The people versus the grandees: The paradox of Claude Lefort’s ‘populism’

Abstract

In recent decades, Claude Lefort has become a recurring reference point for mainstream authors hostile to populism. This article delves into the paradoxical character of Lefort’s own ‘populism’ to challenge these anti-populist approaches. It explores Lefort’s nuanced stance in which, despite his explicit rejection of populism, he nevertheless embraced social division and the empowerment of the people against the grandees. The analysis is divided into three parts. First, it presents Lefort’s objections to populism, echoed by scholars such as Marilena Chaui, Andrew Arato, Nadia Urbinati, Pierre Rosanvallon and Stefan Rummens, who often associate populism with Carl Schmitt’s political theology. The second part highlights latent ‘populist’ elements in Lefort’s work, as examined through his study of Machiavelli and his reflections on a wild democracy. The third part critically assesses the supposed rupture between Lefort and populist thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, identifying moments of consistent theoretical alignment and even shared political engagement rather than stark disagreement. The conclusion challenges the prevailing narrative by positing a sophisticated theory of populism in Lefort’s work. It emphasises the inclusive and emancipatory aspects of appeals to the ‘people’ without overlooking potentially undemocratic expressions. Ultimately, the article argues for a nuanced understanding of populism from Lefort’s work, emphasising the need for a delicate balance in navigating between populism’s democratic and tyrannical manifestations.

This paper is concerned with a puzzling feature of Lefort’s thought, what might be called the paradox of his ‘populism’. The paradox is that while he explicitly rejected a populist project, he welcomed social division and the call for the people to confront those he names the ‘grandees’. This article aims to identify and critically evaluate latent ‘populist’ elements in Lefort’s work and to reflect on a nuanced theory of populism compatible with Lefort’s contribution. This endeavour is particularly relevant since, as Selinger (2023, 16–17) recently pointed out, Lefort is very influential in a mainstream current of authors hostile to populism. Openly drawing on Lefort, many present populism as an expression of political theology associated with the highly controversial figure of Carl Schmitt, a political theology that in turn would be implicit in the works of populist thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Highlighting the populist aspect of a work that is a cornerstone for critics of populism thus contributes to ongoing efforts to reassess the complex relationship between populism and democracy.

To explore the paradox of Lefort’s ‘populism’, this paper is divided into three parts. First, I will present Lefort’s objections to populism, as well as those of intellectuals directly influenced by him, such as Marilena Chaui, Andrew Arato, Nadia Urbinati, Pierre Rosanvallon and Stefan Rummens. Secondly, I will present the ‘populist’ elements in Lefort’s work, in particular the emancipatory character of the division between the ‘people’ and the grandees, discussed in his in-depth study of Niccolò Machiavelli, and I will point out its merits and limitations. In the third and final part, I will try to respond to the criticism of the Lefortian tradition directed at Laclau and Mouffe, two defenders of populism, by critically evaluating the apparent points of rupture, but also by pointing out the moments of continuity between their work and that of Lefort.

The article concludes that it is possible to read in Lefort a sophisticated theory of populism. Against currents that see populism as inherently threatening to liberal democracy, Lefort emphasises how the appeal to the ‘people’ can be inclusive and emancipatory, challenging an ‘invisible ideology’ that seeks to domesticate the democratic experience. At the same time, Lefort seeks to strike a balance by preventing this celebration of the people from becoming a celebration of indomitable antagonism that would also endanger democracy.

Lefort (and Lefortians) against populism

Lefort wrote very little about populism. In an insightful recent article, Selinger (2023, 6) finds two references to the subject in his work. From my previous research, I found four occurrences of the term. The first two uses relate to the Latin American experience. The first reference to populism appears in a colloquium on Latin America in 1989, in a paragraph in which he describes the ideology of populism as trying to fuse government and state, civil society and state, and political power and state power (Lefort [1989] 1991, 230). Populism would then make a reappearance in his work in 1992, in a single paragraph that was only published in Spanish. In a dialogue with Latin American students and researchers, when asked about the fact that populist movements are structured around the defence of social justice, Lefort says that populism can be effectively inclusive, but that it is built from the top down (Lefort 1992a, 141). Lefort reproduces a commonplace that associates populism with a form of charismatic leadership – something that can undoubtedly be contested ¹ – and says that populism produces fascination, dependence and obedience to a leader in what is described as a ‘voluntary servitude’. Populism does not engender liberal rights, nor does it allow demands for new rights to emerge (Lefort 1992a, 142).

Lefort’s last two brief references to populism are in the European context (Selinger 2023, 3–5), and more specifically in the French context. In 1996, he glimpsed the issue in a paragraph in the newspaper Le Monde (Lefort 1996, §14). Here, anticipating a debate that would gain traction fifteen to twenty years later, Lefort openly rejects the hypothesis of left-wing populism as a counterpoint to technocracy. For him, the left’s appeals to the ‘people’ would mimic the discourse of the far right, with the sign reversed. As well as questioning the compatibility of this practice with a democratic ethics, Lefort hastens to point out the ineffectiveness of the strategy: the left’s emulation of far right populism would bear no fruit because the public would always prefer the original, which is unrivalled in its ability to seduce the masses, to the retreaded copy. Finally, a similar argument was used in 1998, in his speech accepting the Hannah Arendt Prize in Bremen, when Lefort declared that left-wing populism in France would replace the caricatured Marxist class struggle with the perhaps even more empty opposition of those ‘below’ against those ‘above’ (Lefort [1998] 2007, 938–39).

As Selinger (2023, 16–17) indicates, although Lefort’s comments on the matter can fit into less than two pages, many authors go back to his work to criticise populism. What Selinger does not point out, however, is that for the vast majority of them, the Lefortian key to attacking populism would be a critique of the theological-political.

