrum’ we have the same phenomena,
this would also be a partial and misleading interpretation of our current
political predicament. Arguing that Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, Podemos or Syriza on the left, and Trump, Bolsonaro, Farage,
Orban, Salvini and all the other authoritarian or proto-authoritarian
leaders on the right are two sides of the same coin, and to reject these
altogether as demagogues, and their bases as deplorable idiots easily
manipulated and unable to grasp that only ‘liberal’ solutions are worth-
while, is missing the fundamentals of the current political shift away
from the center.
      I thus argue (Marcelo, 2018) that rather than simply drawing the
line between ‘populist’ and ‘mainstream’ political movements and uni-
laterally rejecting the former, we should assess their values and the
substantive content of their proposals, thus making them undergo


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what I propose to call a ‘critique of populist reason’ aiming to discern
between legitimate and illegitimate uses of ‘populist reason’ (Laclau,
2005). If we take up such a task, we might very well discover that
some progressive ‘populist’ proposals might actually be welcome to re-
new democracy and tackle the crisis of representation, and that the
line of demarcation between what is legitimate or illegitimate could
very well be drawn in the values that liberal democracies can or cannot
accept. And it goes without saying that hate speech or the multiplica-
tion of the figures of the enemy within an exclusionary logic is some-
thing that we cannot accept.
     What is, then, the intrinsic fundamental logic of populism? Accord-
ing to Laclau it is ‘the very logic of constitution of political identities’
(Laclau, 2005: 19). But these are taken to be ‘differential identities’
(69), that is, they are relationally constituted, the locus of a ‘failed
totality’ or an ‘irretrievable fullness’ (70). For Laclau, populism is the
key to understand politics ontologically, given that it is these construc-
tions of a ‘people’ that reveal the inherently contingent nature of every
political formation. Within populist logics, totality remains relevant, but
it is seen ‘as a horizon, not a ground’ (71). Filling what Laclau calls the
‘empty signifier’, each particular group tries to form an ‘incommen-
surable universal signification’, and it is to this that he calls the consti-
tution of a ‘hegemony’ (Ib.).
     In order for this process of will-formation to take place, Laclau
contends that a chain of ‘popular demands’ be articulated, to form a
broad social subjectivity. It is important to note that unlike in main-
stream political theory, this understanding of politics and democracy is
anti-essentialist and agonistic. Democracy is here not seen as the tech-
nocratic management of a community through its administrative pow-
ers (Ib.: X) that somehow capture the political choices given to people;
rather, the ‘essential non-fixity’ (Mouffe, 2018: 158) of social agents
and social institutions resides in the fact that ‘every order is predicated


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Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




on the exclusion of other possibilities (156) and, therefore ‘things could
have been otherwise’ (Ib.), also because every order can be challenged
by counter-hegemonic practices ‘which attempt to disarticulate it in
order to install another form of hegemony’ (ibid.).
      Now, as Mouffe (2018) makes clear, one of the main challenges
of this vision of democracy, which refuses to reduce it to the placid
management of the res publica and, on the contrary, recognizes an
intrinsic conflictual character in it, rather than the sole search for con-
sensus, is to keep it at an agonistic (struggle between adversaries)
level, preventing it from becoming properly antagonistic (struggle be-
tween enemies) (161). In Mouffe’s words:


      The agonistic confrontation is different from the antagonistic
      one, not because it allows for a possible consensus, but be-
      cause the opponent is not considered an enemy to be de-
      stroyed but an adversary whose existence is perceived as le-
      gitimate. Her ideas will be fought with vigour but her right to
      defend them will never be questioned (161–162).


      This brings us to a very important conclusion, emphasized by
Mouffe, and to which we will come back in our third section. The fact
that the connection between liberalism and democracy is contingent,
and even that liberal democracies have, in recent decades, made sig-
nificant concessions to neoliberalism, and been the cause of social ills
and democratic misrepresentation, should not lead us to reject liberal
democracies altogether. Instead, they should be cherished and re-
newed.
      Mouffe’s conclusion is that the crucial issue in a liberal-democratic
regime is ‘how to establish this we/they distinction, which is constitu-
tive of politics, in a way which is compatible with the recognition of
pluralism’ (161). That is, we have to acknowledge this agonistic aspect


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of politics, as it is revealed by populism, while also cherishing the plu-
ralism without which liberalism is impossible and no just social order
can exist.
    And this is one of the points in which the menace of right-wing
populism becomes clear, given that it tries to squash pluralism and
minorities as it diabolizes the other and scapegoats him or her in a
manner that is offensive and violating of Human Rights.
    But how can we then respond to this with an analysis that tries to
grasp the complexity of this problem while also making a contribution
to tackle it? I believe this begs for the development of a critical her-
meneutics of populism.


