The Crisis of Liberalism and The Emergence of Federal Populism

The Crisis of Liberalism
and the Emergence of Federal Populism
Paul Piccone
The bankruptcy of liberalism has been forecast so often that a sense

of impending doom has become part of its very definition. The various
crises prefiguring its demise, however, have only triggered structural
adjustments resulting primarily in more efficient versions of the same
basic system. Frustration with this political collapse which never came
has generated an opposite, equally mistaken, attitude. Thus during die
last decade many of the doomsday radicals of die 1960s have become
fervent believers in liberalism's eternal validity. Fundamental Enlight-
enment values, which were already part and parcel of most radicals'
Weltanschauung, have ceased to be lofty ideals to be realized in a future
social order of "freedom, equality and fraternity" and, instead, are now
seen as already embodied in existing institutions requiring only fine tun-
ing to function effectively in diis, die best of all possible worlds.
Bodi diese ahistorical approaches fail to take into account die modi-
fications liberalism has undergone in order to survive, how it has gradu-
ally changed from an anarchic to a statist system, and the fragility of
some of die means it has deployed to solve major structural crises. Its
weakest feature, democratic legitimacy, which has been mistakenly as-
sumed to be an integral part of its "liberal democratic" framework, has
been so systematically overlooked diat, when it resurfaces as a challenge
to liberalism in the form of populism, born again liberals are peculiarly
incapable of dealing with it. The same goes for an increasing number of
cases where anti-liberal and often authoritarian regimes are democrati-
cally elected — as in Iran, Algeria, die former Soviet Georgia, etc. — widi
overwhelming popular support. This is largely because die very notion
-7-
8 PAUL PICCONE
of liberalism is so confused and subject to such a variety of contradic-

tory definitions that any political analysis which does not spell out ex-
actly what it means is condemned to inevitable misunderstandings.
To avoid such a predicament, the following account discusses liber-
alism bodi as the New Class ideology of a significant sector of the
American polity (support for a strong redistributive state apparatus,
abstract individualism, a growing number of human and civil rights,
universalism, scientism, etc.) and as a political philosophy predicated
on constitutionalism, democratic legitimacy and the inviolability of a
number of first principles embodied in the nation-state. The two
meanings are historically interwined. Yet, while in the first case it is
possible to contrapose it to a "conservatism" opposed to at least some
of the features of New Class ideology, in the second both liberals and
conservatives can be regarded "liberal." Conservatives, in fact, are
committed to the same "liberal democratic" system, which they contra-
pose to alternatives such as bureaucratic collectivism or Islamic funda-
mentalism based on different principles such as transcendental truth and
legitimated by the future social orders they promise to bring about.
When contraposed to New Class ideology, populism as a Weltan-
schauung can only mean popular sovereignty and the privileging of
democratic legitimacy over and above all other political tenets, no mat-
ter how solidly grounded they may claim to be. Thus the recent resur-
gence of populism is not merely a temporary aberration but an expres-
sion of the modern political predicament, which since before WWI has
been vitiated by a series of exceptional but now increasingly obsoles-
cent historical conditions. As a response to particular political prob-
lems, however, populist politics are also historically contingent and,
within different contexts, assume a variety of idiosyncratic configura-
tions. The following analysis attempts to explain why the present crisis
of liberalism — bodi as an ideology and as a political system — re-
quires populist responses to emphasize federalism, regionalism and
die dismanding of predominant New Class modes of domination.
Unfortunately, populism is not blessed with a rich dieoretical tradi-
tion. Its meaning is all but obvious and usually associated widi its pre-
modern manifestations predicated on the primacy of ethnicity, reli-
gion, language, etc. as organizing principles. Contrary to liberal mis-
readings, however, this is not the kind of populism emerging today in
advanced industrial societies such as Western Europe. This new
populism defies standard Left/Right political characterizations and
strains to the limit existing bipolar political theories. This is why new
THE EMERGENCE OF FEDERAL POPULISM 9
populist political formations such as the Lombard League in Northern

Italy, which can be seen as a paradigmatic expression of this phenome-
non, have been systematically misunderstood and generally dismissed
as right-wing reactions to modernity. In fact, diey warrant careful scru-
tiny precisely because, within new historical conditions, diey articulate
the same democratic spirit that gave rise to the original American Con-
stitution and the Swiss Confederation, and provide a concrete alterna-
tive to a moribund liberalism.
The Unraveling of the liberal Consensus

Now that the Cold War is over, "liberal democracy" seems to have
triumphed over its communist nemesis beyond its most optimistic ex-
pectations. To the extent that communist regimes collapsed internally
rather dian as a result of military defeats or other coercive means, die
end of communism is even more definitive and clear-cut than the an-
nihilation of fascism and Nazism by force of arms. While in the latter
case die external imposition of the radical break with the past left the
question of its internalization by the societies involved temporarily unre-
solved — pending other institutional and socio-psychological adjust-
ments — in the case of communism die final blow was delivered by
voluntary reforms such as glasnost and perestroika or, more precisely,
dieir unintended consequences precipitating "velvet revolutions" and
the failed Soviet coup d'etat. From the viewpoint of liberal democracy,
however, die victory may have been too diorough and thus ultimately
Pyrrhic — to die point of direatening die system's very identity, since
for the past four decades liberalism has been defined by its odier: die
bureaucratic collectivism of communist regimes.
Unlike die relatively satisfactory resolution of Hegel's dialectic of
master and slave, where die vanquished is not annihilated but only
subjugated in order to testify to his inferiority and dius provide die legi-
timating recognition die master needs to establish his very identity, die
definitive obliteration of communism has plunged its declared neme-
sis, liberal democracy, into an unexpected identity crisis precisely when
it should have been most secure. The American political system is now
increasingly unable to articulate institutionally diose collective values
and aspirations whose heterogeneity had hidierto been conveniendy
fused into a national group (in the Sartrean sense) by die external medi-
ation of die direatening communist odier. That foreign "danger" has
provided an overriding national purpose legitimating die growing short-
comings of an expanding state apparatus as die unavoidable emergency
10 PAUL PIC CONE
cost of the post-WWII global confrontation with an expansionist "tota-

litarian" system — a confrontation which greatly facilitated the central-
ization of federal spending around a huge military budget, circum-
scribed internal political debates widiin an anti-communist consensus,
and homogenized all values by means of a shallow consumerism. The
restructuring of die old bipolar geopolitical context into three new pow-
er blocs no longer competing primarily for political and military domi-
nance but merely for economic hegemony has reactivated conflicts
which could be managed effectively within the existing political frame-
work only as long as prevailing international emergency conditions re-
mained relatively stable.
Having lost its totalizing other, the US liberal consensus of the Cold
War years is now unravelling into a new version of pre-New Deal
seriality and is dius confronted once again with those old internal con-
flicts (between labor and capital, freedom and equality, public and pri-
vate) which it had managed to externalize for over forty years. They re-
appear transubstantiated as conflicts over fiscal reforms, civil rights
and cultural autonomy. Contrary to the liberal establishment's self-
congratulatory gloating and its technocratic flattening of history into a
brave new world of unimpeded capitalist growth and successful social
engineering, die end of communism has undermined die military
Keynesianism which, since WWII, had artificially energized a tired cor-
porate liberalism widi smaller but equally ledial doses of die same
centralist-bureaucratic narcotic whose debilitating side-effects were ulti-
mately responsible for die demise of communist regimes: excessive cen-
tralization, compulsive homogenization, enforced conformity and arbi-
trary redistributive practices. Unable any longer to conceal widiin the
Defense Department budget and Pentagon procurement practices die
central planning it pretended to reject in principle, "liberal democracy"
now has to deal widi the re-politicization of previously technocratic deci-
sion-making processes and allocations which, for vague but widely ac-
cepted national security reasons, had been quiedy removed from
broad public scrutiny and turned into die administrative prerogatives
of experts and professionals.
What complicates matters is diat diis repoliticization has had to take
place under conditions of decreasing available resources. While the
unexpected obsolescence of die arms race has rendered superfluous a
great deal of military expenditures and encouraged coundess would-be
liberal reformers to recycle die Great Society delusions of an earlier
generation, post-communist realities have turned out to be considerably
less rosy. Instead of freeing for other domestic uses substantial chunks
of the defense budget, the decrease in justifiable military needs (re-
versed only temporarily because of the Gulf war) has depressed aggre-
gate demand and undermined die political justification for massive
budget deficits incurred in responding to the threat posed by various
"red menaces," "missile gaps" or "evil empires." Consequently, the US
government has had to consider decreasing all federal expenditures in
the attempt to balance the budget (and even begin to consider reduc-
ing the national debt whose servicing absorbs growing percentages of
the GNP). The result is a further reduction of aggregate demand and
the plunging of the system into an economic recession no longer
readily susceptible to traditional Keynesian therapy. Contrary to con-
ventional liberal wisdom, what has invigorated the system for well over
half a century was not a temporary and fiscally inconsequential "pump
priming" but permanent deficit spending which is increasingly difficult
to sustain and justify without severely mortgaging the future by over-
burdening and thus handicapping the economy .
Even if the problem of the growing deficit could be overlooked, con-
tinuing massive government deficit spending confronts new and prob-
ably insurmountable obstacles. The automatic answer to the obsoles-
cence of military Keynesianism, i.e., to find something functionally
equivalent, able to guarantee steady growth and a new totalizing na-
tional purpose (such as rebuilding the nation's infrastructure or under-
taking ambitious programs of space exploration, ecological repair,
etc.), is ruled out by two factors. First, it would be extremely difficult to
build a national consensus around such massive projects without an
overriding military threat. In this respect, the post-Cold War predica-
ment resembles the one obtaining immediately before WWII, when
the New Deal attempted to do something of the sort and ran into in-
surmountable political opposition. Massive totalizing projects of social
reconstruction presuppose a prior national consensus which, with the
exception of anti-fascism and anti-communism, either does not exist
in the US or is impossible to construct under present conditions of
sharply conflicting interests. What made military Keynesianism such
an ideal solution was not so much its economic priming role but the
fact that it legitimately suspended otherwise disruptive democratic de-
cision-making practices and opened the gate to practically unaccounta-
ble government spending. Second, while in the 1940s it was possible to
propose massive deficit spending as a temporary aberration to be
rectified wim the return to normal peacetime conditions of economic
12 PAUL PIC CONE
stability, no such promise would be minimally credible today, after the

