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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007, Unit 6, Th e Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 1.1 (2007) 105–118] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368 
doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.105 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Th e People Has Its Political Reason, of Which Political Th eory 
Knows Nothing

Farhang Erfani, American University

Ernesto Laclau.  On Populist Reason. Verso. London, 2005. 276 pp.  
$26.00 hc.  ISBN 1-859-84651-3.

Ernesto Laclau has written a timely book on populism, a subject which 
has been making headlines. Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, 
is often referred to as a populist and as the leader of the leftward turn 
in South America. Th e Republican Party’s success in the United States 
is also attributed to right-wing populism. On January 9, 2007, seven 
far-right European parties created a coalition at the European Un-
ion’s Parliament in order to further their conservative cause. Th is new 
group, “Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty,” brings together twenty 
EU parliamentarians who despise Europe. Each party is committed 
to undermining Europe and is openly antagonistic to foreign interests 
and foreigners at home, catering to what many refer to as populist 
sentiments.  Even more interesting is the composition of these parties’ 
constituency, usually made up of the poor, the working class, and even 
immigrants! Th e very people who would be harmed by the new coali-
tion’s policies vote them into offi  ce.

Indeed, we fi nd ourselves disarmed, faced with either a left- or right-
wing populist movement. Both seem irrational, sentimentalist and be-
yond the understanding of the political establishment. Th is bewilder-
ment was very well captured in America by Th omas Frank in his book 
What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004). Th e rise of populism seems like 
a backlash, an outburst with no rhyme or reason. But as Laclau’s book 
suggests, there is a “populist reason,” but we have failed to understand 
it.  

Th is is not Laclau’s fi rst treatment of the subject. In his 1977 book, 
Politics and Ideology in Marxist Th eory, he already devoted a chapter to 
populism.  But the crux of Laclau’s work should be traced back to his 
1985 work, co-authored with Chantal Mouff e, Hegemony and Socialist 

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Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (2nd ed. 2001).  In that 
work, they argued that Orthodox Marxism is plagued by a real philo-
sophical knot. Briefl y put, a puzzle confronted Orthodox Marxism in 
the twentieth century. Th e October Revolution had taken place; capi-
talism had met signifi cant resistance and was, during the depression 
era, on the brink of a monumental collapse; but the promised interna-
tional revolution wasn’t happening. To the contrary, the proletariat was 
divided; the workers of the world were not about to unite.  It seems as 
though the proletariat was unable to recognize its own true economic 
interest. For Laclau and Mouff e, this was not a coincidence, or a mere 
phase. It was the result of the Marxist reductionism and the “ontologi-
cal privileging” of the working class. Th ough Laclau and Mouff e have 
never denied the importance of the economic terrain and its strug-
gles, they nonetheless criticized traditional Marxism for its neglect of 
other struggles, such as feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, and 
anti-colonialism, all of which played key roles on the political stage of 
the twentieth century. In short, by reducing everything to economics, 
Marxism failed to appreciate the true nature of the political.  

Instead, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouff e turned 
their attention to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, which was 
a political construct and not a natural, a priori given site of struggle.  
To rid Gramsci of all remnants of essentialism, they used the best of 
the post-structuralist theories to argue for a notion of politics that is at 
home with contingency and anti-foundationalism. Anti-foundational-
ism has been an important current in theoretical humanities over the 
past forty years or so.  But its impact on political thought has been fairly 
limited. It is one thing to admit that there is no such a thing as a race; it 
is another to know how to assess racism. It is one thing to de-naturalize 
human rights; it is another to fi nd a way to reject oppression without 
falling back on modern essentialist categories. Anti-foundationalism 
has opened up the fi eld of possibilities; it has allowed for a prolifera-
tion of complex identities, diff erences and narratives. Its translation 
into politics— a common ground—has been lacking. In On Populist 
Reason, Laclau provides us his solution for the way forward.  