3. A Critical Hermeneutics of Populism
There are many theories of populism. And even though many fall short
of trying to provide an overarching definition of it (an ambition that
Laclau does not shy away from), most do tend to reject it as an entirely
negative phenomenon. Running counter to that tendency, I believe we
should be able to distinguish which ‘populist’ proposals are acceptable
in our democratic process and which should be utterly rejected. I al-
ready indicated in the previous section some of the features that should
guide this process. But let us now turn to the type of theory that seems
suitable to be up to that task.
    Several questions arise concerning this choice. Why a ‘Critical Her-
meneutics’ of populism? Why does such a theory need to be ‘critical’
and what does the qualification ‘hermeneutics’ add to the several
strands of Critical Theory that can be applied to populism?
    Building on an earlier work (Marcelo, 2011) I contend that herme-
neutics is the best method to ‘make sense’ of the social. First, because
we need a theoretical toolbox that is sensitive to history and to the
nuances of the many traditions that make up the complexity of our
societies and the several different traditions within it. Traditions that


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Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




are not automatically justified by their mere existence, but should not
be considered completely irrational either – rather, they have to pass
the ‘critical test’ but before they do, if they are to be understood, they
should be reconstructed in the terms that make them reasonable for
the social actors that take part in them to adhere and stick to them as
their traditions, partly constituting the collective identities in which
they recognize themselves.
      Second, hermeneutics brings with it a distinctive methodological
attitude. Michael Walzer (1987) talks about three possible paths for
social criticism: invention, discovery and interpretation. Invention
adopts a constructivist method, trying to procedurally determine the
best values or rules to implement in order to make a just society (e.g.
Rawls); discovery takes an essentialist approach to those values and
rules, trying to find them in some sort of transcendent predetermined
order, thus granting an ontological foundation to social orders and find-
ing their grounding elsewhere (e.g. Plato); while interpretation, on the
other hand, argues that the values and rules that guide societies are
to be found in those same societies, and that if we are to exert moral
and social criticism to that social reality in order to flesh out the values
and rules that ought to guide it, we will find them in that very order;
so they do not need to be discovered, or invented, just interpreted.
Finding new, better interpretations of them is somehow just what we
need to guide our practices or to bring them closer to the ideals we
already have.
      Consequently, as we can see, hermeneutics does not take a foun-
dationalist approach to social reality. It is not a naïve realism and it
does not need to appeal to objective truth standards outside of it, even
though it is not purely relativist either – rather, hermeneutical truth is
made up of a plurality of different interpretations and the process of
perspective enlargement that is to be done through the adoption of
certain sets of criteria. With its interpretative nature, hermeneutics is


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midway between the descriptive and the normative (a position that
Laclau [2005: 3] argued is the one of ‘populism’ too, which is a case in
point for the adequacy of a hermeneutical method to grasp and assess
populist phenomena), in that in the descriptions it puts forward we find
entangled evaluations that implicitly or explicitly resort to values, as is
characteristic of the hermeneutic circle.
        Third, and even though this qualification might seem counterintu-
itive for many, I want to build on Gianni Vattimo’s and Santiago Za-
bala’s (2011) claim according to which hermeneutics can be seen as
having a ‘progressive’ nature. Indeed, many progressive thinkers have
in the past tended to snub hermeneutics given the fact that many of
the prominent hermeneuticians tended to be conservative (a word well
applied to describe Gadamer; Heidegger is of course a more problem-
atic case, given his anti-Semitism – but this does not mean, of course,
that his philosophy should be rejected altogether because of that). But
Vattimo and Zabala refuse to see in hermeneutics a conservative pro-
ject.
        On the contrary, they consider hermeneutics to be anti-conserva-
tive, almost by definition. Insofar as hermeneutics is a post-metaphys-
ical project, insofar as it aims to go beyond Being as presence and be
an alternative to purely descriptive and naïve objectivistic thought
dominated by the paradigm of the natural sciences (unlike, Vattimo
and Zabala claim, analytic philosophy) hermeneutics is a transforma-
tive endeavor.
        If this assessment is correct, then, it might turn out that herme-
neutics is not only one more theory dealing with populism, not only
one more method applied to social theory but rather the standpoint
that might reveal itself to be the most adequate to solving this prob-
lem. Why? Because it belongs to a ‘politics of interpretation’ with eman-
cipatory goals (Vattimo and Zabala, 2011: 76). On the one hand, it is