Lefort debated political theology and wondered about its permanence in the modern world. What is the relationship between political theology and democratic modernity? Is theology a thing of the past, as some argue, or, on the contrary, a covert structure that unconsciously guides the way one thinks about politics, even when public debate is conducted in terms that are at first sight purely secular?

Lefort’s answer is complex, full of twists and turns. He begins by questioning the very division between politics and religion as fields of knowledge (Lefort [1981] 1986, 279). In his now famous distinction between politics [la politique] and the political [le politique], Lefort says that politics, as understood by positive political science, is interested in ontically well-defined objects and fields within a symbolic order. The political, on the other hand, points to the radical continence of this symbolic order. Although he refused to openly use concepts from psychoanalysis in his political work (Lefort [1975] 2007, 259), Lefort not only interacted with psychoanalysts but also had close contact with Jacques Lacan, whose seminars he attended and who commented on his books (Lefort 1983, 42; 1982, 16–17). Influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, he claimed that there was an unbridgeable gap between the symbolic and the real (Lefort [1980] 1994, 82; [1981] 1986, 291). The political is interested in an ontological dimension, in the processes by which objects and fields are delimited, thus referring to the moment of instituting the symbolic order. Lefort notes that both the political and the religious seek to provide symbolic matrices through which reality can be accessed (Lefort [1981] 1986, 278). Despite this proximity, however, there is a key difference between the political and the religious. Faced with the insurmountable gap between the symbolic and the real, and the anguish it generates, the religious offers a divine representation, the bearer of certainties, which seeks to symbolise society and order it (Lefort [1981] 1986, 288, 297). The political, on the other hand, makes it possible to deal with the gap between the symbolic and the real in a different way, compatible with modernity.

In the early 1980s, in a well-known formula that others would repeat ad nauseam in what Oliver Marchart (2007, 85) calls ‘sloganisation’, Lefort stated that modernity is characterised precisely by the dissolution of references to certainty. There is no ultimate ground on which social life can be based – be it divine, natural or class-based. There is an ultimate indeterminacy regarding power, law and knowledge (Lefort [1983] 1986, 29). In this scenario, democracy emerges as the modern form of society par excellence. However, as Lefort also said, modern democratic society still needs to symbolise its unity in some way. But this is a different kind of symbolisation. In democracy, the place of power is still maintained as a symbolic reference, but it becomes an empty place (Lefort 1982, 15; [1983] 1986, 27). Political subjects vie for this place, but no one can claim to occupy power forever, nor be the spokesperson for unquestionable revealed truths. In the end, any claim to legitimacy is nothing more than that: a claim that can be challenged. As Lefort puts it in an oft-quoted passage:

Democracy inaugurates the experience of an ungraspable, unmasterable society in which the people are said to be sovereign, of course, but whose identity will constantly be open to question, and whose identity will remain latent (Lefort [1979] 1994, 180).

By the end of the 1970s, Lefort was already concerned with how the instances of power themselves should deal with this questioning (Lefort [1978] 2007, 354). Lefort then associated the radical contingency that marks democratic modernity with the idea of rights. Rediscovering Arendt and the idea of the ‘right to have rights’, Lefort emphasises that institutionalised human rights constitute a reference for turning political life upside down (Lefort 1985, 73–74; see also Arendt [1951] 1967, 296–97). Lefort stresses that the effects of human rights are indeterminable and therefore cannot be controlled by power (Lefort [1980] 1994, 56, 64–67, 70–71). He claims that one is dealing with a paradoxical institutionalisation that somehow allows for the expression of indeterminacy.

Returning to the original question, it can be said that, for Lefort, modernity breaks with the religious and is in no way determined by surreptitious religious grammar (Lefort [1981] 1986, 329). However, this does not prevent religious forms from resurfacing (Lefort [1981] 1986, 300–301). Lefort still observes expressions of the theological-political in modernity. This presence indicates the discomfort of subjects with the indeterminacy produced by democracy. It indicates a latent desire to re-establish certainties in society, which, especially in times of crisis, re-emerge in old and new forms – including completely secularised ideologies.

It is this idea of the stealthy return of the theological-political that informs the mainstream Lefortian critique of populism. Marilena Chaui pioneered the link between populism and political theology, in a contribution that also anticipated the most recent debates on the subject by more than 15 years (Chaui 1994, 19–30; see also [1980] 1982). For Chaui, a close friend of Lefort’s whose thought was intertwined with his (Chaui, 1981a, 10; Chaui, 1981b, 3), the leader is a central element of populism and presents himself as incorporating not only power, but also knowledge and the law, and as seeking to occupy the place of power once and for all (Chaui 1994, 19–20, 28). Furthermore, populist politics would be messianic and would be framed in terms of a final battle of good against evil (Chaui 1994, 24–25). In 2015, at an international colloquium dedicated to Lefort, Chaui again denounced populism, seen as a form of tutelage politics, which she opposed to an autonomous party of workers and social movements for the extension of rights (Chaui 2015, 14–15, 21–23).

In a slightly different way from Chaui, and unfortunately without acknowledging her innovative insight, recent contributions that use Lefort to link populism to political theology invariably refer to the controversial jurist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, in turn, is said to have influenced the work of Laclau and Mouffe. In the third part of this article, I will address the validity of the criticisms levelled at Laclau and Mouffe. For now, I will concentrate on the Schmittian dimension attributed to populism.