“Th e main issue addressed in this book,” writes Laclau, “is the na-

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ture and logics of the formation of collective identities” (ix). He also 
tells us that his “whole approach has grown out of a basic dissatisfac-
tion with sociological perspectives which either considered the group 
as the basic unit of social analysis, or tried to transcend that unit by 
locating it within wider functionalist or structuralist paradigms.” His 
dissatisfaction is readily appreciable. Quantitative or rational-choice 
theorists fail because they assume the “people” as a category, or see it as 
an aggregation of rational individuals (in the best case scenario). But 
the “qualitative” theorists have little to off er as well. For Laclau, “the 
impasse that Political Th eory experiences in relation to populism is 
far from accidental, for it is rooted in the limitation of the ontological 
tools currently available to political analysis” (4). Before putting forth 
his own new ontology—and this book is indeed a new political ontol-
ogy—Laclau retraces the history of this failure in the fi rst three chap-
ters of the book.  

In this interesting survey of the literature on populism, Laclau shows 
that no one has managed to capture what populism really is. In fact, 
theorists are often frustrated and prefer not to address the topic because 
it lacks precision; it leads to an impasse. Th e few willing theorists usu-
ally end up describing the phenomenon of a particular populist move-
ment, refusing to do more with what presents itself as an irrational 
outburst. Despite their best eff orts, classical theorists of populism seem 
bound to “separating what is rational and conceptually apprehensible 
in political action from its dichotomic opposite: a populism conceived 
as irrational and undefi nable” (16). Most importantly, this conclusion 
speaks volumes to the assumptions of most political theorists.  For most 
political theorists, populism “simplifi es the political space, replacing a 
complex set of diff erences and determinations by a stark dichotomy 
whose two poles are necessarily imprecise” (18). Th is is where we can 
begin to appreciate Laclau’s originality within the current spectrum 
of post-structuralist theory. He is content neither with the rationalist 
approach, nor with the postmodern advocacy of proliferation of plu-
ralities. Against the rationalists, Laclau argues that populism is in fact 
a challenge to the political establishment which is bound to see it as ir-
rational; against postmoderns (as well as traditional political theorists), 

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Laclau argues that simplifi cation of the terrain, the coming together of 
odd political bed-fellows is the very “nature and logic” of the political.  
In other words, if we were to better understand populism, we would 
understand the way politics in general works.

Early “crowd” psychologists, whose work Laclau meticulously ana-
lyzes, came to this appreciation, though often unintentionally or un-
systematically. Nineteenth-century psychologists came to the question 
of the people through a clear interest in its pathology—the crowd’s 
ability to pressure otherwise “normal” individuals to behave irration-
ally. To them a crowd was a “group in decline” (34). But this “patho-
logical” approach didn’t pan out. 

Whatever the novelties—even the dangers—that the transition to a 
mass society involved, it became increasingly clear that they could be 
addressed with the pathological approach…Mass society required a 
positive characterization (39).

Later theorists, in search of a positive approach to crowds—one that 
would understand them but also master them—paid close attention 
to the role of a leader. Th e fi gure of the leader is very important in 
populist movements. Chavez currently occupies such a position. But 
few have managed to understand the political and ontological role that 
the leader plays. Th at the masses begin to follow the leader is often seen 
—in a way that is reminiscent of Nietzsche, who was a contemporary 
of these crowd psychologists—as a weakness, or a lack of selfhood.  
But for Laclau, there is more to the role of the leader. It is true that 
by following a leader, of any kind, plurality and diff erences among the 
followers disappear to a great extent—though never fully—but this is 
because the nature of creating a collective identity requires this mo-
ment of simplifi cation, or what Laclau calls the “logic of equivalence.” 
In the work of Freud, Laclau fi nds the best support for this theory of 
identifi cation with the leader. Unlike other theorists, Freud saw that 
the relationship of a community cannot be captured rationally, but is 
only understandable libidinally.  