experience of over half a century of accumulating a staggering national
debt.
To the extent that the US has developed into an increasingly self-
conscious heterogeneous society comprising a multitude of particula-
ristic groups vindicating real or imagined value orientations, die una-
voidable public debate concerning "the" national purpose necessary to
totalize die polity behind any particular macroeconomic project is very
likely to result in a stalemate impossible to resolve by standard liberal
means within die existing institutional framework. Whereas from die
1920s to the 1960s the strategy of Americanization by means of die
culture industry, universal education, etc. continued to homogenize a
national constituency whose heterogeneity was simultaneously encour-
aged by die integration of previously excluded ethnic groups, it did so
on die basis of questionable minimalist values such as consumerism
and abstract individualism, which could be upheld only during peri-
ods of collective upward mobility and growing affluence.
The end of rapid growdi in die 1990s brought about by the obsoles-
cence of military Keynesianism, combined with die realization of die
cultural devastation wrought by consumerism and Americanization,
has contributed to a disenchantment with liberalism and die revitali-
zation of die submerged but never entirely obliterated populist political
tradition. What fuels this tradition is not only die significandy eroded
yet still operative American edios of self-sufficiency, autonomy and
personal responsibility, which is anatiiema to any centralizing project
presupposing standardization and homogenization. More importantly,
it is also an expression of a growing impatience with die waste, ineffi-
ciency, counterproductivity and questionable rationality of an increas-
ingly distant central government. When all is said and done, die US re-
mains a society deeply distrustful of central audiority not readily ac-
countable to its legitimating constituency.
It is no accident that every instance of significant expansion of state
capacities in the US — from war mobilization during WWI, die Great
Depression, WWII, and die Cold War — has been (and could only be) in
response to a crisis situation impossible to confront odierwise. Thus die
end of die Cold War and die relative stabilization of international rela-
tions under die stewardship of diree major power blocs inextricably con-
nected by cultural and economic ties prematurely draws die curtain on
die 20di century — a century characterized by a crisis-driven centraliza-
tion causing considerable intended and unintended social disintegration.
As Christopher Lasch has shown, the corollary of this process of

practically uninterrupted centralization from WWI on has been liber-
alism's turn into an elitist and managerial ideology.1 Independently of
the recent demise of military Keynesianism, over the last thirty years
growing opposition to this kind of liberalism had already triggered
considerable resentment resulting in die resurgence of a populism that
had exploded on the American scene in die late 19th century.2 Its
demise at diat time was not, as Lawrence Goodwyn emphasizes, enti-
rely a function of political contingencies such as poor choices culmi-
nating in its fusion with die Democratic Party in 1896. Nor was it pri-
marily due to the return of economic prosperity, as Richard Hof-
stadter deduces from his reading of the movement as a relatively irrele-
vant pressure-group-turned-into-a-political-party clumsily articulating
a rural version of "entrepreneurial radicalism."3 In die long run die
fate of populism, broadly understood as a particular expression of die
American democratic project, was sealed by die Progressive move-
ment and its legacy. By advocating increased state regulation of the
economy, Progressivism and die New Deal'managed to fulfill die letter
of populist demands for state protection of dieir economic interests
direatened by unscrupulous banking practices, tight money policies and
growing industrial exploitation, but not dieir democratic spirit. This helps
explain why populism resurfaced in die early 1960s, widi die beginning
of die crisis of die welfare state. At diat point it became increasingly obvi-
ous diat state regulation of die economy had more to do widi guarantee-
ing the profitability of capital and providing remunerative employ-
ment opportunities for New Class technocrats dian widi safeguarding
populist interests now expanded well beyond Soudiern and Western
farmers to include most of die middle classes.
1. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1991), esp. Ch. 10, "The Politics of the Civilized Minority," pp. 412-532.
2. Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New
York: Oxford, 1976). The publication of this work marked the beginning of a re-evalu-
ation of American populism and reversed standard liberal interpretations of the move-
ment fabricated by liberal historians during the 1950s as tendentially reactionary,
racist and anti-intellectual. The many studies that have appeared since diat time only
expand and extend its analysis, widiout necessitating any substantial alteration of the
main thesis. For a standard liberal misreading of populism, see Peter Wiles, "A Syn-
drome, not a Doctrine: Some Elementary Theses on Populism," in Ghita Ionescu and
Ernest Gellner, eds., Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics (London:
Weidenfled and Nicholson, 1969), pp. 166-179.
3. Richard Hofstadter, "North America," in Ionescu and Gellner eds., Populism, op.
o(.,pp. 9-27. While widely regarded as die standard account during die 1950s and 1960s,
Hofstadter's work has not widistood critical scrutiny. Cf. Lasch, op. cit., pp. 217-225.
14 PAUL PIC CONE
This opposition is not simply the expression of a shifting and generally

fickle national mood but is related to the institutional involution of the
welfare state — the natural outcome of liberal regimes. Although liber-
alism has been defined in a number of different ways, its overprivile-
ging of individualism — possessive, abstract or otherwise — necessi-
tates the deployment of an increasingly powerful state, independently
of whatever particular crises may have historically precipitated the ac-
tual centralization of power. Thus liberalism is terminally statist. Since
the individual cannot be the source of a morality it already presup-
poses, and as inherited social norms are systematically eroded by
the instrumental rationality of a modernity unable to legitimate any-
thing not immediately redeemable at the marketplace of operational
ideas, liberals have had to resort more and more to the state as the
agency entrusted with externally containing an indeterminate collec-
tive behavior no longer internally regulated by traditional moral codes.
But in the long run state intervention only compounds the problem by
extending and generalizing instrumental rationality, thus undermining
the preconditions for its own continued intervention. It erodes that in-
dividuality presupposed as a precondition for the functioning of the
system and gradually engenders a state-dependent personality increa-
singly unable to function without the administration and guidance of
managerial agencies. No longer resisted and therefore no longer
closely monitored by a weakened individualism and autonomous so-
cial institutions, these agencies become themselves increasingly unac-
countable to any external bodies and dius vulnerable to corruption,
waste and counterproductivity.4
Sociology to the Rescue

Liberal thinkers have recognized these destructive dynamics and
sought solutions either through further rationalization of the particu-
lar communities or through an ethical regrounding of the welfare
state. However, to the extent that their analyses remain within liberal
New Class ideological assumptions the solutions they propose are ei-
dier predicated on wishful diinking or end up perpetuating and inten-
sifying existing social pathologies. Thus, in the case of Jiirgen Haber-
mas, probably the best known European liberal with a large American
following, his commitment to a communicative version of the liberal
4. For an earlier analysis of this crisis and of the changes in administrative strategies
to counter bureaucratic involution by integrating new forms of internal opposition, see
Paul Piccone, "The Crisis of One-Dimensionality," in Telos 35 (Spring 1978), pp. 44-54.
THE EMERGENCE OF FEDERAL POPULISM /5
theory of infinite progress (predicated on the inevitability of the growth

of knowledge) leads him to hypostatize the present crisis-ridden wel-
fare state as an irreversible historical achievement. One solution to the
crisis is to devise strategies to defuse the growing unease with liberal-
ism by reintegrating unfulfilled populist aspirations into what he can
only interpret as a temporary legitimation crisis precipitated by bu-
reaucratic excesses and democratic deficits.5
Unlike most otJier liberal thinkers who dismiss the populist emphasis
on existing community norms and local autonomy as a reactionary
defense of pre-modern superstition and dogma, Habermas readily
acknowledges the centrality of this populist dimension and locates it as
5. The crisis of liberal democracy presupposes, as part of its ideological self-mis-

understanding, a liberal theory no longer able to confront its own crisis odier than by
proposing as solutions what otherwise turn out to be the problems. Thus a couple of
decades ago Habermas, whose communication theory is but a linguistification of
Weberian sociology, simply extended the liberal prognosis in analyzing what he saw as
a growing legitimation crisis in Western societies in terms of the collapse of the histori-
cal compromise between labor and capital. Cf. Jiirgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1975). According to this compromise, labor forfeited decision-
making options to a technostructure entrusted with retaining unchanged existing rela-
tions of domination, in exchange for relatively high wages, affluence and an abun-
dance of consumer goods. For Habermas this compromise collapsed when this tech-
nostructure became overcentralized and insulated from the essential feed-back mech-
anisms provided by the constituency it was to serve. As a result, it eroded die condi-
tions necessary for its smooth functioning by engendering an economic crisis (qua
ecological crisis of physical limits to growth), a rationality crisis (qua destruction of reg-
ulatory feed-back mechanisms) and a motivation crisis (qua the undermining of indi-
vidualism and the development of what has come to be known as the state-dependent
personality). Thus the legitimation crisis was the result of diese odier three crises and
could only be resolved through a redemocratization of politics which, by providing so-
lutions to the odier three crises, would also relegitimate "liberal democratic" systems.
The assumption throughout was that the emancipatory character of undistorted com-
munication would necessarily generate a rational consensus translatable into the ra-
tional administrative structure of the welfare state. Predicated on questionable enthy-
mematic Marxist premises assuming die axiological uniformity of a "labor" tenden-
tially constituting the universal class, this analysis may have made sense in a society
such as Germany where the relatively high homogeneity of the population meant that
there were shared traditions and customs translatable into a new liberal consensus for
particular programs of social reconstruction — such as the SPD's Modell Deutschland
successfully deployed in die late 1970s to displace Ludwig Erhard's post-war techno-
cratic strategy. It made no sense in the US, however, where cultural heterogeneity
ruled out any smooth deployment of such a strategy. Over a decade after writing
Legitimation Crisis, and after discovering Husserl's concept of die Lebenswelt (which
Habermas redefined in terms of communication dieory), his analysis became more
sophisticated without, however, losing its apologetic liberal character. The objective
remains to relegitimate the welfare state by first rationalizing the polity through the
blessings of undistorted discursive practices — anodier case of Bertolt Brecht's state of-
ficials electing new voters to replace die existing ones they do not like.
16 PAUL PICCONE
a murky "third area," beneath the state and the equivalent of what his
more careless American epigones have redefined as "civil society" —
an inherendy ambiguous term he is wise enough not to use. He also
acknowledges mat, to the extent it expresses heterogeneous grass-roots
concerns, this grass-roots populist dimension cannot be reduced to
one homogeneous camp. Thus, after his bruising confrontation with
post-modernity, he no longer talks about any one-dimensional discur-
sive domain but about a plurality of "public spheres" to take into ac-
count the particularity of the various heterogeneous communities.
This pluralism, however, is only a tactical concession since in politically
constituting their demands all these public spheres must ultimately ar-
ticulate discursively their processes of collective will-formation and
become caught in die universalism he assumes to be presupposed by
undistorted communicative practices. These practices will permeate
any consciousness — populist or odierwise — which, in order to have
political impact, cannot remain spontaneous and inarticulate. Effective
resistence to what Habermas mystifies as "the colonization of the life-
world" is possible only if the various communities undergo a diorough
"communicative" rationalization which eventually will level them out
and make them conform widi the pseudo-universalist tenets of pre-
dominant New Class ideology, i.e., the homogenization of precisely
mat particularity populists seek to defend. Habermas' vindication of
the primacy of the lifeworld or of populist instances is at the same time
a strategy of instrumentalization since it requires an exhaustive transla-
tion of populist traditions and customs into communicatively articu-
lated norms. As such communication theory ends up as the functional
equivalent of the culture industry, universal education and other older
leveling institutions in rationalizing and making more responsive a lib-
eral democracy which has lost contact with its legitimating founda-
tions. The point throughout is to defend the welfare state against neo-
conservative attacks.6
Habermas' solution essentially consists in having the various consti-
tuencies homogenize spontaneously ramer man by forcing pseudo-uni-
versalist New Class ideology on mem. Unfortunately, his demand that
all features of the populist lifeworld be discursively articulated not only
direatens to destroy it even more effectively than standard bureaucratic
6. See Jurgen Habermas, "The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State
and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies," in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and
the Historians' Debate, ed. and trans, by Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989), pp. 58-69.
strategies of colonization but also provides no guarantees that the end

product will be anything close to the ideal speech communities he
envisions. It is an act of unwarranted modernist faith to assume that
the spontaneous rationalization of the lifeworld will automatically uni-
versalize the ideal speech situation. Short of constituting a communi-
cative brave new world where everyone will speak impeccably a mythical
language able to exhaustively and unambiguously apprehend reality,
cultural heterogeneity is here to stay — not as a mark of imperfection,
but as an ineradicable condition of Being. This elaborate exercise in
translating into communication theory standard welfare state practices
of mediatizing constituencies into "spontaneously" sponsoring other-
wise extraneous technocratic policies misses the real point. In heteroge-
neous societies liberalism cannot sustain a highly centralized state with-
out at the same time bureaucratically homogenizing and thereby de-
stroying the autonomy of the various constituencies — a precondition
for the system's rationality and democratic legitimacy — nor can it guar-
antee the particularity and autonomy of these constituencies while re-
maining centralized. In order to remain centralized it must trivialize
the axiological dimension and reduce it to minimal values such as con-
sumerism and affluence — values acceptable to a broad range of
constituencies. At any rate such a strategy remains viable only under
conditions of steady economic growth during which all other prob-
lems are assumed to be resolvable by means of the new affluence.
Other liberals are not seduced as readily as Habermas by the sirens
of communication theory and the promise that, if everyone were to
talk openly to everyone else, all disagreements would evaporate and the
system would be successfully prevented from colonizing spontaneously
self-rationalizing lifeworlds. Unconvinced by the emancipatory virtues
of undistorted discursive practices, sociologists such as Alan Wolfe rec-
ognize the central constitutive role of values in society and focus di-
recdy on the radical regrounding of fundamental values. Thus they
readily grant that "a liberal theory of politics was linked to a conservative
theory of society"7 and they also grudgingly acknowledge diat liberal in-
stitutions relying exclusively on market and state as steering mechanisms
tend to erode these traditional preconditions.8 Unwilling to grant the
legitimacy of uhese traditional residues whose erosion has precipitated
contemporary social disintegration — Habermas' lifeworld or the
7. Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1989), p. 108.
8. Ibid., p. 246.
18 PAUL PICCONE
populists' traditions and customs, they call for the deployment of soci-
ology as a moral guide to reconstitute a "civil society" presently in ru-
ins and to substitute a new moral vision for traditional or "conserva-
tive" cultural underpinnings. 9
But morality is not a matter of abstract deliberation by committees
of professional sociologists, no matter how eminendy qualified they
may be. It has to do with die most fundamental determinants of per-
sonal and social identity. Thus it can never be amenable to "die
construction of moral rules as a sociological practice" as Wolfe claims,
since people are always already rooted in living traditions diat consti-
tute diem as moral agents.10 The point is to modify and reconstitute ex-
isting practices radier dian to pontificate abstracdy about sociological
experts "helping people make their own rules." A truly democratic so-
lution unshackled by die elitist encroachment of state agencies of soci-
ological rationalization would be to protect existing communities widiin
a strong federal context in which dieir axiological codes are not super-
seded by external and allegedly transcendental alternatives or forcibly
penetrated and colonized by any "emancipatory" agencies whose ethi-
cal superiority can only be predicated on some odier implicit code. To
die extent diat die current crisis of liberalism has to do widi its inability
to provide totalizing norms sufficiendy strong and universally binding
to anchor a viable project of social reconstruction, Wolfe's sociological
approach to moral obligation is unlikely to do anything different from
what sociology has always done. 11 Instead of mediating the recon-
stitution of die components of Wolfe's "civil society" widi die help of
9. Ibid., p. 257.
10. Habermas also rejects the possibility of grounding morality in the subject —
something for which Wolfe reprimands him. However, Habermas' alternative in his
Diskursethik, i.e, to ground it in linguistic intersubjectivity, is hardly an improvement
over Wolfe (ibid., p. 233). To be sure, Wolfe does not want sociologists to condescen-
dingly set people straight as to the nature of their moral obligations. In fact, he explicitly
claims that the "distinctive contribution of a sociological approach to morality . . . is
not to tell people what they ought to do in situations of moral complexity, but rather to
help individuals discover and apply for themselves the moral rules they already, as social
beings, possess" (ibid., p. 211). But if such is die case, it is unclear why people need so-
ciologists in such a task rather than, e.g., rabbis, bartenders or psychotherapists.
11. Wolfe's efforts to descientize sociology is tantamount to throwing in the towel
after over a century of systematic efforts to develop the discipline as a "social science."
It would self-consciously turn sociology into what it was immediately after the Civil
War, before it sought to become a science. Cf. Stephen Park Turner and Jonathan H.
Turner, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis ofAmerican Sociology (New York: Sage
Publications, 1990), pp. 1 Iff. This honest concession by Wolfe, however, should also
acknowledge the failure of the project that the scientization of sociology was meant to
fulfill, i.e., to legitimate as universally valid the moral tenets of secularized Protestantism;
scientistic mystifications these traditional remnants neither need nor

want, sociology can only inform and advise the only social institution
that could have been receptive to its results: die administrative appara-
tus. Already by the 1950s, however, the R & D arm of this apparatus
had become aware of die unreliability of social scientific knowledge
and of die counterproductivity of most social engineering.12
While Wolfe's moral exhortations are predicated on liberalism's tra-
ditional assumption of abstract individuality, his vindication of a viable
social role for sociologists appears much more like a self-serving at-
tempt to reground a discipline confronting the loss of its real object
with the decline of the welfare state. Possible populist objections to so-
ciology follow Popperian lines. Since society has to do with people and
dieir freedom, any unrequested intervention by sociologists or other
agencies can only be an unwarranted intrusion. Sociology cannot be a
social "science" having people as its objects because people are not
passive objects but tendentially free subjects. Its real presupposed ob-
ject, the welfare state, whose delegitimation direatens to leave sociolo-
gy an academic orphan, cannot be recognized because diat would re-
veal sociology to be what it has always been — a technology of domina-
tion — and mus undermine its moral exhortations as vacuous and
manipulative strategies. Wolfe seems to have somehow realized as
much. So he digs out of die 19th century the ambiguous concept of
"civil society" as a new object to guarantee sociology a place in stand-
ard university catalogues: whereas political science studies die state
and economics studies the market, sociology studies civil society. By
implicidy defining civil society in die way sociologists have historically
defined communities, he poses their reconstitution and nurturing as the
task of sociology. Since, however, diis definition of communities actually
and thus caution against the desirability of developing and imposing an hegemonic moral
code in an increasingly heterogeneous society. The history of "sovietization" and of the
American welfare state are the most vivid testimony of recent failures of such a project.
12. Contrary to Wolfe's efforts to recycle sociology as the moral philosophy of
"civil society" as a counterweight to political science's and economics' encroachment
into its alleged domain by universalizing the state and the market, the Turners show
that the present demise of sociology is a result of the diversification of the field in re-
sponse to shifting student interests and the failure to develop a social science from the
1920s to the 1950s. Originally sponsored by the likes of the Rockefeller and Ford foun-
dations as the scientization of Protestantism and, as such, as the universally valid basis of
government policy, sociology's true calling as the intellectual arm of the bureaucratic ap-
paratus was subverted by the spontaneous rise of critical sociology and the resulting in-
ternal disintegration of sociology as a discipline. Cf. Turner and Turner, op. tit., pp.
179-196; and Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman, American Sotiology: Worldly Rejec-
tions of Religion and Their Directions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
20 PAUL PICCONE
rules out sociological intervention, he readily substitutes "society" —

civil or otherwise — whose formal character and present disintegrated
predicament practically calls for a sociological intervention (something
Wolfe seeks to legitimate by covertly appealing to traditional commu-
nity values of caritas, compassion, care for others or, more generally,
"moral obligation"). This conceptual fraud allows Wolfe to salvage an
appropriate object of study for sociologists: moral philosophy. Their
role, therefore, is another form of rationalization of "civil society."
According to Wolfe, the sociologist should do for liberalism — only bet-
ter — what Habermas' communication theory proposed: axiologically
homogenize the polity and relegitimate the welfare state as the expres-
sion of its collective ethical will.
Since the late 19th century it has been generally assumed by most
sociologists that the organicity provided by communities, what con-
stituted personal identities, was lost with its displacement by formal so-
cial relations typical of bourgeois society (after Marx, the standard transla-
tion of burgerliche Gesellschaft, now mystified as "civil society" and
rediscovered by Wolfe in the Scottish Enlightenment). Since liberalism
was the political horizon within which sociology thrived, from Weber
and Parsons to Lipset and Bell all serious sociologists have sought to
accomplish a stabilization rather than a reversal of this modern predica-
ment. Caught within an updated version of the one-way liberal theory
of history whereby progress unfolds from pre-modernity to modernity
(and, more recently, to post-modernity), hardly any sociologist worth
the name ever considered the reconstitution of communities. It is to
Wolfe's credit that he not only recognizes the desirability of reconstitu-
ting communities by emphasizing "moral obligation," but actually
poses it as a project for sociology as a discipline. Such a project, however,
cannot be realized by sociology as he systematically misunderstands its
domain and, consequently, the sociologist's role. His "realms of inti-
macy, trust, caring, and autonomy that are different from the larger
world of politics and economics"13 do not describe societies but com-
munities. These realms are much closer to Habermas' lifeworld and to
classical populist notions of communities14 than to the standard notion
13. Ibid., p. 38.

14. Unfortunately, Wolfe subscribes to a condescending notion of populism as
"identification with the moral purity of the oppressed" (ibid., p. 234). In so doing, he
falls squarely in line with standard liberal misinterpretations of populism as a quasi-re-
ligious, irrational and, at any rate, hopelessly simplistic Weltanschauung. For a critique
of Wolfe's earlier efforts to repackage and sell sociology as a discipline, see Moishe
Gonzales, "Commentary on Tikkun," in Telos 69 (Fall 1986), pp. 134-135.
of "society" before it became souped up by the qualifier "civil": an

"arena in which a multitude of anonymous groups and collective agents
influence one another, form coalitions, control access to the means of
production and communication, and, already less visibly, preestablish
through their social power the margins within which political questions
can be thematized and decided."15 Unlike societies, communities cannot
be permanently rationalized by coercion: lasting rationalization re-
quires a process of gradual internalization. By confusing the two Wolfe
can deploy the sociologist as the equivalent of Hegel's "external medi-
ator" to reconcile the heterogeneity of conflicting private interests,
power struggles etc. — the classical role of the bureaucrat. But whereas
Hegel's bureaucrat is neutral, Wolfe's sociologist cannot resist helping
reconstitute community (a.k.a. "civil society"). Thus his scholarly bu-
reaucrat tends to take on the role of the Jacobin or the Bolshevik as he
realizes that what Wolfe calls "the gift of society" is being wasted. The
rest is history! As much as one might sympathize with people con-
fronted with unemployment or, if they already have tenure, with intellec-
tual marginalization, community-reconstitution is too important a proj-
ect to be staked out as a special reserve for otherwise academically dis-
placed sociologists.
Sociologists professionally have no options other than to gravitate
from communities (in which they cannot have any privileged role other
than as integral members) to the state (where they can function as sci-
entific experts). Since the state comes to occupy such a central role,
they can best function in a society increasingly bifurcated into a mana-
gerial elite and disempowered masses, with a gray area in between
occupied by residual "individuals" constituted as such by communi-
ties not yet completely eroded. Thus today the role of sociology is termi-
nally restorational: in a context characterized by the natural disintegra-
tion of the welfare state, sociology seeks to relegitimate and rationalize
it. At best sociology can aspire to be what it has always sought to be-
come: the research arm of the bureaucratic apparatus. This feeds into
the dynamics of the crisis of liberalism where an increasingly unmana-
geable government systematically disempowers its alienated citizens
into passive wards of the state, unable or unwilling to function as citizens
and in need of more and more supervision and guidance by sociologists
and other "experts." But this is a losing proposition. Since disempo-
werment and alienation breed normlessness, social order can be
15. Habermas, op. at., p. 66.

22 PAUL PICCONE
maintained only by increasing legislation to substitute for disintegrat-

ing internalized norms, which generates a vicious circle by engender-
ing more alienation, and so on. Widiin diis legalistic structuring of pol-
itics by late liberalism, most people find it increasingly impossible to
participate, leaving diem widi civil disobedience as their only option to
defend whatever values they feel threatened by the system or to articu-
late politically their particular interests uninterpreted and free of bu-
reaucratic redescriptions.16
This crisis of technocratic liberal democracy manifests itself first and
foremost as a crisis of ungovernability, whose most obvious symptoms
are inefficiency, corruption and counterproductivity. It is not a partic-
ular problem widi this or that government but an inherent feature of
all representative institutions unable to establish strong feedback
mechanisms guaranteeing accountability and, widiin a democratic
context, legitimacy. Populism comes about as a response to this mod-
ern predicament: the result of the realization of an unbridgeable gap
between real needs and official policies, lived informal norms and an
increasingly remote formal rationality. It is not an accident that in popu-
lar speech "Washington" and "bureaucrat" have come to take on de-
rogatory connotations.
16. This is the process Carl Schmitt described as that "motorized legislation"
brought about by legal positivism's attempt to externalize and codify all previously
internalized norms. It is part of that process Adomo and Horkheimer described as the
dialectic of enlightenment, where the domination of the concept inexorably leads to the
reversion of enlightenment into myth, i.e., the hypostatization of particular mythological
values above all else. In Schmitt's formulation it became the cancer of the modern age
and brought about the eventual instrumentalization and delegitimation of law into mere
legality, the increasing deployment of super-legality understood precisely as the
hypostatization of particular values above the law, and the inevitable disintegration of
liberal democratic regimes — a disintegration already prefigured by the withering of
the Soviet state. For a discussion of these concepts, see Carl Schmitt, "The
Plight of European Jurisprudence," in Telos 83 (Spring 1990), pp. 35-70.; G. L. Ulmen,
Politischer Mehrwert: Eine Studie iiber Max Weber und Carl Schmitt (Weinheim: Acta huraa-
niora, 1991), pp. 69-86 and 408-448; and Michele Nicoletti, Trascendenza e Potere: La
Teologia Politica di Carl Schmitt (Brescia: Marcelliana, 1990), pp. 353ff. Even Habermas
acknowledges that this bureaucratic modus operandi of the welfare state disintegrates so-
cial life (op.tit.,pp. 58-59). However, his solution, i.e., "the establishment of new forms
of life," presupposes the existence of that "undamaged subjectivity" he has finally ac-
knowledged to be a counterfactual pipe dream (ibid., p. 69). Either communities ra-
tionalize themselves according to their own logic, or it does not happen. Their particu-
larities must be allowed to unfold according to their own dynamics, in relation with
other competing communities. These particularities are ultimately totalized within a
broad teleological project, but not rnrough communication or language, and certainly
not by sociologists. See Paul Piccone and G. L. Ulmen, "Schmitt's 'Testament' and the
Future of Europe," in Telos 83 (Spring 1990), pp. 3-34.
The Rise of the New Populism

Historically populist movements have arisen in response to a variety
of different crises. 19th century agrarian populism in the American
South was triggered by the Draconian deflationary fiscal policies insti-
tuted after the Civil War and their devastating consequences on farm-
ers. In Russia, by contrast, populism sought a return to ethnic, reli-
gious and local traditions as the bases of a new order to avoid the tribula-
tions of Western capitalist development.17 As Lasch, Goodwyn and other
historians of populism have emphasized, the recent resurgence of the
phenomenon is a result of a growing dissatisfaction with the ideology of
progress and unlimited economic development advocated both by liber-
al-democratic and bureaucratic-collectivist regimes. From the beginning
of the century this transformation has taken place as the unintended
consequence of the project of turning the American federation into a na-
tion and has led to the deployment of a strategy of "Americanization."
Today it is becoming increasingly obvious that the project did, on the
whole, succeed, but only by replacing deeply-rooted traditions and
customs with a narcissistic individualism and a shallow consumerism.
17. Even more than American populism, its Russian counterpart has been the vic-
tim of considerable historical distortion, beginning with Engels himself, during the pe-
riod after Marx' death, when he began to codify historical materialism into the "ortho-
dox Marxism" of the Second International that eventually became frozen into the
dogma of Marxism-Leninism. See Franco Venturi, Studies in Free Russia, trans, by
Fausta Segre Alsby and Margaret O'Dell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),
pp. 238-240. Thereafter Lenin and all subsequent communist historiography simply
dismissed Russian populism as a backward-looking petty bourgeois aberration in die
19th century, dumped into the infamous dustbin of history once Leninism, die one
and only true revolutionary dieory and practice, came on die scene. In spite of dissent-
ing interpretations by scholars such as Franco Venturi, Isaiah Berlin, Richard Pipes
and odiers, this dogmatic interpretation remained predominant well into the early
1970s, when Polish apparatchiki such as Andrzej Walicki, elaborating Lenin's sacred
texts, would still insist diat populism was not even a movement but only die ideology of a
sector of die Russian intelligentsia having little to do with real popular aspirations. See
his "Russia," in Ionescu and Gellner, op. tit., pp. 90-91. This article is a shorter version
of his equally questionable book The Controversy over Capitalism. Studies in the Social Philoso-
phy of the Russian Populists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). It is noteworthy that
some of die pages of Isaiah Berlin's introduction to the standard text on die subject
[Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution. A History of the Populist Movements in Nineteenth Century
Russia (London:Weinfeld and Nicholson, I960)] could have come direcdy out of die
best accounts of American populism by Lasch, Goodwyn or Norman Pollock (cf. his
The Just Polity: Populism, Law and Human Welfare [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988]). For a summary comparison of Russian and American populism, see Gianna
Pomata, "A Common Heritage: The Historical Memory of Populism in Europe and die
United States," in Harry C. Boyte and Frank Riessman, eds., The New Populism: The Politics
of Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), pp. 30-50.
24 PAUL PICCONE
To the extent that this project of Americanization was primarily a

