Anthony Lawrence Borja

Appropriating Machiavelli for a political camp is tempting, and appropriations by all sorts of political leanings have rendered his body of thought as contradictory at best. John McCormick, in two relatively recent works, tries to cut through this by portraying Machiavelli as a populist and a democrat. Despite his insights, McCormick tries to end the conversation with the hopes of making his appropriation of Machiavelli conclusive. In response, I take a Gadamerian hermeneutical approach towards him and Machiavelli in order to keep the conversation open by asking two questions: (1) What is the relationship between popular sovereignty and statecraft? (2) What is the relationship between class conflict and statecraft? I will illustrate that Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy and The History of Florence do not contain any notion of popular sovereignty along populist or even democratic lines despite exposing the strengths and limitations of the People in relation to the life of the republic and to other sectors within it. Overall, democratizing Machiavelli casts aside his gift of being sensitive to the internal problems facing a democratic project—a sensitivity to the weaknesses of the People and the complexities of factional conflict beyond binary oppositions and in relation to statecraft.

While acknowledging Laclau's invaluable contributions to understanding populism from a discursive perspective, I will illustrate that his framework holds a latent psycho-political dimension that this essay lifts out and elaborates. Guided by the simple question, what are the characteristics of a populist mind, I will assess this latent dimension via an elaboration of Laclau’s adaptation of cathexis (emotional investment) to the issue of identity formation. Moreover, I will refer to the case of competing populist discourses and leaders as a means of highlighting the importance of a psycho-political approach to populism. Through insights drawn from On Populist Reason (OPR) and The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (RFS), I will bring Laclau’s framework closer to the reality of competing populists by developing the latent psycho-political dimension of his theory on populism. I will illustrate that in the context of constitutive heterogeneity, the formation of a populist identity as the workings of a populist mind, is something affected by other psychological factors surrounding cathexis, the impact of pre-existing identities, and a person’s dis/alienation with political actors and objects. Overall, this study seeks to connect Laclau's framework with contemporary research on populist psychology, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of populism that links discourse, rhetoric, cognition, emotions, and behavior without rejecting constitutive heterogeneity and contingent hegemonic struggles.

Recent pluralist accounts of the People and popular sovereignty, defining it as either a performance or a process, are divorced from the realities of mass disempowerment. By shifting emphasis from who to what, these notions of the People, though seemingly unconcerned with the problem of positing this entity as a collective agent, have actually posited the politically active as the concrete subject of the People. Consequently, I argue that these recent theories exclude the reality of mass disempowerment within contemporary democracies by marginalizing agency, presupposing empowerment, and assuming the resonance of the various representations of the People. Simply put, they suffer from an activist-centric bias that renders the politically alienated, disempowered, and inactive as irrelevant entities, a nameless shadow lurking behind analyses of popular power. Hence, my task is to clear the ground for a more comprehensive theory of the People and Popular Sovereignty by exposing the roots, limits, and costs of this activist-centric bias.

The issue of statecraft is central to the works of Machiavelli, and his primary contribution to contemporary practice and theorizing is an exposition of the inevitable complexities behind this human endeavor. States rise and fall because of failures in leadership tied with the moving contours of the political arena itself. Key to Machiavelli’s analysis of statecraft is the internal relations between Virtù and Fortuna. I intend to show that Machiavelli’s contribution to the modern notion of state-building is not only an exposition of the innards of court politics, but also a development of the classical notion of virtù-Fortuna into a vital component that gave statecraft and, to an extent, politics in general its spirit of eternal motion. Machiavelli paved the way for a modern notion of statecraft by exposing the primary problem that gives it meaning through its inherent irresolvability—statecraft as determined by the convergence of virtù as a conscious effort with the basket of constantly moving objective factors we call Fortuna. Specifically, I argue that virtù and its dimensions seek to penetrate Fortuna and expose its concrete components, hence, making these factors recognizable, understandable, predictable, and eventually, vulnerable to acts of establishing and sustaining control.

The beating heart of democratic politics is a set of paradoxes revolving around the issues of popular identity and sovereignty. Populist ideology appeals to the sovereign people, consequently engaging the democratic paradox in a manner akin to either moving an immoveable object or catching something in constant flux. Marginal consideration has been given by scholars to populism’s relationship with the democratic paradox, with current notions of the former seeing it more as a result of the latter. Thus, by recasting the democratic paradox as a question and analysing its relationship with populist ideology, this article seeks to clarify the supposedly ambiguous relationship between populism and democracy. In analysing the transformative processes within populism by using early Peronism and Italian Fascism as case studies, it argues that as the ideological embodiment of the democratic paradox populist ideology preserves and expresses the paradox in the public sphere.