For Schmitt, structurally, ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’ (Schmitt [1922] 1985, 36). By attempting to place itself outside this grammar, liberalism could not hold (Mouffe [1988] 1993, 33; [1989] 1993, 111). Following on from this controversial premise and closing ranks with tyranny, Schmitt would also controversially assert that politics is fundamentally reduced to a friend-enemy relationship, in the moralistic struggle of good against evil (Schmitt [1932] 2007, 26, 38). And the enemy is therefore an adversary to be eliminated (Schmitt [1932] 2007, 32–33). Somme toute, democracy for him is indistinguishable from dictatorship, and the leader is the agent who originally constitutes the very people who acclaim him (Schmitt [1921] 2014, 112–31; [1923] 1985, 16, 32). Inspired by Weber, Schmitt celebrates the power of charisma, against the ‘iron cage’ of technocracy (Schmitt [1922] 1985, 65–66; Weber [1918] 1994, 161–62).

The author who has drawn on Lefort and discussed the Schmittian character of populist political theology most extensively is Andrew Arato. Even before bringing up Schmitt, Arato had referred to Lefort and even mentioned populism on occasion to show how the appeal to the ‘people’, so central to the modern questioning of authority, can become the basis of an ideological imaginary that threatens the very invention that democracy represents (Arato 2012, 23–25). In a later article, he directly draws connections between populism and Schmitt’s political theology (Arato 2013, 150). In populism, Arato argues, a part of society – the plebs, the underdog – proclaims itself to be the whole, in the name of the fantasy of a well-ordered society (Arato 2013, 158; see also Diehl 2023, 886–87). The whole populist dynamic is based on idealised fictions in which the masses are emotionally invested (Arato 2013, 159–60). The ‘people’ occupies the transcendent place that was previously reserved for the divine. But this divine-like entity does not manifest itself. It does not exist as such, autonomously. Arato also understands that the leader is central to populism, in a politics based on embodiment. The leader embodies the part, and the part embodies the whole, the ‘people’. And if, as with Schmitt, the ‘people’ ultimately exists only through the leader, out of the will of the leader when he utters the name ‘people’, then any form of control of the leader by the people is meaningless (Arato 2013, 161–62). In contrast to the dissolution of certainties that Lefort associates with democracy, populism seeks to re-establish a regime in which there is no room for questioning.

Like Arato, Nadia Urbinati, Pierre Rosanvallon and Stefan Rummens also draw on Lefort to argue that populism is marked by a Schmittian political theology. For Urbinati, populism is a project of domination (Urbinati 2014, 132–37). Like Arato, she stresses the leader-centred, top down and acclamatory character of Schmittian populism, with the leader claiming to be the only legitimate spokesperson for the people (Urbinati 1998, 116, 119; 2014, 189). She also pays particular attention to the undemocratic way in which populism deals with political conflict. According to Urbinati, by reinforcing the logic of excluding enemies, populism opposes a fundamental principle of democracy: isonomy, the equality of citizens (Urbinati 2013, 143). The same arguments are used by Rosanvallon and Rummens. Rosanvallon says that populism reproduces Schmitt’s acclamatory dimension of politics (Rosanvallon 2020, 43). Rummens says that populists present themselves as the representatives of society as a whole so that their opponents can only be illegitimate elements, outsiders to be excluded (Rummens 2009, 381; 2017, 561–62). Like Urbinati, Rummens even concedes that populism can play a democratising role ‘as long as a liberal democratic regime has not [yet] been established’, only as an instrumental mobilising force ‘against an oppressive regime’, but that it is not possible to found a democracy based on populism (Rummens 2017, 562; Urbinati 1998, 116). Populism seeks to close and saturate the empty place of power (Rummens 2017, 559).

Lefort’s ‘populism’

In the face of such hostility to populism, how can one dare to see in Lefort’s work a defence of populism? This question runs up against the problem of how to define populism, a contested concept. If several specific, pejorative and anti-democratic characteristics are ascribed to populism, then there is no populism in Lefort. In a less restrictive and harsh way, however, Lefort appeals to a trope that is common to all theories of populism: the celebration of the opposition of the people against the elites, the grandees (Pranchère 2020, 33). Furthermore, he stresses that this opposition can be the vehicle for previously silenced sectors to enter the public sphere, and even suggests that a charismatic leader, so reviled, could play a central role in this emancipatory movement.

Lefort’s work went through several phases. Among several possible, all arbitrary, segmentations, I adopt the one that divides his career into (1) a first youthful, militant phase, marked by the works of Socialisme ou Barbarie, of the ‘proletarian experience’, and by his fierce debate with Jean-Paul Sartre between 1952 and 1953 on the role of the vanguard party (see also Cardoso 2018, 8–9); (2) an intermediate period marked by Lefort’s falling out with Marxism, whose most important work is his monumental study of Machiavelli, published in 1972, to which he devoted more than a decade of work; and (3) the late period, beginning at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, in which the idea of the empty place of power takes centre stage. Mainstream Lefortians tend to look to the late Lefort for inspiration in their critique of populism, and it is from a study of this phase that Selinger (2023, 8–12) sustains that a ‘Lefortian’ theory of populism could only be conceived in anti-populist terms. I contend that the traces of Lefort’s own ‘populism’ can be found in the second, in-between moment when he discusses Machiavelli. Furthermore, I do not believe that Lefort’s influential late writings invalidate the ‘populist’ reading of his work. Although there are changes in these three phases, there are no total ruptures in his work, and Lefort would return to his reflections on Machiavelli until the end of his life.

Associations between Machiavelli and populism are not new. In particular, the brilliant researcher Camila Vergara argues that populism can be understood through what she calls recent plebeian reinterpretations of Machiavelli (Vergara 2020, 237). Lefort is quoted by Vergara, but curiously not his interpretation of Machiavelli, one of the pioneering works of this recent re-reading of the Florentine Secretary (Cardoso 2015, 224).