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Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




committed to a deep interpretation of existing practices – not to shun-
ning them altogether or close them in the domain of the ‘unthinkable’
or the ‘irrational’. But, on the other, it ‘is committed to overcoming
institutionalized conventions, norms and beliefs and certainly not to
accepting existing practices’ (Ib.).
      We see, then, that for Vattimo and Zabala hermeneutics is in itself
political (77). Accordingly, they see in hermeneutics not only the em-
phasis on the plurality of interpretations but also a rejection of the
conservative nature that they see in descriptive philosophies, in favor
of action (Ib.). For them, hermeneutics is a potent tool against the
bearers of power, and thus has an emancipatory and revolutionary po-
tential. In their framing of hermeneutics as a form of ‘weak thought’,
they rebrand it as also being ‘the thought of the weak’, i.e., a force
pushing for change (96).
      Now, drawing the consequences of this claim we can see the ex-
tent to which adopting a hermeneutical approach to populism can be
fertile. It will be so because adopting an interpretative and emancipa-
tory approach to social reality, hermeneutics can contribute to identi-
fying the interests, and power-relations within a given society and pro-
vide a broad picture of the neoliberal status quo that led to the rise of
populism; but also, with its value-laden interpretative analyses, dis-
cern among the many populist options which ones might be deemed
acceptable.
      In other words, this is just a way to emphasize the critical aspect
of hermeneutics. To a certain extent, critical hermeneutics, such as it
has been highlighted by Ricoeur, Thompson (1981) and others, much
like Critical Theory, is reminiscent of a Post-Kantian operation of dis-
tinction, of depuration, of separating the legitimate from the illegiti-
mate uses of a given faculty. With the difference here being that, within
the context of hermeneutics, the result of critique is not only a negative
demarcation and limitation of the domain of what can legitimately be


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known, but rather the enlargement of what can actually be thinkable
or feasible in action, through the process of what Ricoeur called the
conflict of interpretations. That is, hermeneutics has at least as much
to do with the multiplication of possibilities, the disclosing of realities,
as it has with rejecting the wrong (political or theoretical) options
through its evaluative capacities.
     With this description of a critical hermeneutics in mind, and with
the indications already given as to the way in which it might apply to
populism, let us now begin to delineate its tasks. In this, it shall be
useful to compare it with its closest option, Critical Theory, especially
as it was formulated in its first generation as a response to social
events that were more catastrophic than what is happening in our own
time.
     Let us be reminded that one of the first interdisciplinary tasks
taken up by the Institut für Sozialforschung were the studies on au-
thority and family. The study of the influence of the authoritarian per-
sonality (Adorno et. al., 1950) and, later, of mass culture, were of the
utmost significance for the Frankfurt school’s take on the rise of Nazism
(see also Horkheimer, 1947). That we cannot grasp Nazism without
understanding authoritarianism seems today obvious; but the Institut’s
claim was more profound. As Martin Jay makes clear in his masterful
reconstruction of the early years of the Frankfurt School: ‘one of the
key elements in the Institut's interpretation of Nazism was the belief
that the phenomenon [of authoritarianism] could not be isolated from
general trends in Western civilization as a whole’ (Jay, 1974: 134).
     Jay recalls that there were two different approaches to Nazism
within early Critical Theory: one closer to a more orthodox Marxism,
focusing on the changes in legal, political and economic institutions
that made Nazism possible, and whose representatives were figures
like Neumann, Gurland and Kirchheimer; the other, composed of a
number of authors around Horkheimer, emphasized less the economic