By Chapter Four, Laclau is ready to provide us with his own theory, 
while again emphasizing the fact that “populism is the royal road to 
understanding something about the ontological constitution of the 

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political as such” (67). How is that the case? Laclau begins with the 
category of demand, which he points out

is ambiguous in English: it can mean a request, but it can also mean 
a claim (as in ‘demanding an explanation’). Th is ambiguity of mean-
ing, however, is useful for our purposes, because it is in the transition 
from request to claim that we are going to fi nd one of the fi rst defi ning 
features of populism (73).

For Laclau, there is no such a thing as a pre-defi ned society.  Th e very 
act of this defi nition—who is “in” and who is “out” or what is meant 
by “we” is the very work of the political. Initially, a segment of the 
population has a request; it lacks something. Given its particular posi-
tion in the world, this group has a particular concern, say anti-racism.  
But this group is not the only one with a demand. All given fragments 
of the citizenry have their own requests. If such requests are satisfi ed, if 
there is a concession by the powers, the demand plays no political role.  
When the demand is not satisfi ed, then it becomes a claim, something 
of a real concern. Or as Laclau puts it:

People can start to perceive that their neighbours have other, equally 
unsatisfi ed demands—problems with water, health, schooling and so 
on. If the situation remains unchanged for some time, there is an ac-
cumulation of unfulfi lled demands and an increasing inability of the 
institutional system to absorb them in a diff erential way (each in iso-
lation from the others), and an equivalential relation is established 
between them. (73)  

Th is is the beginning of populism and the beginning of a political 
movement in general. One particular sector’s demands—even when 
they go unfulfi lled—cannot amount to a political gesture. It requires 
the moment of equivalence whereby a multiplicity of demands are in-
tegrated into a single front. Here, we can begin to see why populism 
usually seems incoherent and unpredictable. It is indeed its very nature 
to incorporate heterogeneous interests; but that, according to Laclau, 
is the nature of politics in the fi rst place.  

Given Laclau’s post-structuralist sympathies we must remember that 
for him the logic of equivalence and the logic of diff erence are always 
already at work, at the same time, in the same place. Politics needs 

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both.  A purely equivalential society—one in which all diff erences have 
been eliminated—is not only ethically and politically undesirable, but 
it is, as post-structuralism and psychoanalysis have argued, impossible.  
Perfect coincidence is a dream, one that is in fact grounded in the frus-
tration of unfulfi lled demands and the need for equivalential struggle.  
Th is is indeed the danger of populism, as it is commonly understood.  
Populism may pretend to create a permanent unity where there is only 
one united people, but that is impossible to achieve. Not the least, for 
Laclau, because oneness and unity require a frontier of separation, of 
diff erence, which is achieved through the contingent construction of 
an antagonistic front through the chain of equivalence. To concretely 
illustrate this matter, let me quote at length a brilliant passage from 
Laclau:

A society which postulates the welfare state as its ultimate horizon 
is one in which only the diff erential logic would be accepted as a le-
gitimate way of constructing the social.  In this society, conceived as a 
continuously expanding system, any social need should be met diff er-
entially; and there would be no basis for creating an internal frontier.  
Since it would be unable to diff erentiate itself from anything else, that 
society could not totalize itself, could not create ‘a people.’ What actu-
ally happens is that the obstacles identifi ed during the establishment of 
that society—private entrepreneurial greed, entrenched interests, and 
so on—force their very proponents to identify enemies and to reintro-
duce a discourse of social division grounded in equivalential logic.  In 
that way, collective subjects constituted around the defense or the wel-
fare state can emerge. Th e same can be said about neo-liberalism: it 
also presents itself as a panacea for a fi ssureless society—with the dif-
ference that in this case, the trick is performed by the market and not 
by the state. Th e result is the same: at some point Margaret Th atcher’s 
sound ‘obstacles’ started denouncing the parasites of social security 
and others, and ended up with one of the most aggressive discourses 
of social division in contemporary British history. (78–79)

Th is passage illustrates Laclau’s ability to navigate through concrete 
examples, while providing us with a genuine theory that cuts across 
diff erences that we take for granted—the opposition between the wel-
fare state and neo-liberalism, in this instance. Th is is indeed the job of 

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an ontology. Having established the duality of equivalence and diff er-
ence, Laclau moves to the second tenet of populism: the establishment 
of antagonistic frontiers between two incommensurable camps.  