Lefort returns to Machiavelli to emphasise the importance of social division as a source of freedom, inscribing the French philosopher in the dissociative tradition of democratic theory shared by many authors who see democratic potential in populism (Mouffe 2018, 87). For Lefort, democracy is not based on the construction of consensus, but above all on dissent and division. In Lefort’s work, the idea of division has two dimensions (Marchart 2000, 54–55, 57). The first is a division that can be described as ontological. Steeped in post-foundationalist perspectives, Lefort understands that social dynamics are not determined by forces external to them. These social dynamics are discursive formations and, as such, are radically contingent (Marchart 2000, 67n; see also Lefort [1972] 2018, 404; [1974] 1978a, 488–89). The symbolic and the real are irremediably separated. This impossibility of founding society on solid ground is expressed in a second type of division: in the ontic division, in the political conflict. As he says, it is division that constitutes society in the first place (Lefort [1981] 1986, 292). At the same time, it is in the clash between projects that radical contingency is most clearly seen, that all discourses are open to being questioned, confronted.

If the term ‘Machiavellianism’ unfairly associates Machiavelli with an unscrupulous cynical realism, it is because the Florentine thinker symbolises the advent of modernity, revealing in the very first pages of The Prince that there are no transcendent principles on which to base politics (Chaui 2018, 8). There are no certainties in tradition, the gods or nature to take refuge in. A divided city is all there is.

Lefort is particularly attached to the Machiavellian idea that the city is divided and witnessing a clash of desires. On the one hand, there is the desire of the grandees, the desire to dominate. On the other is the desire of what Machiavelli calls the people, who desires not to be oppressed (Machiavelli [1513] 1998, 39). As Lefort notes, for Machiavelli this clash is not to be feared. On the contrary, dissent should be welcomed, and the city ‘ought to have methods with which the people can express their ambition’ (Machiavelli [1517] 1989, 203). It is not a question of idealising a good, morally elevated people, for Machiavelli understands that the people can be corrupt (Lefort [2010] 2020, 568). It is about understanding that it is only in this clash that society can experience freedom (Lefort [1972] 2018, 382). As Machiavelli says, ‘all the laws made in favour of liberty result from [this] discord’ (Machiavelli [1517] 1989, 202–4). The opposite of the clash would be the attempt to impose an undemocratic unification of the city.

In his reading of Machiavelli, Lefort presents the people as a negative force of destitution (Lefort [1972] 2018, 476–77; [1978] 2007, 355; [2010] 2020, 569). This is what Vergara presents as a plebeian understanding of the people: a people that does not seek to establish its rule, and that exists only insofar as it opposes the grandees – a people-as-plebs, not a people-as-one (Vergara 2020, 232). Lefort’s claim to popular sovereignty does not see this sovereign people as the whole of society, but is instead marked by the acceptance of social division. At its core, the people’s desire is not for domination, for assertion, but for freedom. As Lefort would later say, the people is ultimately an ‘unrepresentable’ force (Lefort [2009] 2012, 9–10, see also [1980] 1994, 83).

It is interesting to note once again the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis on Lefort’s interpretation of Machiavelli’s notion of desire. Echoing Lacan, Lefort says that the two desires that clash in the city are non-specular: they have no object and know no limit (Lefort [1972] 2018, 722–23; [2010] 2020, 568; see also Fink 1995, 90). As he says, the political actors are not in conflict in a search of power or money – or at least their actions cannot be reduced to these demands. For him, if the conflict that pervades society was the expression of concrete demands – as in Marx’s class struggles – it would be possible to resolve it (Lefort [1972] 2018, 722–23). Conflict in his view is irreducible because it reverberates a subjective crisis that cannot be fully addressed.

The celebration of an appeal to the people as a force of destitution in opposition to the grandees should be enough to classify Lefort as a theorist of populism. But there is more. Although there are countless examples of populism without charismatic leaders, the frequent association of populist politics with personal leadership is also expressed in Lefort’s work. As Lefort reads Machiavelli, it is through an alliance with a leader that the people can challenge the grandees and preserve the republic (Lefort [1972] 2018, 382–83; [2010] 2020, 569). The populist character of this leadership becomes inescapable when Lefort emphasises that the leader can mobilise a new mass, those ‘ordinarily excluded from the political arena’, taking them out of their subaltern situation and bringing them into political life through the struggle for emancipation (Lefort [1972] 2018, 632–33; see also Machiavelli [1517] 1989, 247, 463–64).

As will become clearer in the next part of this paper, another point of Lefort’s ‘populism’ involves the critique of what he calls ‘invisible ideology’, developed a couple of years after his main work on Machiavelli (Lefort [1974] 1978a, 551–55). Anticipating what Colin Crouch would call ‘post-democracy’ a quarter of a century later (Crouch 2000, 2), Lefort’s idea of an ‘invisible ideology’ refers to a certain domestication of democracy, a domestication of social division. He is concerned with circumstances in which division takes place within boundaries that limit it, and is supplanted by the celebration of technique and pure, supposedly rational administration (Lefort 1979, 11).

My use of the word ‘domestication’ here is not accidental. It refers to another idea in Lefort’s work: the idea of a wild democracy [démocratie sauvage]. This is a term that he used only three times in his writings, already in his later phase, but which, as I will show, also has affinities with populism. Wild democracy usually refers to an insurgent dimension that any democracy must have to deserve that name (Lefort 1979, 23). These are the moments when the political expresses itself and shakes up the structures of politics. It is the moment of insurrection that challenges the symbolic order and its conventions (Lefort [1988] 2008, 276–77). He also associates wild democracy with an insurgent process of horizontal solidarity, in which different struggles converge, irrupt and constitute a public space (Lefort [1988] 2008, 275–76; 1999, 57). Finally, not far from what some claim to be Arendt’s own ‘populism’ (see also Canovan 2002, 420), wild democracy can be interpreted as the moment when the ‘right to have rights’ is evoked. Lefort states that when wild democracy is performed, the people gathered together act ‘as if they had the law on their side’ (Lefort 1999, 53). They claim a right to appear, challenging the existing order.