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Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




structure and ‘paid increased attention to technological rationalization
as an institutional force and instrumental rationality as a cultural im-
perative’ (166). This latter strand was far more interested than the
former in the ‘psychosocial mechanisms of obedience and sources of
violence’ (Ib.) and acknowledged advanced capitalism’s resistance to
the collapse that was predicted by Marx, which led to some skepticism
concerning the possibilities for change (Ib.). It was this tendency that
became prevalent within the Institute, and that in later years led to the
analysis of mass culture and its aesthetical critique.
      Now, why is this historical reminder important? Because there are
some parallelisms between our current political situation and the late
1930s in Europe. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that the sit-
uation is the same. But as Michaël Foessel (2019) has recently argued,
public discourse and popular sentiments today eerily echo, at least par-
tially, those of 1938, in that today we see, like before, populist attacks
on the judicial system and liberal democracy, a longing for more au-
thority, a rise in nationalisms, and so forth. In other words, as Foessel
argues, the logic of today’s political movements is somehow similar to
those of 1938.
      Another striking similarity is the use of propaganda through new
technological means. In the 1930s Goebbels and Hitler relied on the
power of the radio to bypass traditional mediations and directly reach
the people with their inflamed rhetoric. Today the so-called Nationalist
International, under the tutelage of Steve Bannon and others, relies on
fake news, fake profiles in social media and the creation of myths
around their targets (e. g. the ‘Soros bogeyman’ theory) to manipulate
their base and capture more and more voters disillusioned with glob-
alism. Should these populist-nationalist leaders gain the upper hand
throughout Europe, chances are that they would use these new tech-
nological means for social control, finding new ways to gather data on




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their peoples, curtail basic freedoms and eventually eradicating plural-
ism within the frontiers of Europe.
    Ultimately, we could be looking at the prospect of a much more
monolithic Europe: hostile to cultural, religious, racial or sexual differ-
ence, exerting a strong grip within its borders, and much more closed
off to those coming from outside. So what should we do? This paper
does not delve on the aspects of citizen or political mobilization, even
though they will of course be instrumental to change this course of
events. Its main aim is just to sketch, from the side of theory, what
could a ‘Critical Hermeneutics of populism’ contribute to what is
needed. With this context as a backdrop, allow me to outline a few
tasks ahead of us:
    First, a critical hermeneutics of populism must comprehend the
causes of populism. As I contented in the first part of the paper, there
are significant differences between the several populist phenomena. As
a result, some of the causes of populism might be widely shared, while
other populist phenomena will certainly exhibit rather unique traits and
causes. As a consequence, this critical hermeneutical task will be two-
fold: 1.1) to understand the social psychology behind right-wing pop-
ulism, much like the Frankfurt School tried to understand the authori-
tarianism at the root of Nazism and, later, the mechanisms of domina-
tion underlying mass culture; and 1.2) to make a historical-hermeneu-
tical reconstruction of the way in which different societies and commu-
nities have been affected in the last decades by the economic crisis,
the democratic legitimation crisis, or other problems that might have
broken down their traditional party system and led to a surge in pop-
ulism.
    Both aspects of this twofold first task could be seen as looking to
attain a deep understanding of these social phenomena and, given the
thick dimension of hermeneutics in which emancipatory values are also
embedded, as we have seen with Vattimo and Zabala (2011), they