How are these camps established? How are they defi ned? A simplistic 
approach would defi ne them negatively, i.e., a common enemy would 
become the common identity. Th is is a typical analysis of populist 
movements. For Laclau, there is indeed an external frontier, separating 
the two sides. But establishing the frontier is itself the great political 
moment par excellence. Pointing to a common enemy is not enough.  
In a detailed analysis that uses a concept he has developed throughout 
his career, Laclau argues that when a chain of equivalence is established 
among similar struggles (and here the commonality among the op-
pressed is made visible; or better yet, a common lack is felt), then one 
particular agent or only one sector becomes the representative of the 
entire movement. Th is is the construction of a hegemonic front (85).  
A genuine, powerful populist movement is born when a new dividing 
line is put in place:

Th e meaning of such [initially isolated] demands is determined largely 
by their diff erential positions within the symbolic framework of soci-
ety, and it is their frustration that presents them in a new light. But if 
there is a very extensive series of social demands which are not met, it 
is that very symbolic framework which starts to disintegrate. In that 
case, however, the popular demands are less and less sustained by a 
pre-existing diff erential framework: they have, to a large extent, to 
construct a new one. (86)

Laclau correctly shows us that right-wing populism, particularly in 
America, is best understood through this framework. As the left-wing 
discourse failed to meet the demands of the people, they turned to-
ward another movement, equally outside of the establishment: the ex-
treme right. Th is phenomenon is easily observable in Europe as well.  
As each country is clearly governed through a centrist policy that de 
facto excludes the majority of the people and their demands, a grow-
ing number of disillusioned sectors of the population—including im-
migrants—turn to the Right. In these cases, “the ontological need to 
express social division,” the fact that most people fi nd themselves ex-

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cluded from the political process, is “stronger than its ontic attachment 
to a left-wing discourse” (88).

Here, we can begin to better understand the frustrations of typical 
analyses of populism.  Political theory, we must recall, is often speech-
less before populism; it fi nds itself at an impasse since the multiplicity 
of the demands, the “irrationality” of the alliances and of the leader 
puzzle theorists. But, for Laclau, the irrationality and the “vagueness” 
of populism are no surprise. Th e one segment of the population, that 
actor or that group that becomes representative of the entire move-
ment indeed embodies a multiplicity of demands. Th ere is no a priori 
coherence; solidity and solidarity must be built (99).

Focusing on this process brings Laclau to the very notions of rep-
resentation and naming. What is involved when a particular actor is 
named a leader, or a particular cause embodies a much larger set of 
demands?  To begin with, and this is a crucial point for Laclau, the mo-
ment of hegemony which allows one group to rise to the representa-
tional level necessarily means that this group loses part of its own par-
ticularity.  To give a more concrete example: traditional Marxism, from 
Laclau’s perspective, never really understood this political hegemony. 
When it did, as in the case of Lenin, it was not a true hegemony.  Lenin 
saw the proletariat as the revolutionary agent that represented all other 
oppressions—such as sexism or racism—which were brought forth by 
modern capitalism.  But the revolutionary agent represented itself; its 
identity remained insular and did not incorporate other demands. It 
did not modify its own platform, but asked other causes to rally be-
hind it. In other words, the process of naming is itself a political move. 
By breaking with the dominant, analytic model of linguistics, Laclau 
liberates the signifi er from the signifi ed. Th e relationship between a 
name and its content become contingent, historically and structurally 
unstable. In psychoanalysis, Laclau uses Lacan’s object petit a, which for 
Lacan is the object of desire. What Lacan brings to the discussion is his 
emphasis on “the identity and unity of the object result from the very 
operation of naming” (104). A given signifi er—say, freedom or equali-
ty—is not a priori defi ned, but through the process of hegemonization, 
the coming together of the chain of equivalences, the cause gets its 

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own conception.  Laclau formerly referred to this phenomenon as the 
“empty signifi er”; yet here, in On Populist Reason, he pushes his analysis 
further by replacing his own formula by a new one: “fl oating signifi er.” 
Not only does emptiness suggest that there is a total void, which is un-
tenable, it makes it seem as though there is already an “empty place” of 
power, to use Claude Lefort’s phrase. Th e fl oating signifi er does justice 
to the instability of the social division, which itself moves through the 
process of naming. Th ere is no place in the fi rst place.

