Critical Theory and Demagogic Populism Paperback - 2022

From the rear cover

Populism is one of the most significant phenomena in twenty-first-century politics, but what it is and how it functions remains a source of dispute. Side-stepping the usual debates over definition, Critical theory and demagogic populism makes a unique contribution by revisiting the Frankfurt School's ground-breaking work on demagogy.

The book reconstructs the Institute for Social Research's 'Studies in Prejudice' project of the 1940s, providing an analysis of demagogy in the United States that engages with Weber's work on charismatic leadership, the US liberal critique of demagogy and the theories of Freud, notably his group psychology. The result is what Adorno calls 'a kind of psychotechnics', where the rally acts as a site of performative cultural production of demagogic speech. Extending this analysis into the present, the book identifies modern demagogy as a key feature of contemporary populism. Populist movements, whether 'left' or 'right', are susceptible to 'demagogic capture', and the likelihood of capture has only increased with the rise of the culture industry, since demagogues, from Father Coughlin in the 1920s to Trump today, have always been 'early adopters'.

Providing a critique of orthodox populism studies and its critics, notably Laclau, Critical theory and demagogic populism brings the wider Gramscian tradition into productive dialogue with the work of the Institute for Social Research. It concludes by extending the Institute's analysis to assess 'counter-demagogic' forces.