Against populist reason: Ernesto Laclau’s blind alleys
"Populism," as a political concept, gained mainstream traction over the 2010s as the neoliberal consensus broke down internationally. But what is populist theory and what is its relationship to the twentieth-century Marxist thought from which it developed? In this piece, Stathis Kouvélakis offers a critical examination of the political logic of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism.