For a Political Concept of the People (2019)
by Mario Tronti
Abstract: The concept of the people can have a neutral meaning (population, people) and a specific, political meaning. It designates a pre-political basis, which can become either political or anti-political. The era of industrial capitalism knew a structured, organized, politicized people, but then the animal spirits regained political dominance and cultural hegemony, distorting social relationships. Perhaps today, only politics and law together can take on the operational task of remaking a people and remaking society.1
I found the introduction to Enrico Scoditti’s Populism and Law (in this facsimile) relevant to the current political situation prevailing in the country. It is appropriate for thinkers of law and thinkers of politics to unite their voices to unravel a thread that has become remarkably tangled, that of the relationship between institutions and society. We come from decades of the confused objective progress of transitions between phantom Republics, left unthought legally and politically. Anti-twentieth century reaction has not proved to be up to the great themes that legal science and political theory had raised in the tragic history of that century. It was not about repeating them, those themes, but to resume them, update them, adapt them and reformulate them. It was believed that things had passed to another form of State and of society, while those same forms had only changed appearance and not substance. I am convinced that, along with the important structural data that certainly intervened, one of the causes of the current degradation of public life, and consequently of the debate to be sought in a fall of cultures, is that these forms no longer possessed, and therefore controlled, the course of real processes, not so much because they had profoundly changed as because they had tremendously accelerated. Now the time has come that the owl of Minerva of thought arrives, late in the evening, to pronounce its Gericht [Judgement]. It will not be enough for it to change the course of things. It will take, instead, indispensably, a practical initiative for the collection of forces capable of imposing the turn.
Scoditti writes, almost as a premise of his discourse: “The nexus between people and democracy is well evidenced, less evident is that between people and law, as demonstrated by the dialectic between democracy and constitutionalism that developed during the twentieth century.” In the present conjuncture, it is unfortunately to be observed that the connection between the people and democracy is no longer so evident. And this is because both poles of the relationship have suffered a drift, one precisely not intellectually possessed or politically controlled. It is a material fact of the present situation. And the Italian anomaly intervenes to aggravate, underlining it, a condition which is European and Western. I want to speak here, and I think I am asked to speak here, more than populism and law, of people and politics. Moreover, political constitutionalism and legal constitutionalism have to ask themselves at this point the question of why and how in today’s democracy the relationship between politics and the people has been so severely damaged.
Also on this topic, as on many others, it is appropriate to do away with the progressive dogma of “everything is new.” Of the irruption of the term populism in public discourse and in the political practice there has been a media chatter of such proportions as to perhaps hopelessly confuse a serious consideration of the term people. It is from here that we must start again. Populism has a precise political contingency, both in the well-determined experiences of the late nineteenth century in the United States and Russia, and in the twentieth-century Latin American ones. This sort of modern neopopulism repeats something without knowing anything about it. The proof is that if paleopopulism expressed itself in a project, neopopulism represents itself in a drive. But this character of irrational mass behavior is a theme that the twentieth century had already tragically placed in the attention of political thinking and action. And it happens that its current farcical repetition is paradoxically more difficult to understand and to counteract, because you doubt whether it is appropriate to take it seriously or to let it go waiting for the night to pass: always asking the sentinel at what point we are in the night. Better then is to return to reasoning about the root of the problem, that historical term-concept of people, which in its long duration has deposited praxis and theory of a great level.
The incarnations of the spirit of the people have been many and cannot be traced back to unity.
The demos of the Greeks is not the populus of the Romans. The we the people of the Americans is not the sovereignty that belongs to the people of the Europeans. The root confirms to us that people can have a neutral meaning, population or group, and a specific, political meaning. For this reason, [Max] Weber considered the term useless for a truly serious investigation. And [Giovanni] Sartori considered it questionable even for a theory of democracy. The thing is that people designates in fact a prepolitical basis, which can become either political or anti-political. We can see it today perhaps better than in the past. Because we see here and now repeating—in spite of all the novelties—well-known twentieth-century dynamics: not so much populist supply as demagogic-anti-political demand. It is the request for a symbolic function of the head, who through a plebiscite legitimization, takes charge of real needs, even with a delegation of power outside or above the laws. It is here, in my opinion, that it interweaves anti-politics and institutions together with populism and law. Weber did not have time to see the realization of charismatic power in totalitarian power. Even still, he saw better what we need to see for today. Every democracy—he said—carries in its body a plebiscite inclination. After all, after the end of the First Republic and with the squalid public events that followed, we experienced the collective unconscious of an almost Weimar situation: albeit without the great political and cultural protagonists of that era. Resistant social antibodies prevented and still prevent an authoritarian solution. That inclination of democracy to anti-politics is very well able to express itself in internal transformative forms, without the need for institutional overruns. It is no coincidence that all attempts at constitutional reform have failed. All it takes is a daily practice of technologically armed disintermediation of a democratic directism—which has nothing to do with direct democracy—oriented by the increasingly alienating means of mass communication.
