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Titre La science du populisme au crible de la critique sociologique : archéologie d'un mépris savant du peuple
Auteur Federico Tarragoni
Mir@bel Revue Actuel Marx
Numéro no 54, octobre 2013 Populisme / contre-populisme
Rubrique / Thématique
Dossier : Populisme/Contre-populisme
Page 56-70
Résumé anglais The Science of Populism as Assessed through the Prism of Sociological Critique: an Archeology of a Knowing Contempt for the People. Populism is one of the most widely-criticised concepts in the social and political sciences. The reasons for such a consensus derive from the concept's dearth of analytic precision, its empirical elasticity and its normative dimension. However despite reiterated proposals by the community of social scientists for its elimination from the academic vocabulary, the “profane” usage of the term closely shadows the curve of oppositional positions in current European elections. In a context marked by the growing disparity between the dynamic of current politics and the academic analyses to which it gives rise, an epistemological reconsideration of the concept of “populism” is called for, to be carried out on the basis of a double critique, both archeological and genealogical. If sociology wishes to retain and to reconstruct the concept of “populism” on a renewed foundation, this can only be achieved through an exposure of the presuppositions which the idea of the people as unreasonable, antidemocratic and illusion-prone exercised in the elaboration of the category between the 1960s and today. Having thus deconstructed the presuppositions conferring upon the “populologists”, the experts in populism, the auctoritas enabling them to separate the good grain of democracy from the populist chaff, what emerges is a new field of research: the examination of the forms of politisation which a populist politics can induce among those who are the excluded remainder of the liberal contract.
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