Lefort’s populism, however, needs to be nuanced. His reflections on the clash of desires and the role of the leader, as well as his observations on wild democracy against an ‘invisible ideology’, are not an uncritical celebration of appeals to the ‘people’. As Lefort increasingly emphasises throughout his work, the risk of domesticating social division is twinned with another: that conflict becomes indomitable antagonism that paradoxically also seeks to tame social division.

Psychoanalytic insights had already allowed Lefort to draw attention to these risks in his reflections on the clash of desires in Machiavelli. Lefort knows that for psychoanalysis, the dynamics of desire are not necessarily emancipatory, as they are often concealed in fantasies (Lacan [1963] 2004, 76–77). This point is made at two moments. Firstly, Lefort points out that the desire of the grandees evokes fantasies of an ‘unbridled jouissance of possession, power and prestige’ (Lefort [1972] 2018, 478–79). As he would say a few years later, the grandees’ desire does have an object: ‘wealth, status, prestige’ (Lefort [1974] 1978b, 222).

Fantasies that conceal the non-specular nature of desire are also a risk on the part of the people. As Lefort notes, although there is no possible equivalence between the grandees and the people, the objectless desire of the people is also ultimately unsustainable (Lefort [1972] 2018, 727–29). In practice, the people seeks a symbolic inscription. Lefort understands, à la Lacan, that the anguish caused by objectless desire produces primary aggressiveness (Lefort [1972] 2018, 482–83; Lacan [1948] 1966, 104–5). This is expressed symbolically both in the construction of the grandees as scapegoats, thieves of jouissance to be eliminated, and in the narcissistic image of the people itself, frequently embodied in the figure of the leader and fantasies of sovereignty. In the end, the actions of the leaders can threaten the city (Machiavelli [1517] 1989, 457).

In the alliance between the people and the leader, there is a danger that those who desire not to be oppressed will end up being oppressed by the leader himself (Lefort [1972] 2018, 383–84). And the oppression by the leader may not be a violent one. Lefort points out that the masses are naïves, and that a shrewd leader knows how to perpetuate the demand for his rule by embodying the promise of community unity and maintaining the dynamics of desire among his subjects (Lefort [1972] 2018, 384, 434). As discussed, Lefort would later claim that the populist leader could lure the people and foster voluntary servitude (Lefort 1992a, 141). In this process, the would-be tyrant might try to conceal social division (Lefort [1972] 2018, 433) – an attitude that Lefort would condemn as an attempt against democracy.

In the same vein, Lefort’s celebration of the wild dimension of democracy is also accompanied by an awareness of the risks involved in the popular uprising (Lefort 1979, 25). At one point, for example, Lefort says that wild democracy could produce anomie, endangering the references that sustain collective life (Lefort [1988] 2008, 277). In a second moment, he adds that since it plays with groundlessness, wild democracy is vulnerable, ultimately unable to protect itself from being abruptly suppressed or, even worse, not far from what he had already suggested when discussing Machiavelli, seductively co-opted by tyrannical forces with promises of becoming a people-as-one (Lefort 1999, 57).

Twenty years after his original reflections on Machiavelli, and having already formulated his idea of the empty place of power, Lefort would understand the risks of these slips and add a more explicit ethical dimension to the idea of the clash of desires. As he puts it, for there to be emancipation, division itself is not enough. Both sides of the clash of desires must recognise that there are no final answers in politics, and embrace the division itself (Lefort 1992b, 175; see also [2009] 2023, 58).

However, as noted above, Lefort never abandoned his ‘populist’ Machiavellian moment, nor his understanding that a democracy worthy of the name must have a wild dimension, even if he increasingly drew attention to the risks inherent in social conflict as his career progressed. Taking Lefort’s work in its entirety, from his Machiavellian celebration of the uprising of the ‘people’ against the elites to his hostility to calls for a people-as-one, one can formulate a sophisticated theory of populism. Unlike Selinger (2023, 8–12), who claims that a ‘Lefortian’ theory of populism would, by definition, be anti-populist, I sustain that his work shows how the construction of the ‘people’ as a political subject can take different forms. While one should not unconditionally celebrate references to the ‘people’, which can slide into tyrannical projects, one should not be hostile to populism either, because it is the source of plebeian freedom that denaturalises hierarchies and inequalities.

Populism: Servitude or emancipation?

As indicated above, the debate about Lefort’s ‘populism’ is fraught with definitional problems. Many Lefortian scholars would certainly refuse to classify Lefort’s defence of the people against the grandees as populist. Chaui, for example, would probably distinguish the emancipatory revolt of the people against the elites in Lefort’s philosophy from the pathological tutelage politics of ‘populism’ (Chaui [1980] 1982). Urbinati would in all likelihood follow the same line, saying that this opposition between the people and the grandees in Lefort’s work evokes what she calls a ‘popular movement’, not populism. Although Urbinati acknowledges that the distinctions are not always clear-cut, she defines populism as always being unified and verticalised and involving a project of domination (Urbinati 2013, 138–39). Furthermore, as has also been seen, she and other recent disciples of Lefort who criticise populism by associating it with a form of Schmittian political theology focus their attacks on Laclau and Mouffe, perhaps the most famous pair of authors to point to the democratic potential of populism. To justify that there is ‘populism’ in Lefort, the third part of this article aims to critically show the points of convergence between his works and those of Laclau and Mouffe. Without ignoring the differences between Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe, I will argue that the distance between them is undoubtedly less glaring than mainstream Lefortians claim. As I say, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of populism is also sophisticated, and by no means implies an unconditional defence of appeals to the ‘people’.