Contingency and history rarely coincide, giving rise to a state of exception. This is not the case that we are given to experiment with. Today the contingent is ahistorical. And therefore impolitic. And so here is a difficulty of practice that only thought can attempt to overcome. It is not the unserviceability, or questionability, of the concept of people that should be emphasized. It is rather this ambiguity of the term, that it is a question of assuming. After all, all modernity had to do with this two-faced Janus. Already [Thomas] Hobbes distinguished between population and people, between a certain number of men living in a geographical territory, and the political aggregate bearer of sovereignty. This distinction was then stabilized and transformed into people-nation and popular society, into a political concept and a social concept of the people. The bourgeois form of capitalist society has intelligently accomplished this operation. These are personal ideas, but I don’t have any more to put at my disposal. I see a people before class, a people with class, and a people after class. We are now dealing with this last kind of people. There is a populus aeternus, which is of little interest to us because of what we have to do here now. We were interested in those people who, not by capitalism in general, but specifically by industrial capitalism, were put into the form of a class. There we had a structured, organized people, a politicized social reality, acting in the class struggle, as moving masses following a social aristocracy and a political elite. It was the time when the people held in shape a relationship of society against the animal spirits of production, the market and the consumerism that tended to dissolve it.
When these animal spirits regained political dominance and cultural hegemony, among other things of the global level, and no longer just the national, then contemporary history turned on itself, with an ideological narrative in its own ingenious way, with a pre-modern thing presented as postmodern. [Giancarlo] Scoditti is right: at that point, the modern balance between law and people, mediated by politics, has dissolved. That mediation took place at two levels, from above through the State, from below through the party. I am more than convinced of this observation: “the interpenetration of social warmth and identity with the coldness of the Judicial, a pure technique of limiting power, has been realized thanks to politics.” This is the basic reason why the intelligence of the system, in defense of its partisan interest, has spent the last decades in a daily work of delegitimizing politics. And without abandoning the traditional takeover of the state machine, it aimed to dismantle the political representation of the opposing party interest. The anti-politics of the system has confidently gone to specifically attack the politics realized in the party-form. And because of this, with good reason, “the political party of the twentieth century Europe, decisive elaborator of political directions, represented the point of arrival of the modern notion of the Political, from Hobbes on...”, one of the levers of that process of civilization of which Norbert Elias spoke, has thus come to fall. It is correct, then, to speak of the barbarization of social relations. But it is necessary to grasp, to combat the unprecedented ways through which the attempted operation has then succeeded. These ways are two, contemporary and complementary: a plebeianization of the people and a vulgarization of elites. It would be an event to be defined as tragic if we, children of the twentieth century, did not know well other heights, or lows, of the tragic in history. It is actually a dramatic passage, with dominant farcical movements.
Today, a people without a class reference produces a formless social relationship. When it was said: there is no society, there is only the individual, a maxim of truth was pronounced, which defines the present. But in this way individualism is not personified, it is massified. And the social relationship disappears, not because it does not exist, but because it is distorted into something that no longer makes it recognizable. In fact, it even becomes disputable. The post-human technology of virtual communication contributes to the radicality of the phenomenon. Today the bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all] has moved to the recitative gymnasium of the web. The civil bellum must then be retranslated, reformulated, and thus brought back to the materiality of the human condition. The individual needs to be rethought of as a person. Far from moving away from the real daily needs of the individual, of their family structure, of their territorial belonging, it is necessary to bring politics closer to these places, taking into account their times. The law itself should rephrase its subject matter in this sense. Between the current dominant globalization, not only of history, but of the news, on the one hand and, on the other hand, the naked lives of people, once spoken of as in the flesh, and even better spoken of as simple men and women, an alienating distance must be bridged that presently produces only insecurity, anger, fear. Only, perhaps, politics and law together can take on this operational task, which I would call redemptive. This is the way to remake society, remake people. Re-create them because the fact of the current falsely eternal present negates both. This will not happen if we do not reorder the conflict. At the moment the traditional contrast of order and conflict is not a given. In a divided society it is conflict that brings order. Real conflict, social and political, between alternative visions and actions and passions. In the society of all, a new people must take part. How much legal work and political work must be put in place for this operation is all to be calculated. It is certain that the narrow passage of a cultural revolution demands to be bravely crossed as soon as possible.
Original article: Mario Tronti, “Per un concetto politico di popolo,” Questione Giustizia, no. 1 (2019): 52–54, https://www.questionegiustizia.it/data/rivista/articoli/591/qg_2019-1_09.pdf.