Neoliberalism and the annihilation of the Social Contract in the Western World
Western liberal democracies had at their foundation an implicit social contract: following Locke’s insights, the broad idea is that people give up their executive power in order to create a political community. From there on this power is transferred to a government and citizens submit themselves to the will of the majority. This idea however has come to an end with the advance of neoliberalism and the increasing power of corporate interests over the will of the people.
One of the most striking examples of recent years is the case of Brexit. It is not so much the results of the referendum but the division of the United Kingdom in two opposing sides, neither of which seems willing (even today) to find a common ground. The outcome (as in the rest of Europe) is the reappearance of the far-right as a powerful political agent. On the one hand, the EU has failed as an institution to honour the ‘social contract’ with the people(s) of Europe. The 2015 negotiations between the Greek Syriza/ANEL government and the institutions (ECB, EC, IMF) exposed the prioritization of neoliberal financialization over the people. On the other, the outcomes of Brexit have now revealed that rather an attempt to national (and popular) sovereignty, it was nothing more than a covert attempt to transfer power to mechanisms like the Investor-State Dispute Settlement courts, enabling cooperations to impose their interests on states and governments.
Can a new politics emerge in this dystopian present? A left populist politics can create the inescapable confrontation with the very same elites (political and economic) that have annihilated any contractual character of liberal democracy and lead to a politics that will reshape national and transnational institutions.
Marina Prentoulis is Professor (Emerita) in Politics and Media at the University of East Anglia. She completed her PhD in Ideologies and Discourse Analysis at the Department of Government, University of Essex supervised by Ernesto Laclau. She has been working on strategic communications, social movements. European radical ideologies and populism. She has been involved in numerous campaigns and movements. Since 2014 she has been giving public and University lectures on Left populism, social movements and left parties and she has been contributing to OpenDemocracy, the Guardian, Red Pepper, Soundings and other international publications. She is the author of Left Populism in Europe: Lessons from Jeremy Corbyn to Podemos (Pluto, 2021).
Dr. Asel Doolotkeldieva is a Non-residential Fellow of George Washington University, based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. As a critical political scientist, she studies populist mobilizations and revolutionary praxis in authoritarian contexts in conversation with discourses and practices of democracy, equality and social justice. She recently published “Das Volk und der starke Staat. Repolitisierung in Kirgistan” in OSTEUROPA Journal, 2024, (The people and the strong state. Repoliticization in Kyrgyzstan) and convened and guest-edited a Special Issue “Politics of popular revolts in Kyrgyzstan”, Central Asian Affairs, 2023. Presently, she is writing a book manuscript on popular uprisings and social contract in authoritarian Central Asia. She holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Exeter (UK) and previously worked as a Senior Lecturer at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan).
Populism – beyond the positivity of the social?
In contrast to most other approaches to populism Laclau suggested to stop searching for the final rebut of populism and think of it as a ‘pure’ form, the very ontology of the political. The challenges associated with formulating a coherent positive definition of populism are well-documented, often leading to paradoxical outcomes, such as J. W. Müller’s exclusion of the original populists in The People’s Party. However, I argue that elevating populism to an ontological status cannot be maintained. Laclau’s discourse theory is based on an insistence of constitutive (i.e. non-sublatable) negativity – a beyond the positivity of the social. But also the idea that such a negativity – a beyond – my gain actual presence in the social, in the form of antagonism. According to Laclau, this is what grants the political an ontological primacy, and populism the status of the ontology of the political. I will refute this position and argue that populism must be reconceptualized as an ontic logic, with particular characteristics distinguishing it from other (equally ontic) political logics. Populism is, however, particularly revealing of the relation of the positivity of the social to its beyond: An insurmountable haunting of negativity in any possible (‘positive’) being. Politically, the particular characteristics of populism underlines the inherent progressive nature of the populist logic (which does not, however, prevent it for being used by regressive forces).
Allan Dreyer Hansen is a political theorist at the department of Social Science and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark. He has been working on populism in a Laclaudian discourse theoretical perspective for several years. He has led a research project on In the Name of the People: Popularity, Populism and Democracy, and is a part of the Nordic POL-AID research project on Polarisation, Affect, Identity: Nordic Populism and the Media Landscape, led by Liv Sunnercrantz. He is primarily interested in theoretical aspects of populism, such as its conceptual history and the question of its ontological (or rather ‘hauntological’) status.