We, the People! Community, Populism and the Crisis of Political Representation
We, the People! Community, Populism and the Crisis of Political Representation

Summary/Abstract: The paper inquires whether the concept of the people can still be an important political tool for imagining communities and bringing into being historical agents for social and political change. With a long and convoluted history in which it has been claimed by leftist, liberal and rightwing ideologies, ”the people” is currently the preserve of xenophobic and quasi-fascist mobilization in Europe and the US. By shifting the emphasis from a substantive definition of the people, and thus bypassing the dialectical problem of inclusion and exclusion that undergirded the concept from its inception, the text argues for a performative definition of the people by way of which the concept is no longer defined substantially but relationally. Against whom, or what, is “the people” mobilized in political discourse? becomes the relevant question for distinguishing between progressive and regressive uses of the concept.

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