The first issue to be addressed is the accusation made by mainstream Lefortians and presented in the introduction that Laclau and Mouffe are followers of Schmitt. Arato claims that Laclau’s theory takes up ‘Schmitt’s friend-enemy conception of politics’ (Arato 2013, 156). Urbinati says that ‘Laclau revives Schmitt’s main themes in his theory of populist democracy’ (Urbinati 2013, 149). Rummens states that Mouffe is ‘in line with the work of Schmitt’ (Rummens 2017, 562). Rosanvallon uses the word ‘fascination’ to describe Laclau and Mouffe’s relationship to Schmitt’s political theology and its appeal to the antagonistic grammar of friend versus foe (Rosanvallon 2020, 31; 2019, 52, 55). Critics also claim that Laclau and Mouffe have a decisionist and verticalised understanding of politics. For them, as for Schmitt, the leader constitutes the people at will (Urbinati 2019, 32–33). It is therefore possible to understand why for Arato it could seem as if Laclau was also repeating Sartre (Arato 2013, 162; 2017, xiii), who once said in a forceful debate with a young Lefort that the unity of a ‘dispersed’ amorphous people could only be produced by the unity of the leadership – in this case, the unity of the vanguard party (Sartre [1952] 1964, 248–50; 1953, 1607; Lefort 1953, 1541–42). To use Vergara’s terminology – who also refers to the late Lefort exactly to criticise Laclau and Mouffe – for Lefort, populism would be a force of destitution, a people-as-plebs, and he would look with concern on any authoritarian drift of the people. For their part, Laclau and Mouffe empty populism of its plebeian dimension: they want precisely a people-as-one that claims to be the only legitimate force in society (Vergara 2020, 233). They would advocate for a populism that institutes a new form of domination, taming social division.

If the critics are right, Laclau would be guilty of a cynicism that Lefort despised: Lefort was highly suspicious of those who were aware of the dissolution of markers of certainty but continued to convey fantasies of a reconciled society to the masses in an attempt to advance a left-wing agenda while ultimately disavowing radical contingency (Lefort [1983] 1986, 18). Since there has been a lot of talk about political theology here, the critics might say that Laclau would behave like the apostate leader of a religion described by Alexandre Kojève – a leader who, even after abandoning faith, camouflages this fact and continues to publicly act as a believer to maintain his rule (Kojève [1964] 1990, 11–12).

Laclau always openly refused to participate in ‘a new “trahison des clercs”’ (Laclau [1988] 1990, 186). As Emmy Eklundh and Lasse Thomassen point out, if Laclau and Mouffe sometimes open the door to some of these interpretations of their work as expressions of cynicism, their generalisation is the product of a misunderstanding (Eklundh 2016, 117, 121; Thomassen 2019, 338–39).

Above all, the accusation of being Schmittian does not hold water. Laclau wrote little about political theology. In the rare text in which he openly addresses the subject, his paradigm eschews Schmittian logic. On the contrary, not far from Lefort, he focused on the paradoxes of representing the unrepresentable as such, of representing the sublime (Laclau 1997a, 251). The truth is that Schmitt is not an important reference in Laclau’s work. He appears only twice in rather marginal texts, and only once is he discussed in depth, in a rather critical way, with Laclau stressing that ‘politics cannot be simply reduced to the moment of hostility’ (Laclau 2005b, 6; 2007, 13, 17). Those close to Laclau say that, during his lifetime, he claimed never to have read Schmitt’s work seriously. For his critics, this was some form of dissimulation (Arato 2013, 156). Moreover, Laclau’s alleged decisionism would prove his clandestine affinity with Schmitt.

The theme of the role of decision in Laclau’s work is not new, and was debated at length in an exchange between him, Jacques Derrida (1996, 86–87), Richard Rorty (1996, 71–72) and Simon Critchley (1998, 809). Laclau seems to have difficulty drawing ethical consequences from the Derridean idea of undecidability (Howarth 1996, 951; Norval 2004, 140–41). However, it must be emphasised that he repeatedly rejected the Schmittian or even Sartrean perspective of a sovereign subject who decides. As Laclau says, any decision is ultimately impossible, because it takes place in a context, in the gaps of a symbolic order that informs and limits it (Laclau 1996, 57–58; 2000a, 82). Furthermore, the subject that supposedly decides is not sovereign. Laclau understands subjects to be divided and themselves a by-product of the decision (Laclau [1988] 1990, 193; Howarth 2000, 121–23; 2013, 14, 19).

From another perspective, in very practical terms, Laclau believes that any collective identity is a discursive construction to which various actors contribute. Who these actors are and what weight each has in this construction depends on the context. Laclau explains that in historical Latin American populism, leadership played a central role in mobilising masses with little prior organisational capacity. This mobilisation created a powerful trade union movement, but its more vertical character was not very pluralistic. Contemporary populism, however, would develop in a much more complex and plural society, full of autonomous social movements (Laclau 2013, 15–17). These movements are not only the basis of the horizontal solidarity that Laclau and Mouffe claim is the necessary precondition for populism (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 185–86; Laclau 2005c, 37). They are also social forces with which any leadership will have to negotiate. This is very different from the Schmittian top-down model.

While Laclau hardly ever referred to Schmitt, it is undeniable that Mouffe, his partner, discussed the work of the German jurist in greater depth (Mouffe [1990] 1995, 21). A detailed analysis of these works, however, shows that attempts to stigmatise Mouffe as a ‘left-wing Schmittian’, as some do, are inappropriate. As Mouffe herself puts it, she reflects with Schmitt, but also against Schmitt (Mouffe, 1999b, 6). Her horizon in the theory and defence of populism has never been the indomitable Schmittian friend-enemy antagonism, that she denounces (Mouffe, 1999a, 43–44; see also Laclau and Mouffe 2001, xv).