statist strategy only indirectly related to popular needs and aspirations,
it did not succeed in generating an ethical vision sufficiently rich and
widespread to sustain a nation and constitute a rough aggregation of
particular groups — the US in the 19m century — into a broader com-
munity. The new values that did become generalized were those associ-
ated with consumerism, which fed smoothly into die logic of capitalist
rationalization. Whatever heterogeneous traditions and customs turned
out to be dysfunctional to the new order were readily branded pre-
modern, irrational and ultimately a mark of obsolescence and backward-
ness. The result was die kind of community disintegration documented
by the Lynds in dieir classic work, Middletown. The current resurgence
of populism has to do with die growing realization of the magnitude of
these losses and of die impossibility and/or undesirability of die infinite
growdi promised by liberalism — promises which do not seem fulfil-
lable widiin existing economic dynamics and which, at any rate, increas-
ingly threaten to precipitate massive ecological catastrophes.
Although odierwise incommensurable with die barbaric means de-
ployed by bureaucratic-centralist regimes, especially during die Stali-
nist era, die Americanization strategy and its consequences are not
structurally different from parallel processes in die former USSR.18
Thus it is not surprising diat over the last diree decades mere has been
an increasing resentment of counterproductive government interven-
tion in housing, employment, education and other matters to fulfill
homogenizing social agenda extraneous to the needs and aspirations
of die communities direcdy effected. Instead of remedying significant-
ly die manifest injustices against which diey were deployed on die ba-
sis of an abstract state-sanctioned egalitarianism, diese policies have
generally contributed to a further deterioration and disintegration of
struggling communities. Predicated on economic growdi (benefiting
mosdy die wealthy) and of redistribution (benefiting primarily the
underclass), diese policies leave the bulk of die middle class, which
bears die brunt of dieir consequences, overburdened, disenfranchised
and resentful.19 It is a process not altogedier different from die Bolshevik
18. It is not a coincidence that, in analyzing the causes of disintegration in the for-
mer USSR and the former Yugoslavia, Veljko Vujacic and Victor Zaslavsky point to the
very same social dynamics at work in the US. See "The Causes of Disintegration in the
USSR and Yugoslavia," in.Telos 88 (Summer 1991), pp. 120-140.
19. Lasch has carefully reconstructed how liberal attacks on middle class values
and institutions in the US has triggered the recent resurgence of populism — especially
its New Right variety. Cf. Lasch, op. cit., pp. 476ff.
elite's mobilization of "workers and poor peasants" to annihilate the

aristocracy, the "kulaks" and whatever there was of a nascent middle
class in Russia. The result was not only the destruction of agriculture,
but also the undermining of all creativity and initiative without which the
USSR ended up as one of the world's most conservative and unimagi-
native societies.
The new populism demands government accountability, institutional
reorganization and a redefinition of politics to facilitate participation
beyond the limited levels presently available within representative de-
mocracy.20 Yet populism remains a confused notion and, partly as a re-
sult, one of the most misunderstood and distorted phenomena in mod-
ern politics.21 While the liberal mass media persists in disparagingly la-
beling "populist" anything expressing popular sentiments unmediatized
by certified elites, and middle-brow academics insist on misperceiving
this resurgence of populism as short-sighted, right-wing, anti-intellectual
and xenophobic — precisely in the way the phenomenon has been
historically distorted and eventually codified by leading 1950s liberal
ideologues22 — recent scholarship has exploded most of these myths
20. That this is neither a particularly novel development nor one limited to the US
can be seen in the first line of Ionescu and Gellner, Populism, op. tit., where they modify
the opening phrase of The Communist Manifesto to read that: "A spectre is haunting the
world — populism."
21. After attempting to review and classify most of the available literature with the
help of Wittgensteinian mystifications such as "family resemblances" and "cluster
concepts" in order to develop a satisfactory social-scientific definition of "populism,"
this is roughly what Margaret Canovan concludes, while wishing that the concept had
never been developed in the first place. See her Populism (New York: Harcourt, Brace
andjanovich, 1981), p. 301. For a radically different account, see Lawrence Goodwyn,
"Rethinking 'Populism': Paradoxes of Historiography and Democracy," in Telos 88
(Summer 1991), pp. 37-56.
22. Although such crudely ideological accounts of populism are still predominant
in the US (cf. the front page of The New Republic of November 25, 1991 with the heading
"The New Populism" direcdy above a picture of David Duke, meant to associate
populism with racism) they are rapidly disappearing from serious scholarship.
Abroad, however, the situation remains nothing short of disgraceful — even in other-
wise respectable academic publications. Thus, a special "dossier" in the French jour-
nal Cosmopolitigues, No. 18 (February 1991) devoted to the theme "Populisme: Le Mai
Europeen?" exhibits not only an appalling ignorance of the voluminous literature on the
subject (none of it is mentioned), but displays in the process most of the self-contradic-
tory features of late 20th century liberalism. Thus, while grudgingly acknowledging
that democracy is "the government of the people," Georges Ayache immediately adds
the qualification that this means representative democracy since the people's immediate
instincts are not to be trusted and, after all, only "competent representatives" can
guarantee "freedom, well-being and integrity" [ibid. p. 7). Although in an interview
(appropriately tided "Le populisme ou le refus de la complexite du monde," p. 50)
26 PAUL PICCONE
and begun to re-examine the relevant documents and events to draw

rather different conclusions. In the wake of Goodwyn's reexamination
of the history of 19th century agrarian populism, it is becoming widely
acknowledged mat the phenomenon — as ambiguous and inarticulate
as it usually appears — must be reinterpreted as an essential moment
in the unsuccessful attempt to realize what he calls "the democratic
promise" against the elitism of a triumphant corporate liberalism.23
Contrary to bodi liberal and conservative conventional wisdom, to-
day's growing interest in populism in the US has very litde to do with
any backlash against the civil rights movement,- a resurgence of tradi-
tional prejudices, racist resentment of welfare and other redistributive
policies or simply with poor leadership. Rather, as Harry C. Boyte et al
argue,24 it has a great deal to do with the grass-roots rejection of the
technocratic state developed by die New Deal and institutionalized wim
the subsequent war mobilization — a rejection which received its first
political articulation when diis technocratic state began to run into a
crisis in the early 1960s25 and whose most visible expressions were not
Thierry de Beauce admits that populism may have to do with "crises of political repre-
sentation," he insists on branding populists "the declared enemies of representative de-
mocracy," notwithstanding the fact that populism has historically sought to remedy
precisely these "representational deficits" with participatory democracy. At any rate, the
whole operation is meant to identify tout court populism with Le Pen's National Front,
demagoguery, know-nothingism, nostalgic longing for long-gone communities (p. 16),
standard anti-intellectualism (p. 22), and the "reduction of the complexity of social life to
some of its extremely schematic features" (pp. 24 and 43). While condemning populism
as unequivocally "reactionary," the whole dossier turns out to be a tired apology for ex-
isting political institutions by calling for a "deepening of our democracy" and envi-
sioning "renewed forms of citizenship (pp. 52-53) — precisely what populists have his-
torically sought. In the entire dossier there is no mention of American populism and
the couple of short simplistic articles on Russian and East European populism are
concerned almost exclusively with anti-Semitism. For a careful reconstruction of
populism's political philosophy — although focused only on early American populism
— see Norman Pollack, op. cit. The growing literature on the subject is so extensive that it
is impossible to cite. For a partial list see Boyte and Riesman, op. cit., pp. 319ff.
23. Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, op. cit., pp. 542ff. Although he analyzes
Kansas populism in dubious class terms, Scott G. McNall comes to roughly similar
conclusions in his The Road to Rebellion: Class Formation and Kansas Populism, 1865-1900
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
24. Harry C. Boyte, Heather Booth and Steve Max, Citizen Action and the New Ameri-
can Populism (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1986). Cf. also Harry C. Boyte,
Common Wealth A Return to Citizen Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1989). While rich
in raw information, Boyte's account is theoretically sloppy, superficial and self-contra-
dictory. Whenever his analysis runs into conceptual problems the narrative fades into
the anvjctodal mode. As such, it readily feeds into the popular stereotype of populism
as a useless theoretical mishmash.
25. Cf. E. J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1991), pp. Chs. 1 and 2.
only the rise of the New Left but also Barry Goldwater's campaign in
1964, followed by George Wallace's American Independent Party in
1968, Jimmy Carter's 1976 defeat of the Democratic Party's liberal estab-
lishment, up to Ronald Reagan's "revolution" in the 1980s. It presuppo-
ses what European political scientists call "transversal politics," which
transcend the standard Left/Right division to vindicate local autonomy,
traditions and customs against bureaucratic encroachments by exter-
nal exploiting agencies.
Unfortunately, old mental habits are difficult to shake and populists
with New Left backgrounds tend to remain mired in traditional political
dogma contraposing the "reactionary" populism of the New Right to
their own, new and improved "progressive" brand. In so doing, however,
they destroy the originality of populism understood as the vindication of
people's really existing cultures, traditions and customs. The privileging of
"progressive" populism allows them to project onto populism, and thus
substitute for it, a Left-liberal Enlightenment ideology, thus perpetuating
precisely that same substitutionist elitism Lasch attacks as one of the fun-
damental flaws of 20th century liberalism.26 Consequently, their "pro-
gressive" populism turns out to be a warmed-over version of codified
1960s New Left ideology (understood not in its early form, as a vindica-
tion of participatory democracy, tolerance and axiological heterogeneity,
but in its late corrupted version as merely a self-rightous call to make die
existing system, arbitrarily redefined according to liberal values, live
up to its promises by whatever means necessary).27 The only possible
outcome is another call for the rationalization of existing padiological
26 For particular examples of how this substitutionist strategy works, see Russell
A. Berman, "Popular Culture and Populist Culture," in Telos 87 (Spring 1991), pp. 59-
70; and "Intellectuals and the Gulf War in Germany and in the United States," in Telos
88 (Summer 1991), pp. 167-180.
27. Typical of this simplistic approach is the anthology edited by Boyte and
Riessman, The New Populism, op. tit., which opens with an essay by Goodwyn criticizing
the ideology of progress as foreign to populism. Every other essay in the volume, how-
ever, proceeds to vindicate "good" progressive populism against "bad" conservative
falsifications. Boyte himself acknowledges in the Introduction that populism poses a
challenge to both Left and Right, but immediately proceeds along with most of his
contributors to associate populism tout court with late New Left ideology. The book's
"political correctness" is further demonstrated by vacuous discussions of "feminist,"
"disabled," "minority," etc. versions of populism. That populism aims, first and fore-
most, at the revitalization and reconstitution of communitarian traditions and customs
where such bureaucratic designations make no sense and whose deployment consti-
tute what in Habermasian language amount to strategies to colonize the lifeworld
(since communities' internal divisions are not a function of abstract universal determi-
nations but of internalized traditional norms) is readily forgotten in a scatterbrained
celebration of populism as "a night in which all cows are black."
28 PAUL PIC CONE
power relations: rendering government more "responsive" and "ac-