Th e last major theoretical movement in the book—in addition to 
the chain of equivalences and naming—is the importance of the het-
erogeneous. In a dense discussion, Laclau moves farther away from 
traditional Hegelian-Marxism by refusing to let the dialectic fully de-
termine the scope of a struggle. In fact, when a struggle is dialectically 
comprehended, it is within the already established political framework 
and bears no revolutionary trait. By looking at Hegel’s notion of “peo-
ples without history” and Marx’s own analysis of “lumpenproletariat,” 
Laclau shows that the presence of this political remainder—the ones 
that are not even part of the dialectical struggle—is key in breaking 
away from the status quo. A true populist movement is once again 
incomprehensible to traditional theory because it seeks to incorporate 
demands that are so far off  the political radar that the claims seem 
absurd:

Th is is what happened with the aggregative model of democracy 
(Schumpeter, Downs) which reduced the “people” to a pluralism of in-
terests and values; and with the deliberative model (Rawls, Habermas), 
which found in either justice as fairness or in dialogical procedures the 
basis for a rational consensus which eliminated all opacity from the 
representation process. Once that point has been reached, the only 
relevant question is how to respect the will of those represented, taking 
it for granted that such a will exists in the fi rst place. (164)

Th is is why for Laclau there is “no political intervention which is not 
populistic to some extent” (155). By now, it should be clear that the 
process is not automatic; it requires establishing equivalences, the rise 
of a representative agent that breaks the given social antagonisms by 
incorporating the heterogeneous elements of society that have been 

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excluded. In Chapter Eight, Laclau focuses on three examples where 
populism “misfi red” (201). American populism has failed in its goals 
because it refused to expand the chain of equivalence; institutional seg-
regation prevented the establishment of equivalences, by focusing on 
diff erences. Atatürk failed in his quest to change Turkey because he 
adopted a top-down approach; he tried to “construct” the people in 
the image that he had in mind.  In the case of Peron, Laclau shows that 
there was a collapse of identifi cation; all involved causes only identifi ed 
themselves through the leader (221).

Th is tour of the world proves, for Laclau, that there is a way to ana-
lyze populism that does not reduce it to an irrational outburst. But 
not only do contemporary political theorists neglect the concept of 
the people (the Conclusion of the book is dedicated to showing how 
Laclau diff ers from his principal theoretical rivals: Žižek, Hardt and 
Negri, and Ranciere), the Left has equally given up on constructing a 
hegemonic front, even though capitalism provides the heterogeneous 
framework for such struggles.  In his own words:

Th e politico-intellectual task as I see it today—and to which I have 
tried to make a modest contribution here—is to go beyond the hori-
zon drawn by this faintheartedness, in its praises and in its condemna-
tions. Th e return of the “people” as a political category can be seen as a 
contribution to this expansion of horizons, because it helps to present 
other categories—such as class—for what they are: contingent and 
particular forms of articulating demands, not an ultimate core from 
which the nature of the demands themselves could be explained. Th is 
widening of horizons is a precondition for thinking the forms of our 
political engagement in the era of what I have called globalized capital-
ism. Th e dislocations inherent to social relations in the world in which 
we live are deeper than in the past, so categories that synthesized past 
social experience are becoming increasingly obsolete. It is necessary 
to reconceptualize the autonomy of social demands, the logic of their 
articulation, and the nature of collective entities resulting from then.  
Th is eff ort—which is necessarily collective—is the real task ahead. Let 
us hope that we will be equal to it (250).