To make things clearer, it must be pointed out that in Laclau’s work, it is possible to distinguish between two types of populism: an undemocratic populism and a radically democratic one (Laclau 2005a, 196–97; 2015, 266–67; Thomassen 2019, 342–43). Likewise, Mouffe says in a response to Rosanvallon that one should not speak of populism in the singular, but of populisms in the plural (Mouffe 2020, 3). And the populism they advocate does not threaten liberal democracy. It is a populism that seeks to radicalise liberal democracy, within, re-signifying, but always preserving this paradigm. As Mouffe points out, they defend an agonistic populism (Mouffe 2018, 45). As she explains, agonism is a conflict between adversaries who respect each other. It is not a fight to the death between enemies.

Contrary to what the critics suggest, the truth is that there are similarities between Laclau and Mouffe’s contributions and Lefort’s work. Laclau at various times claims to defend a populism that emerges in articulation with the principles of political liberalism, especially human rights (Laclau 2005d, 259–61; 2005a, 171). For him, both populism without liberalism and liberalism without populism would mean the death of democracy. There is a possible parallel here with Lefort. In 1989, when Lefort first used the word ‘populism’, he concluded that liberalism and populism alone were not enough to sustain a democratic ethics (Lefort [1989] 1991, 232). There are several passages in which Laclau and Mouffe suggest that they share the same understanding. Like Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe’s celebration of the ‘people’ against the grandees is not unconditional. They are always struggling amid the tensions between the potentially emancipatory character of social conflict on the one hand and its possible undemocratic drift on the other. Some accuse Laclau and Mouffe of losing their balance and succumbing to defending an indomitable antagonism. It is curious, however, to note how, at various times, attentive readers have criticised them – as others have also criticised Lefort and Arendt – for limiting political conflict too much, in an ‘agonism without antagonism’ (Critchley [1992] 2014, 209–11; Mouffe 2010, 21; Norval 2007, 158–60).

It should be remembered that Laclau and Mouffe cited Lefort’s work – as well as Arendt’s – approvingly in their early writings (Laclau [1988] 1990, 192; Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 155, 186–88). In response to Rummens, Mouffe states in a later interview that she and Laclau ‘do not have a difference with Lefort’ on the idea of democracy as an empty place of power (Mouffe 2011, 678). I would go further and suggest that the number of points on which Lefort anticipates or at least shares affinities with Laclau and Mouffe is vast. At the theoretical level, all three understand reality as a discursive construction (Lefort [1974] 1978a, 525–26; Marchart 2000, 67n). All three affirm that political identities are relationally constructed (Lefort [1972] 2018, 382). All three understand that social division should not be read through the lens of politics but as an experience of the political (Lefort [1981] 1986, 281–85; Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 122–27). All three say that ideology is something that cannot be eliminated, without which the world would be incomprehensible, and that the greatest false consciousness would be to think that it is possible to overcome ideology (Lefort [1974] 1978a, 490–91; 1992b, 171–72; Laclau 1997b, 297–99; [1983] 1990, 92; 2005c, 47).

These theoretical convergences find expression in similarities in political engagement. The proximity is evident, for example, between Lefort’s critique of ‘invisible ideology’ and Laclau and Mouffe’s quest to radicalise liberal democracy. The comparison is also inevitable between the convergence of struggles in Lefort’s wild democracy and the horizontal solidarity of the chain of equivalences that Laclau and Mouffe observe at the base of any populism. Moreover, in both perspectives, these processes transform sedimented social practices, the hierarchies entrenched in society, in the struggle for the extension of rights. Both perspectives also point to the role that leadership can play in emancipatory struggles, incorporating invisibilised sectors. Most importantly Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe see an emancipatory potential in the ‘people’, but it is not absolute.

The more one studies Lefort, the more one might even get the impression that Laclau and Mouffe’s contributions were not all that innovative. So why this hostility between these two perspectives? Why do so many Lefortians choose to direct their fire at Laclau and Mouffe? Laclau has undoubtedly provided ammunition for this division. Most notably, in his reflections on populism, he devotes seven pages to pointing out his differences with Lefort’s approach (Laclau 2005a, 164–71). Based on these passages, critics of populism accuse Laclau of wanting to reoccupy the place of power. But is that what he was advocating?

Beyond Laclau’s verbiage and the implacable reaction of Lefort’s disciples, a cold analysis of the Argentinian theorist’s critique of the French philosopher reveals that the disagreement is less than it appears. Laclau’s comments on Lefort are not linear but boil down to an allegedly central disagreement: for Laclau, the emptiness of the place of power is not a structural fact, but in itself a discursive construction. He is therefore interested in studying the dynamics of ‘producing emptiness out of the operation of hegemonic logics’ (Laclau 2005a, 166). After all, ‘emptiness is not just a datum of constitutional law, it is a political construction’ (Laclau 2005a, 170). Perhaps here Laclau is not even being fair to Lefort’s position, which was not limited to given facts or constitutional law. In any case, Laclau’s objection leads him to think about how political subjects are constructed, to think about their relationship to identity. Who is the ‘people’? How can this identity of the ‘people’ be defined?

As Arato and Rummens point out, the main reference to emptiness in Laclau’s work is not Lefort’s empty place of power, but what the Argentinian theorist called the empty signifier. For Arato and Rummens, the empty signifier is an empty naming, a vague symbol – such as the ‘people’, or even the figure of the leader – that fascinates a crowd, forming a blind mass incapable of criticism and that seeks to destroy enemies and undermine social division (Arato 2013, 158; Rummens 2009, 381). The polysemy of the concept of empty signifier undoubtedly lends itself to confusion, but other interpretations of this concept are more insightful and compatible with the Lefortian tradition (Zicman de Barros 2023, 11–13).