countable," without ultimately challenging the structural conditions
(technocracy, bureaucracy, professionalism, centralization, axiological
pseudo-universalism, etc.) responsible for the social disintegration and
the crisis of liberalism.
Unlike its 19th century forerunner, the new populism can no longer
pretend to vindicate the interests and lifestyles of a relatively homoge-
neous "people." Although the US was always an heterogeneous society,
in the 19m century, when much of the country was not yet altogether
sold on the idea of racial equality and native populations were still be-
ing regularly exterminated or confined to remote reservations, WASP
hegemony had not yet been challenged in any significant way and
marginal groups could not question — and often did not really want to
question but rather internalize — the predominant value system. The
result was the functional equivalent of a relatively homogeneous con-
stituency. In this sense the populists were not entirely out of line in de-
fending what in retrospect look suspiciously like highly exclusionary
nativist positions. This helps explain the not always ungrounded
charges of ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Catholicism and
general xenophobia hurled against populism. Today the new populism
must not forget that what is crucial in e pluribus unum is diat pluribus
without which die unum will have problems remaining such.
It is this predicament that forces the new populism to reconsider
the original notion of federalism as an integral part of any program
seeking to transcend die antinomies of liberalism and vindicate partici-
patory democracy as necessary for the reconstitution of organic com-
munities. Widiout that type of federalism all appeals to populist senti-
ments are doomed to retrace die liberal padi to managerialism, depo-
liticization of public discussion, and die spectacularization of politics.
To die extent mat all national constituencies are heterogeneous and di-
vided on various issues, any attempt to develop a meaningful national
policy will eidier end up clashing with a substantial segment of this
constituency or, in order to appease everyone, whatever national poli-
cy is ultimately proposed will have to be so vague and ambiguous as to
be politically meaningless. What has to be circumvented is the tradi-
tionally megalomaniacal nation-state which, because of its sheer size,
rules out die possibility of participatory democracy and the constitution
of a new collective consciousness. The task of die new populism is to
substitute for die nation-state small autonomous organic communities
federalized within a broader framework guaranteeing bodi cultural
particularity and unimpeded economic interaction.
Multiculturalism as Bureaucratic Populism

Liberal interpretations of populism, even sympathetic ones, have in-
variably fallen into the trap described over a century ago by Marx
when he attacked the classical economists' uncritical usage of the con-
cept "the people" for being guilty of what Adorno later described as
"identity thinking." These interpretations naively assume that real
people correspond to what the concept of "the people" normally descri-
bes, i.e., some homogeneous aggregation of "Americans" exhibiting all
the WASP characteristics that have historically been associated with
such a designation. As a result they hypostatize and substitute a set of
particular populist values above and beyond all others, thus becoming
vulnerable to charges of cultural imperialism and Eurocentrism.28
Without any further concrete determinations concerning their particu-
lar cultures, habitats, languages, religions, ethnic origin, etc. "the peo-
ple" remains an empty abstraction upon which to project arbitrary
universal characteristics. By calling for concrete determinations, of
course, Marx sought to dear the way for and legitimate his own
favorite "derminations," i.e., class distinctions, as ontological features
of reality. The point here is that the question whether significant differ-
ences do or do not obtain within a given population is never just an
empirical nor even a theoretical but, first and foremost, a political one.
Whether someone is a Croat or a Yugoslav, or whether it matters, cannot
be established once and for all simply by looking at the facts. It requires
a prior political determination of what will constitute relevant facts.
Marx' concrete "determinations" are ultimately a function of socio-
economic practices informally developed over time and eventually sedi-
mented in the collective consciousness of the particular communities
they come to constitute. Within the canonical interpretations of most
Marxist traditions and against the background of the devastating im-
pact of the rise of capitalism and of the industrial revolution some of
these practices, i.e., those related to production, have been privileged
28. Even careful critics such as Dionne [op.tit.)fall into this trap when, after having
gone to great pains to describe many of the irreconcilable issues that split the Ameri-
can electorate, in the last chapter of his book he tries to pull a rabbit out of his hat in
the form of "the American political tradition," allegedly able to totalize magically all
constituencies and reconcile all differences. Such reconciliations and totalizations can
and have been successfully carried out by astute politicians for a long time, but at the
price of depoliticizing politics and thus unintentionally pointing to this state of affairs
as providing the answer to the question Dionne uses as the tide of his book. Other at-
tempts to recycle analogous republican politics, such as Lasch's, are more realistic
and, consequendy, end up with pessimistic conclusions concerning dieir chances of
success.
JO PAUL PICCONE
as determining all others. Such a reading was encouraged by Marx

himself, who spent most of his latter years reconstructing the logic of
capital as the essence of modern historical development. Yet, to the ex-
tent that all these practices are ontogenetic and therefore inextricably
connected with intersubjectivity, they constitute a.praxis of which labor
and production in general are only a special case.29 They are always
embedded in specific territorial and cultural contexts widiin which
they receive dieir meaning as integral parts of a particular nomos.30
Caught within die logic of his own account of the irresistible universa-
lizing function of capitalism, Marx uncritically assumed the eventual
totalization of all remaining nomoi into communist society, thus
29. It is not an accident that, in his struggle against what eventually became the
predominant philosophical positions of the Second and Third International, Antonio
Labriola redefined Marxism as "the philosophy of praxis." Although Gramsci developed
this approach in terms of what he sought to articulate as the particularities of national
life and popular culture, the whole effort shipwrecked in subsequent crude econo-
mistic reinterpretations of "cultural hegemony" as the equivalent of successful propa-
ganda and of praxis as politically determined labor, i.e., as organizing. At any rate,
Gramsci's project of cultural hegemony was an attempt to rationalize the traditional
lifeworld, the existing nomos, on the assumption that such a rationalization would natu-
rally take place along Marxist lines — an intellectualistic illusion not altogether differ-
ent from Habermas' hope that the defense against die colonization of the lifeworld
will automatically result in the universalization of the purposive rationality allegedly
inherent in undistorted communicative practices. Cf. Paul Piccone, Italian Marxism
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983).
30. Although originally articulated by Heraditus at the dawn of Western philoso-
phy as the divine world order (Cf. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture
[New York: Oxford University Press, 1965], pp. 151-184), nomos reappears in contem-
porary political theory through Carl Schmitt, who traces it back to the Sophists, before
Cicero mistranslated it as lex, thus occluding its territorial, communitarian and tradi-
tional connotations. Schmitt, however, specifically articulated the concept in terms of
the dissolution ofthejuspublicum Europaeum and its implications for his particular disci-
pline, constitutional and international law. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im
Volkerrecht desjus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1978). In his essay
on "Nomos — Nahme — Name," [in Siegfried Behn, ed., Der besta'ndige Aufbruck
Festschrift, fur Erich Pnywara (Nuremberg: Clock und Ludz, 1957)], however, Schmitt
traces language itself back to nomos and thus prefigures the Wittgensteinian themes of
the Lebensformen and "language games," and Foucault's notion of genealogy as radical
alternatives to abstract enlightenment universalism — what post-modernists call
"logocentrism" and the elitist managerial ideology of late liberalism. Cf. also Ulmen,
Politischer Mehrwert, op. tit., pp. 301-317. Ulmen emphasizes how for Schmitt the con-
cept of nomos unfolds in three stages: land appropriation, division and production. Its
last configuration corresponds to Marx' notion of "the mode of production" without,
however, following the orthodox Marxist degradation of the extra-economic "super-
structure" to the level of an epiphenomenon. A populist concept of nomos would com-
bine both die Marxist base and superstructure without serializing its particular manifes-
tation widlin the unilinear theory of history dogmatically accepted by bodi Marxism
and liberalism.
THE EMERGENCE OF FEDERAL POPULISM Jl
forgetting the ineradicable cultural constitution of his social individual,

