Samuel Acosta-Melgarejo

This article proposes a reconfiguration of the analysis of populism by articulating Erik Olin Wright’s framework of “real utopias” as a response to the challenges posed by Benjamín Arditi to formalist conceptualizations of populism. Contemporary political philosophy has frequently relied on Ernesto Laclau’s influential account of populism as a “logic of political articulation”, independent of its substantive content. While analytically powerful, this approach suffers from a persistent normative deficit: it lacks the conceptual resources to justify a preference for inclusive and emancipatory political projects over exclusionary or xenophobic ones. Arditi’s recent work radicalizes this critique by questioning not only formalist theories but also the very usefulness of “populism” as a category, without completely closing the possibility of its rehabilitation through the incorporation of external normative criteria. The central argument of the present work is that Wright’s project of real utopias supplies precisely the normative and strategic substance that Arditi identifies as necessary. Integrating Wright’s framework into the analysis of populism allows for a non-formalist differentiation between inclusive and exclusionary political projects based on their normative commitments and material consequences, rather than on their rhetorical or structural features alone. This approach allows us to move beyond purely descriptive analyses toward a framework capable of guiding action under non-ideal conditions, particularly in contexts marked by anti-political sentiment and democratic erosion.