Laclau clearly states that a truly empty signifier is incompatible with a closed identity, with a positive, full content, with well-defined boundaries separating the community from its outside (Laclau 2005a, 196–97). It is no coincidence that, a few years after his rare theological-political reflections on the sublime mentioned above, Laclau associates the empty signifier with the Lacanian idea of sublimation (Laclau 2005a, 113). The very same psychoanalytic idea that seems to have influenced Lefort to formulate the theory of the empty place of power in the first place (Zicman de Barros 2022, 228). For Lacan, sublimation, as opposed to idealisation, involves the construction of a symbol that evokes emptiness, incompleteness, an unsaturated symbolic order (Lacan [1960] 2019, 190–91). Therefore, contrary to what Slavoj Žižek (2008, 276–77) argues, the ‘people’ of populism in Laclau’s work would not be an idealised Lacanian master signifier that would render the subject incapable of criticism. Instead, Laclau shows in several passages that he is interested in the construction of a ‘people’ with an open identity. Just as Lefort said that the ‘people’ was unrepresentable, Laclau seeks a political movement that produces ‘a symbolisation of impossibility as such’ (Laclau 2000b, 199).

In this sense, far from being a people-as-one, the populism defended by Laclau and Mouffe can be said to be a force of destitution, a plebeian force. Laclau criticises those who see the ‘people’ as an entity with a positive identity (Laclau 2005a, 247–48). The ‘people’, like the ‘proletarian’ before that word was associated with the industrial worker, is not a sociological category. They are dispossessed – beginning with the dispossession of their own identity.

The rejection of a populism that seeks to reaffirm closed identities becomes clearer when one considers Laclau’s concept of heterogeneity and the idea that the name of the ‘people’ is the banner through which heterogeneity enters politics. Formulated in a critical analysis of G. W. F. Hegel, Antonio Gramsci and, above all, Georges Bataille, the heterogeneous in Laclau’s work refers to everything that is excluded from the symbolic order, to an expression of the Lacanian real (Laclau [1991] 1996, 24; 1999, 93–95; 2005a, 155–56). They are the radically excluded subalterns that Lefort, in his interpretation of Machiavelli, said the leader could bring into the public sphere. They are an expression of what Arendt would call the worldless, the invisibilised who emerge in the space of appearances and claim their right to have rights (Arendt [1958] 1998, 115, 118, 201). Of course, the inclusion of the heterogeneous is not always democratic. The reactionary mob that Arendt speaks of, which enters politics to reaffirm order, is also an expression of the worldless (Arendt [1951] 1967, 107; Canovan 2002, 407–8). The ‘people’ can indeed be constructed in different ways, but it is clear that Laclau prefers the construction of a ‘people’ with an open identity, an unrealised and unrealisable reference point that is always under debate to include more and more people.

I have spent a lot of ink in the last few pages discussing Laclau and Mouffe, which some might consider an unnecessary detour in the discussion of populism and Lefort. Nevertheless, as has been noted several times in this paper, debates about populism always return to the question of how to define this phenomenon. Separating Lefort from Laclau and Mouffe has been a strategy of critics to delimit populism as a political pathology. There are certainly differences between the three. But what should be clear from the last few pages is that there are undeniable points of convergence. By blurring the line that separates Lefort from the prominent theorists of populism, it becomes possible to see expressions of populism in Lefort’s work. It is, of course, a nuanced populism, but one that provides a very rich framework for understanding the ambiguities of appeals to the ‘people’.

Conclusion

In contrast to mainstream approaches that use Lefort to develop hostile readings of populism, this article has shown that it is possible to find traces of a sophisticated theory of populism in Lefort’s work. Lefort sees an emancipatory force in the appeal to the ‘people’, even if he does not ignore its potentially undemocratic expressions. I began this paper by reconstructing the critique of populism developed by both Lefort and Lefortian authors. I showed how, for them, populism would be a return to Schmitt’s political theology and would try to occupy the empty place of power definitively. Moreover, populism would be verticalised and decisionist: the leader would build up the people who acclaim him from the top down, presenting himself as the unquestionable source of power, law and knowledge.

The second part of the article showed that, despite these critiques of populism, there are traces of an emancipatory and plebeian conception of populism in Lefort’s analysis of Machiavelli as well as in his reflections on wild democracy. Inspired by Machiavelli, Lefort sees the irreducible social division as a source of freedom. It is in the antagonism of the people against the grandees, he says, that all naturalised differences of rank, all forms of domination, can be challenged. In his ‘populism’, without ignoring the risks involved in this process, Lefort even stresses the importance of the leader in mobilising subaltern sectors and bringing them into politics.

The third part sought to question the current opposition between Lefort’s work, which is seen by the mainstream as hostile to populism, and the work of Laclau and Mouffe, which is seen as defending populism. This is important to blur the frequent distinction between virtuous ‘popular movements’ and pernicious ‘populism’, and to justify attributing a ‘populist’ dimension to Lefort’s work. Despite their differences, it is clear that Laclau and Mouffe were not only influenced by Lefort but also shared common concerns. I argue that Laclau and Mouffe, like Lefort, do not promote an absolute celebration of the antagonism between the people and the grandees, but instead develop a much more sophisticated approach to populism.

Indeed, in light of all that has been discussed, it can be said that Lefort faces a tension that is difficult to resolve. On the one hand, he seeks to foster political conflict, social division, and mobilise the people in a convergence of struggles capable of challenging the ‘invisible ideology’ that domesticates democracy. On the other hand, he must preserve the emancipatory potential of this conflict, preventing it from degenerating into indomitable antagonisms and tyrannies that also have as their horizon the overcoming of social division. Lefort celebrates an emancipatory people-as-plebs, but he does not ignore the danger of slippage, of its transformation into an undemocratic people-as-one. It follows from these considerations that, in a theory of populism inspired by Lefort, the ‘people’ can emerge in both undemocratic and emancipatory ways and that the challenge is to find a balance on this fine line.