no matter how much he may farm in the morning, engage in social cri-
ticism in the afternoon and watch CNN in the evening. Other, more
conservative 19th century thinkers (often engaged in defending aristo-
cratic rule against the democratizing, universalizing and homoge-
nizing implications of the French Revolution) took traditional nomoi as
the foundation of nations which, in turn, totalized and formalized the
organic relations they embodied into states.31 Unfortunately, as a
result of unexpected socio-economic disruptions, none of these na-
tional projects ever materialized. Thus there do not seem to be too
many nations in existence today mat fit this stringent description. At
any rate, since WWI and the collapse of thejus publicum Europaeum it has
become impossible to conceive of nations in this fashion since any ef-
fort to constitute them along these lines results in the marginalization
and disenfranchisement of whatever minorities happen to inhabit the
national territory. The result has usually been civil war, whenever the
minorities are able to resist national homogenization, or occasionally
genocide, when the minorities are too weak to fight back.
Today all nations are culturally heterogeneous and, as a result, their
particular states find it increasingly difficult to reflect any particular na-
tional values, traditions or customs. Modern states are caught in the par-
adox of having to embody concrete values derived from some particular
nomos, while their grounding in heterogeneous societies commits them to
axiological neutrality and prevents them from admitting the privileging
of any one nomos over all others. They can only claim to codify formal
relations among abstract individuals within a minimalist axiological
horizon able to serialize, without actually integrating various residual
and often conflicting nomoi. But the very designation of abstract indi-
viduality as the fundamental social unit, or what exactly constitutes in-
dividuality and citizenship, betrays a commitment to a potential nomos
reflecting the interests of intellectuals: Enlightenment values and, subse-
quently, New Class ideology. What is especially problematic in the US
case is that the particular variation of this general Northern European
outlook, the WASP ideology that became embodied in the federal
31. Some subsequent articulations of Savigny's ideas focused on the Volksgeist and
contributed significantly to 20th century racism and National Socialism. This outcome,
however, is only one historical possibility among many. The alternatives are not limited
to a contraposition of the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment and the irrational
particularism of most 20th century conservative thought. For a possible synthesis along
federal lines, see Paul Piccone and G. Ulmen, "Schmitt's 'Testament'..." op. cit., pp. 26-
28; and Ulmen, Politischer Mehrwert, op. cit., pp. 74ff.
32 PAUL PICCONE
Constitution and, after the Civil War, determined the structure of the
US as a nation, includes plurality, tolerance and autonomy as integral
parts. Because of the growing demographic heterogenization resulting
from both voluntary and, earlier, involuntary immigration, the original
American identity necessitated its self-denial in the very process' of be-
coming objectified in a nation-state. When the US as a nation began to
codify its federal Constitution into the welfare state this paradoxical
predicament resulted in an axiologically minimalist project whose
realization presupposed the prior homogenization of its constituency.
In carrying out this project of cultural homogenization, however, the
welfare state did not generate a new nomos — since nomoi cannot be cre-
ated by bureaucratic fiat — but only extended the existing one while
having to deny its very existence.
In discussing the US in die closing pages of his Verfassungslehre
(1928), Schmitt pointed out that the federal government could not rec-
ognize minorities as political entities since their claim to embody a
particular nomos implied diat they were nations in mice and dierefore
incompatible widi the existing and developing American nation.32 The
only approach he envisioned at that time was the one actually being
followed by the government, i.e., to regard all members of these
minorities merely as abstract individuals like everyone else. In the late
1920s such a solution was still viable only to die extent that the US was
still in the early phases of transition from a federation strictu sensu to a
nation. But as a contractual intra-national document — even if an incon-
sistent one based on democratic foundations ("We, die people . . . " instead
of "We, the states . . .") — the Constitution could not substitute for a na-
tional nomos. Even die most imaginative readings of die Bill of Rights
could yield little more in die way of substantive values dian die protec-
tion of a few rights of abstract individuals and die pursuit of happiness
operationalized into consumerism. Thus it is not surprising diat the final
product of diis long and painful process of building a nation out of die
original federation, accelerated during die shift from entrepreneurial to
state-organized capitalism under conditions of severe economic crisis,
turned out to be a technocratic redistributive welfare state.
Lacking a viable axiological foundation dearly defining its mandate
beyond a vague injunction to safeguard die stability of die system, die
welfare state could not avoid remaking die constituency in its own image.
Thus it continued die process of homogenizing and politically deactivat-
ing die populace not only in order to dientize and control it but also
32. Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970), pp. 388-391.
to create a market of homogeneous consumers for a state-regulated

capitalism predicated on the deployment of new mass production
technologies and a correspondingly homogenized labor force to meet
the personnel requirements of the new system. The unintended conse-
quence of this strategy, however, has been the deterioration of that sec-
tor of the population which could not, for whatever reason, participate
in this project of rationalization and homogenization into state-depen-
dent clients unable and/or unwilling to function as autonomous indi-
viduals; the transformation of the former middle class with ready ac-
cess to educational institutions and professional skills primarily into a
managerial elite supervising these new welfare state clients; and the up-
grading of the old working class to real or imagined middle class sta-
tus, to bear the costs and consequences of these developments. As long
as the welfare state, through whatever legitimate or politically fraudu-
lent means, could guarantee a steady growth and relatively high
standads of living, populist discontent with cultural homogenization
and the debilitating impact of state penetration of the lifeworld could
be contained as marginal ideological disturbances or integrated by ex-
isting institutional mechanisms. This is essentially what has happened
since the New Deal. But in a context of prolonged economic stagnation
and growing cultural impoverishment no longer buffered by increas-
ingly eroded familial or autonomous community networks — a dis-
tinct possibility for the foreseeable future — popular dissatisfaction
translated into populist resentment may eventually force the existing
system into undertaking substantial institutional reforms.33
The crisis of the welfare state has not gone unnoticed by the techno-
cracy entrusted with managing it. Already in the early 1960s sponta-
neous ghetto uprisings in practically every major American city by dis-
enfranchised blacks made it clear not only that the welfare state had
lost touch with most of its alleged clientele, but also that government
policies had undermined the various targeted constituencies' ability to
represent themselves and thereby participate in the general project of
33. This is precisely what happened to bureaucratic collectivist regimes which de-
ployed similar strategies of social rationalization. The Soviet Union withered when a
terminal economic crisis precipitated by the growing irrationality of a system no longer
run by more or less autonomous individuals but by state-dependent apparatchiki gradu-
ally curtailed the central government's redistributive options. Although the current re-
surgence of populism is not predicated on standard theories of the economic crash
(Zusammenbruchstheorie) — a trademark of the Second International's determinist out-
look — to the extent that economic crises vividly document the system's shortcomings
they tend to lend legitimacy to populist critiques.
34 PAUL PICCONE
social reorganization.34 The advanced disintegration of residual nomoi

in those sectors of the population most direcdy affected by state
policies of cultural homogenization had become dysfunctional to the
very running of a welfare state, which still projected die final mediatized
result to be some sort of new national nomos. The technocracy seems to
have realized mat no new American nomoi can come into being by bu-
reaucratic fiat: they can only be constituted through the spontaneous
interaction of people in organic communities. At any rate, from the
mid-1960s the technocracy has reversed its Americanization strategy
and encouraged autonomous and government-sponsored reconstitution
of disintegrated residual nomoi as a piecondition to reestablish its own
internal rationality. Such direct sociological interventions to recon-
stitute disintegrated or disintegrating communities widi the assistance
of professional organizers such as Saul Alinsky, the Office of Economic
Opportunity encouraging and funding opposition groups to generate
regulatory feed-back for an insulated and therefore irresponsive bureau-
cratic apparatus, the almost obsessive government supervised voter reg-
istration campaigns in the South to ensure the election of truly represent-
ative officials, etc. were all primarily bureaucratic attempts to reconstitute
disintegrated nomoi to rationalize and legitimate an increasingly falter-
ing welfare state. What this meant was forfeiting any hope of constitut-
ing any new national nomos other than one hypostatizing the bureau-
cratic apparatus as a permanent mediator among a myriad of conflict-
ing artificially reconstituted traditional groups.
Unable to enforce the internalization of its mandates, this Great So-
ciety and post-Great Society welfare state strategy succeeded only in
generating artificial negativity which, to die extent that it does not re-
flect die spontaneous expression of internalized norms, remains a
34. Adolph L. Reed Jr. has explained these events precisely in terms of the
bureaucratic destruction of residual nomoi understood not as parts of some mythical
African culture buried in the collective unconscious but as internalized community
practices developed over decades of struggling against institutionalized racism in the
South. Cf. his "Black Particularity Reconsidered," in Telos (Spring 1979), pp. 71-93.
From diis, however, over a decade later Reed opportunistically concludes that, since
racial oppression was part and parcel of government policies, it is the government's re-
sponsibility to remedy its consequences through more affirmative action and other
programs which have, at best, only benefited a small upwardly mobile black middle
class. See Adolph Reed Jr. and Julian Bond, "Equality: Why We Can't Wait," in The
Nation (Dec. 9, 1991), pp. 733-737. Since the government cannot reconstitute any re-
sidual Afro-American nomos, Reed's call for more government intervention in the
black community will probably succeed in securing a few more affirmative action ap-
pointments in prestigious universities, while contributing to further disintegration and
dependence in the urban ghettos.
THE EMERGENCE OF FEDERAL POPULISM J5
bureaucratic phenomenon extending and intensifying radier dian con-