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would also, to some extent, aim to apply a therapeutic model to these
social ills, at least if we consider right-wing populism as a ‘social pa-
thology’ (Marcelo, 2018). However, this task has one important caveat
that must be mentioned.
      Hermeneutics is historical-comprehensive and emancipatory. But
one should not overemphasize the role of the critical theorist or, in this
case, the critical hermeneutician in this. What I mean is this: critical
hermeneutics should be wary of any ‘epistemological break’ between
the ‘theorist’ and ‘the people’ / ‘the masses’. Let us not forget that
hermeneutics is not, and does not pretend to be ‘objective’ science. As
such, and much like in French pragmatic sociology, what is at stake in
this task is what Ricoeur would perhaps call the right mix between
hermeneutics as a recollection of meaning and hermeneutics as the
exercise of suspicion (Ricoeur, 1970).
      Allow me to unpack this last statement. Every diagnosis of a con-
cealed meaning or every denunciation of domination through manipu-
lation involves the exercise of some sort of suspicion, because what is
at stake there is a distance between patent meaning and latent mean-
ing; and this is why, as Ricoeur noted, we need hermeneutics as an art
of interpretation, in order to decipher patent meaning and find what is
latent in it (Ricoeur, 1970). However, the wager of hermeneutics, at
least as it appeared in Ricoeur, inspired French pragmatic sociologists
(Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; see also Michel, 2012), and is an epis-
temological position very close to third-generations Critical theorists
like Axel Honneth, is that social actors are not dumb puppets who need
the social critic to come fully explain the world to them and come lib-
erate them from the ills that the critic denounces.
      This latter position is some sort of theoretical elitism which is not
only self-serving but that actually fuels anti-intellectualism and resent-
ment. This discussion is of course complex and wide-reaching as it




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touches not only on the social role of theorists (including Critical theo-
rists) but also on the foundational or anti-foundational theoretical
stances that underpin the theories of society that are put forward. But
it is true that there is a tendency that runs from Lukács to the first
generation of Critical theory or to ‘critical sociology’ deriving, from in-
stance, from Bourdieu (not to mention Althusser, who theorized the
‘epistemological break’ allegedly stemming from Marx’s Capital in the
first place) to institute this epistemological schism between those who
would see the ‘real’ society or master the ‘real’ social science, and
those who would need their help to see it.
    And then these theorists are surprised when the ‘Proletariat’ does
not really embody ‘universal’ interests and bring about the revolution,
when it is allegedly ‘bought’ by the social Welfare states and acquiesces
to capitalism, or when social movements tend to be rather inorganic
and not driven by theory or instituted party systems. So what we need
to acknowledge is a somewhat democratic distribution of rationality
and the ability to grasp meaning. In a way, Ricoeurian hermeneutics
gives us that ability. At the same time, this is not to say that social
actors are entirely rational, as neoclassical economics, and namely ra-
tional choice theory would have it. Things are far more complicated.
Affects play a role in motivation too, as does their ideological manipu-
lation, for instance within the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and
Chiapello, 2007). So people are neither entirely rational (nor is ration-
ality the merely instrumental capacity it is sometimes taken to be) nor
entirely irrational (and, as I mentioned above, rejecting the constitu-
encies who votes for right-wing populists as being made up of ‘deplor-
ables’ or dumb, irrational people, only adds to the problem).
    Instead, we have zones of opacity within us, and we are prone to
being seduced and manipulated, but also capable of resisting and
grasping meaning. A critical hermeneutics of populism needs to take
stock of this complexity, and, through education and interpretation,


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Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




help to provide people with the tools to identify their problems and
reject the false and simplistic solutions that right-wing populists offer
them.
      Second, a critical hermeneutics of populism will have to rely on
one particular instance of traditional, Gadamerian hermeneutics: the
fusion of horizons, at least when what is at stake is fostering relation-
ships of mutual recognition. Hermeneutics is not all about the fusion of
horizons, just as politics is way more than consensus building. But
something akin to a fusion of horizons is important for mutual under-
standing, for the welcoming of the standpoint of others, to see oneself
as another and treat the others as selves equal in worth and deserving
of esteem and respect. This much is upheld by Charles Taylor (1994)
when he grounds his vision of multiculturalism in the fusion of horizons.
Making a place for it is not tantamount to denying the agonistic trait of
the political; but it is acknowledging that within the struggle that
traverses our societies, space must be made for what Ricoeur (2005)
called the ‘clearings’ of recognition.
      This is something particularly important when what is a stake is
the absolute other, the one who is not a proper subject of rights be-
cause he or she is foreign to a given polity. Within their logic of antag-
onism and multiplication of enemies, right-wing populists tend to make
the refugees, asylum seekers and migrants an easy target, a scapegoat
for all economic woes and social malaises. Their problem thus becomes
a matter of misrepresentation because they will often be left without a
voice. A true politics of recognition and hospitality must thus rely on
the wager of overcoming hostility through mutual understanding. Rich-
ard Kearney (in Marcelo, 2017) depicts it as the passage from the im-
possible to the possible, from hostility to hospitality, and proposes to
operate this mediation through narrative imagination. It is through the
exchange of narratives that this might be accomplished – which is in
itself a hermeneutical act.