All in all, this is an extremely rich book. Th e argument put forth is 
novel, in so far as it sheds light on new and emergent forms of pop-

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ulism, while explaining the very nature of modern social movements, 
which have puzzled political theorists for a long time. At the end, I 
fi nd myself asking for even more. How about the dangers of populism?  
Laclau showed that right-wing populism has been extremely success-
ful. Despite his descriptive and analytic tone, it is perfectly clear that 
Laclau deplores this development and assumes that left-wing populism 
is better, that it is more emancipatory. But since the goal is to oppose 
global capitalism, unless there is a genuine international movement, 
are populist movements, even those favoring the workers, not doomed 
to nationalism (and by extension racism)? Laclau would argue that we 
need to establish an equivalential chain between anti-racist and work-
ing-class demands. We would have to change the meaning of national-
ism (227). I agree, but I remain concerned that right-wing populism 
would always have an easier appeal.  

Th is brings me to my next point. Laclau convincingly argues that 
populism is not evil, and that it is the very nature of the political. He 
seems to vacillate a bit here. On the one hand, he insists that populism 
is the “royal road to understanding something about the ontological 
constitution of the political as such” (67); on the other, he tells us 
that populism, “for political analysis, is one of the privileged places of 
emergence of a new political articulation” (222). Is there a non-popu-
list approach that we might adapt, faced with the rise of right-wing 
populism? 

Finally, as I mentioned before, this is an ontological work. Despite 
its “applied” focus, it is a highly theoretical endeavor, bringing together 
many diff erent trends in the humanities and social sciences. Historical 
examples throughout the book are immensely helpful but the reader is 
left in a void when it comes to the future. On the one hand, it is unfair 
to expect Laclau to make predictions, or to give us prescriptions.  After 
all, his very theory is rejecting the full predictability of the political 
terrain.  Th e contingency of the political forbid him from dialectically 
projecting far into the future. Nevertheless, he hints—especially by the 
end of the book, and in the last passage cited above—that we are in an 
era of global capitalism which is fragmenting the world into heteroge-
neous segments. Th e task, he tells us, is to reconceptualize our frame-

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work; we must bring together the diff erent demands and struggles; we 
must work toward a new solidarity, a Postmodern International. But is 
there a way to use “class” without using the old categories? Better yet, 
can class be used—named again—while it is so historically charged? 
Laclau certainly thinks so. His work rightly emphasizes the need for 
better understanding discourse, rhetoric and even imagination.  

Is it necessary to mention how this polarization is projected today 
(June 2004) on the immediate American electoral alternatives? Either 
middle America deserts the populist right-wing camps because it no 
longer recognizes itself in the aggressive neo-conservative onslaught 
of the Bush regime, with the result that new equivalential chains are 
formed—that is, we move to a new hegemonic formation—or the Re-
publicans will be re-elected. What is pure illusion is to think that their 
long-term defeat could take place without some kind of drastic reart-
iculation of the political imaginary (the situation is too polarized for 
small changes in one direction or the other to be able to make any ma-
terial diff erence). Even if Bush marginally loses the election, his succes-
sor will fi nd his movements limited by the straitjacket of a hegemonic 
formation whose parameters remain substantially unchanged. (138)

Th ough I fully admire Laclau’s work, and fi nd myself sympathetic to 
his goal, I remain concerned that our political imaginary is too weak 
for this task. In a way, this cited passage best illustrates my concern 
(and the unfairness of my expectation from Laclau, to fi nd the solution 
to the neo-conservative hegemony). In 2006, the Democrats won giv-
ing the U.S. the “small changes” that Laclau mentioned. We are caught 
up in the same logic, once more. What’s next? How can we persuade 
the electorate that is seduced by right-wing populism? Th ere is no radi-
cal shift in the works in America. Worse yet, could middle America, 
middle Europe and the middle World establish a new identity?  Could 
it be done without falling prey to the old essentialism of the Second 
International? Is there an upcoming radical break, “a creatio ex nihilo” 
(228)?  

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References

Frank, Th omas
2004 What’s the Matter with Kansas? New York: Metropolitan Books.

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouff e
2001 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 

[1985]  2nd ed. London: Verso. 

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