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     Third, when thought of in more general terms, applied not only to
the fusion of horizons within the relationships of mutual recognition we
have to engage in with those who are the most foreign to us, but to
the entirety of relations between social groups and political actors
within the same polity, the task of a critical hermeneutics of populism
extends to involve something we already invoked with Mouffe: how to
reconcile the agonism intrinsic to the political logic with the necessary
respect for pluralism. This is one of the key distinctions that allows us
to separate between legitimate and illegitimate populism, i.e., the pop-
ulist forms that jeopardize liberal democracies, and those that do not.
     Fourth, as I already hinted at – and this being something that
follows as a consequence from the three other tasks –, a critical her-
meneutics of populism must be able to pinpoint the political proposals
that are able to renew and reinvigorate democracy and popular partic-
ipation and welcome and foster them as a way to tackle the legitima-
tion deficit of representative democracy, while it must denounce and
reject the populism that squashes pluralism and liberal democracy. And
this can only be done by hermeneutically analyzing political proposals,
discourses and actions. And in when this comes down to political com-
munication, this distinction will only come by through education and
the exercise of critique – again, not by putting the critic in a pedestal,
but by helping people to forge the tools they need to arrive themselves
at these conclusions.
     It goes without saying that this is a tentative and incomplete list
of tasks for what is still only the sketch of a project. It seems to me,
for the reasons explained above, that a Critical Hermeneutics can be
well suited to tackle populism. And if critical hermeneuticians are able
to fulfill, even if only partially, these tasks, then their contribution to
saving and renewing liberal democracy would already have been pre-
cious.




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Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




      In the next and brief section of the paper, I present a summarized
outline of what has been dubbed a ‘leftwing populism’ by Chantal
Mouffe, in order to show the differences between this proposal and
rightwing populism.


4. Leftwing Populism: a reappraisal
I have been claiming not that all populist forms are alike and that ra-
ther than asking whether certain political proposal is populist and dis-
crediting it if the answer is affirmative, we should do well to assess the
problems it aims to solve and the values it holds.
      Chantal Mouffe claims that due to the disillusionment brought
about by mainstream politics we are living in a populist moment and
that, as a consequence, in the next few years, the main locus of polit-
ical struggle will be between right-wing populism and left-wing popu-
lism. (Mouffe, 2018: 21) As a consequence, she believes, the only way
to prevent the coming of authoritarian solutions will be to reaffirm and
expand democratic values through the construction of a new, progres-
sive hegemony. This new hegemony would be inclusive, even though,
playing a part in the agonistic process, it would still have an adversary:


      Left populism wants to recover democracy to deepen and ex-
      tend it. A left populist strategy aims at federating the demo-
      cratic demands into a collective will to construct a ‘we’, a
      ‘people’ confronting a common adversary: the oligarchy. This
      requires the establishment of a chain of equivalence among
      the demands of the workers, the immigrants and the precar-
      ious middle class, as well as other democratic demands, such
      as those of the LGBT community (50).


      It is noteworthy that Mouffe believes that even though this new,
inclusive democratic hegemony, necessitates a transformation in the


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relations of power and a creation of new democratic practices (69), it
does not require a revolutionary break with the liberal-democratic re-
gime (70). That is, a new hegemony could be built within the same
institutional framework; which is to say, might we add, that what are
needed are new interpretations of the democratic ideal, rather than a
complete destruction of the current institutional framework and ways
of living. Mouffe believes it still necessary to define an adversary (in
this case, the oligarchy) and to build a ‘hegemonic offensive’, because
without it no real change will ever happen. The question then becomes
how do populists treat such an adversary.
    Indeed, the line between agonism and antagonism is fine. Insofar
as left populism still draws a frontier and builds a hegemony, can it not
also be exclusionary? In order to prevent it from being so, this agonism
must be handled with care. One way to argue that it is not necessarily
exclusionary resides in the fact that these conflicts we are alluding to
are still, in a way, conflicts of interpretations. And insofar as the ‘oli-
garchy’ is actually an impediment to a democracy in which everyone
really counts (not only in the formal procedure of voting) promoting a
more equal distribution of power as a result of a progressive hegemony
might actually be a sine qua non for a more fulfilled democracy.
    Another possible problem facing left populism is its reliability on
the charismatic leader. This is a striking feature of any form of popu-
lism: its use of affects that somehow are channeled through charisma.
And there is an intrinsic tension between this feature and Mouffe’s re-
liance in the current institutional framework. Allow me to unpack this
diagnosis.
    In a way, even though she does not explicitly acknowledge it,
Mouffe’s project is critical hermeneutical, insofar as in her attempt to
spell out this sort of ‘radical reformism’ (88) what she is doing is trying
to put some flesh in the bones of the very ethico-political principles of
the liberal-democratic regime –     ‘liberty and equality for all’ (77) –


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Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




through ‘an immanent critique that mobilizes the symbolic resources
of the democratic tradition’ (78).
      In other words: Mouffe just wants to recover values that we al-
ready adhere to in our democracies and to reinstate them in a more
fulfilled manner. What she is aiming at is a reinterpretation of our
founding (Ricoeur would call them ideological in a constitutive sense)
values, within our current institutional framework, but with new prac-
tices and through a defeat of the ideology (neoliberalism) that made
us forego or squash these same old values. And another key aspect is
that she emphasizes the way in which ‘political parties provide discur-
sive frameworks that allow people to make sense of the social world’
(105). That is, as is now clear, Mouffe’s strategy of a left populism is
hermeneutic through and through.
      However, for all her reliance in our founding values and current
institutions, there is an implicit (albeit not always emphasized) reliance
on the charismatic leader. And this has its limitations. It can be argued
that the same progressive strategy that is being put forward here can
be born within institutions themselves or, more likely, in a more hori-
zontal manner through social movements and using modes of commu-
nication that are more democratic and less centered on the figure of a
leader. Otherwise it runs the risk of putting its faith on political solu-
tions which might be devoid of meaning without the charismatic lead-
ers that once led them. And if so, then left populism would not be very
far from rightwing populism after all.
      But it can be. Mouffe makes clear that her theory has no specific
program or regime in mind (97). That is, the deepening of democracy
she aspires to could assume the forms of democratic socialism, eco-
socialism, associative democracy, participatory democracy (Ib.) or
other forms, according to specific contexts. Rather, her goal is to get




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more representation for the people: ‘The remedy does not lie in abol-
ishing representation but in making our institutions more representa-
tive. This is indeed the objective of a left populist strategy’ (105).
    We could then say that there is some intrinsic indeterminacy or
vagueness in this proposal, but this has necessarily to remain so; oth-
erwise the theory on left populism would really amount to no more
than a political program. The goal is rather to inspire the political pro-
jects that can bring about more freedom, equality and democratic rep-
resentation. Mouffe tries to re-signify populism in order to show in
which manner it could recover democracy. And this, we could say, is
also precisely another task for a critical hermeneutics of populism.


5. Conclusion
When successful and carried out to its ultimate consequences, a new
and better interpretation of the social world can change it. It remains
to be seen whether a ‘left populist’ attempt at hegemony will succeed
in tackling both neoliberalism and rightwing populism and bringing
about a more democratic, free and equal society. Part of the task at
hand is, of course, hermeneutical. Such an effort would have to defeat
both the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ and the resurgence of the exclusion-
ary forces.
    This new symbolic order would partially recover already-existing
ideals but endowing them with new interpretations leading to new
practices. Will this ever happen? That much cannot be affirmed with
any degree of certainty. But the interpretative and emancipatory po-
tential of a critical hermeneutics of populism could, and should, help in
the task of identifying both the perils and possibilities of the current
political landscape. And perhaps also contribute, with its critical capac-
ity of distinction, to provide the tools allowing people to instantiate
their will to live together and exercise their power-in-common through




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Gonçalo Marcelo, Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism




the choice of the political options that better accommodate the found-
ing values of democracy.




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