taining and correcting bureaucratic involution. What diese strategies suc-
ceeded in doing was primarily to extend the bureaucratic apparatus by
creating a professional New Class counter-bureaucratic elite bodi to re-
spond to and co-opt growing populist resentment by providing diis op-
position widi officially sanctioned representative institutions. In
Adornian terms die main outcome of diis new version of die dialectic
of enlightenment was to extend the domination of die concept in die
form of an attempted bureaucratic reconstitution of cultural heteroge-
neity to legitimate and rationalize the welfare state. The project failed
because diese cultural traits did not denote dynamic living practices
internalized by die various communities diey constituted, but embel-
lished memories having litde relation to concrete social realities odier
dian as legitimating ideologies for a rising multicultural bureaucracy in
me 1970s and 1980s. Thus, far from representing any spontaneous
grass-roots phenomenon, multiculturalism is primarily anodier symp-
tom of the involution of die welfare state.
But the welfare state cannot coexist with multiculturalism. Any seri-
ous vindication of particular cultures must resuscitate or invent auton-
omous nomoi whose articulation requires die constitution of corre-
sponding nations widi dieir own states — the kind of project
undertaken with catastrophic consequences in Northern Ireland, Leba-
non and, more recendy, in what was Yugoslavia. On die odier hand,
anything short of nationhood, predicated on a plediora of conflicting
criteria of language, race, gender, class, edinicity, sexual orientation,
etc., can only yield pressure groups advocating artificial particularity as
career advancement strategies for often poorly qualified would-be state
functionaries pretending to represent constituencies never substan-
tially affected by these dynamics.35 Thus, as a medicine to cure die ills
of die welfare state, multiculturalism is eidier too strong, to die point
mat it direatens to kill die patient, or not strong enough, in which case
it is socially irrelevant. In the first case die result is Yugoslavia, Leba-
non, etc. In die second case, which more closely resembles die way die
problem is articulated in die US, weak multiculturalism fails to provide
alternative axiological foundations necessary for autonomous individ-
uality and community reconstitution. Worse yet, it actually intensifies
die crisis of the welfare state bodi by actually encouraging conformity
while advocating an enforced diversity, and by legitimating contradic-
tory and irreconcilable criteria for redistribution that render extremely
difficult, if not altogedier impossible, any equitable implementation.
36 PAUL PICCONE
Post-Liberal Populism
As bureaucratically-coopted populism, multiculturalism cannot re-
medy the welfare state's axiological deficits because the reified hete-
rogeneity it legitimates does not correspond to any spontaneously
lived practices and only seeks to substitute for the administrative impo-
sition of an extraneous homogeneity an equally extraneous heterogeneity.
The problem with the earlier Americanization strategy, however, was
not homogeneity as such. Rather, it had to do with the fact that it was
administratively imposed. These efforts in the past half century have
tended to accelerate the disintegration of remaining nomoi without
actually substituting new ones, thus leaving in their wake a state of
normlessness and community disintegration legitimating further bu-
reaucratic intervention and the increasing tendential bifurcation of so-
ciety into a New Class managerial elite and its disenfranchised clients
— the liberal coalition that has displaced the traditional working class
as the main constituency of the American Democratic Party.
No longer confident of being able to constitute technocratically a
new nomos defining an American nation smoothly run by an efficient
bureaucratic apparatus of New Class professionals, the welfare state's
sponsorship of multiculturalism ends up relegitimating existing rela-
tions of domination, privilege and socio-economic inequality by redi-
mensioning the role of die central goverment.35 Having feudalized cul-
ture into zbellum omnium contra omnes, the welfare state — itself pretend-
ing to proportionately represent the country's racial, ethnic, linguistic,
religious etc. make-up — seeks to become the only neutral mediator
able to adjudicate among the permanently warring factions in manag-
ing and redistributing die fiscally appropriated social surplus. But to
the extent diat this process of artificial multiculturalization direcdy af-
fects only a small, although highly vocal and visible, upwardly mobile
segment of die bureaucratic apparatus, leaving the rest of die newly
designated cultural minorities as disempowered and alienated as ever,
it cannot generate the kind of political constituency whose support it
needs to remain in power. Growing populist opposition to its costs and
questionable practices threatens to translate into demands for institu-
tional reforms to redimension and decentralize this increasingly coun-
terproductive and self-destructive bureaucratic apparatus, and dius to
re-empower local communities to the point of creating conditions
within which new regional nomoi can actually be reconstituted.
35. Cf. "Special Section on Affirmative Action in Academia" in Telos 86 (Winter

1990-91), pp. 103-140.
THE EMERGENCE OF FEDERAL POPULISM J7
Rather than reviving or inventing devisive idyllic visions of ethnic, gen-

der or cultural particularity, the new populism focuses on the creation of
new nomoi in terms of developing modes of interacting among people in
the process of negotiating and renegotiating everyday life.
The new populism will have to part ways with its earlier manifesta-
tions precisely in this: it can no longer assume a pregiven national con-
text and will have to refederalize the political system as a precondition
for reconstituting local communities and concrete nomoi able to relegi-
timate the democratic ethos. This means that cultural specificity will
have to be defined entirely in territorial terms rather than ethnic, racial,
religious, linguistic, and other criteria. Unresolvable within the instru-
mental rationality of a large centralized welfare state, the question of
conflicting nomoi is more easily solved within small contexts where new
nomoi can be constituted through direct interaction among people.
After all, nomoi are never given once and for all, but are living entities
constantly modified in the process of being articulated. If die signifi-
cant political units are de-totalized into smaller ones allowing for con-
crete interaction and will-formation, then new nomoi can develop out of
the old ones, as they always have in the past, in particular localities, as a
result of the concrete interaction of various groups.
Civil wars in Lebanon, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland are largely
the results of efforts to universalize particularistic nomoi at die level of
die nation-state where large chunks of the constituency have to be ne-
cessarily disenfranchised or marginalized rather than organically integ-
rated in new formations which, to the extent that they are locally devel-
oped by the various peoples themselves, are automatically internali-
zed. Interaction among differing cultures can never be codified by
government policies without perpetuating indefinitely existing social
divisions. While there is no guarantee that local communities will al-
ways invariably resolve smoothly whatever internal differences obtain,
it is clear that bureaucratic imposition is no alternative — as can be
seen from the resurfacing in the former USSR and in Eastern Europe
of all the conflicts and internal divisions that communist governments
repressed for decades by authoritarian decrees.
At any rate, notwithstanding the fact diat the confusion of most re-
cent discussions of the resurgence of populism have tended to sub-
stantiate standard liberal claims that it is die politically impotent ex-
pression of nativist resentment — a kind of anti-modernist reaction
likely to wither in any serious confrontation with other more rational
political positions — a federal, anti-bureaucratic populism may be on
38 PAUL PICCONE
more solid theoretical ground than standard liberal ideology predi-

cated on the obsolete nation-state. As such, it presents a serious chal-
lenge to welfare state liberalism and, in an international context char-
acterized by the dissolution of hitherto stable nations such as the
USSR, Yugoslavia and even Canada, warrants careful scrutiny. Even
West European nations, paradigms of national stability, are increasing-
ly confronting the same sort of political crisis typical of all nation-
states. The specter of populism haunts Western as much as Eastern
Europe. While it is too early to prognosticate about possible develop-
ments, it is possible to examine one recent and still barely noticed po-
litical phenomenon which not only embodies the characteristics of a
new federal populism but has also been registering spectacular elector-
al successes: die Lombard League in Northern Italy.
The Lombard League's New Federal Populism

Explicitly opposed to Italy as a unitary nation-state, the Lombard
League rejects the traditional post-Enlightenment plotting of the polit-
ical spectrum along Left-Right axes, calls for the break-up of the coun-
try into three more viable sub-units, the abolition of existing party pol-
itics, the decentralization of the parties' de facto power base — die wel-
fare state, and die constitution of new local nomoi. Unlike earlier
populist movements originating in socially and economically back-
ward regions such as the US South or the Russian countryside, and ap-
pealing to die least educated and most economically disadvantaged
sectors of die population, die Lombard League has its roots in die
most prosperous and industrially advanced part of Italy, draws most of
its support from a rapidly growing, well-educated, middle-class and
youdiful constituency, and is being increasingly emulated by parallel
political formations diroughout the country. Aldiough practically
unknown outside Italy and generally dismissed by traditional parties
and politicians as a temporary aberration, die one serious study of it so
far has unambiguously concluded diat not only is die Lombard League
here to stay, but it is likely to grow significandy in the foreseable future.36
Founded in 1982, die Lombard League takes its name from die op-
position to Roman imperialism by the Gallic people inhabiting Lom-
bardy at die time of Hannibal's invasion of Italy. Finally vanquished
36. Renato Mannheimer, ed., La Lega Lombarda (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991), p. 194.
Since the publication of this work, the League registered spectacular electoral successes in
the fall 1991 local elections to the point of gaining a relative majority over all other traditio-
nal political parties in Brescia, probably Italy's most industrialized and prosperous city.
around 186 B.C. by the Romans, who eventually proceeded to integ-

rate and assimilate the whole region into the flourishing Roman Em-
pire under Julius Ceasar, the League was briefly reconstituted to fight
against Frederick II in 1237, at which time it was once again defeated.
In both instances the League stood for the kind of local autonomy that
has been historically associated with prosperity and well-being, which
declined whenever the region was forcibly subjugated by broader po-
litical units. It is this appeal to territorial autonomy that also character-
izes the present League and defines the corrupt, wasteful and generally
inept Rome-based Italian central government as its primary enemy.37
According to Renato Mannheimer, one of the main factors contribut-
ing significandy to the League's formation has to do widi the collapse
of the Catholic and Communist sub-cultures which had dominated Ital-
ian politics since WWII,38 and the growing irrelevance of traditional
Left/Right divisions.
Although Catholicism remains strong at a subjective, idiosyncratic
level, die growing secularization of society at large has clearly taken its
toll. After the overwhelmingly onesided outcome of the divorce refer-
endum it became obvious that official Catholic values and policies no
longer have much direct political bearing on a still largely Catholic
population and that the Christian Democratic Party was simply anodi-
er center party concerned primarily widi its own political clientele and
its actual power base, die bureaucratic apparatus. An even worse fate
befell communist ideology after die failure of Eurocommunism and
die much heralded "historical compromise" whereby die Communist
Party formally accepted die liberal rules of the game, rejected outright
any residual notion of die dictatorship of die proletariat and, for all
practical purposes, became just anodier run-of-die-mill social-demo-
cratic party. Notwidistanding notorious ambiguities about its relation
to parliamentary democracy, the Italian Communist Party had always
dirived on die pretense mat it provided a qualitative alternative to
"bourgeois" politics. After the formal break with Moscow, well before
die beginning of perestroika and in die wake of Soviet intervention in Af-
ghanistan, die Party gradually lost its historically distinct space widiin
37. Ibid., p. 32. This negative evaluation of the performance of the Italian central
government is by no means limited to the League, but is widespread. For a similar
analysis from a New Class perspective concerned widi merely rationalizing the existing
system by substituting a decentralized "welfare society" for die present "welfare
state," see Ugo Ascoli, "Dopo il Welfare State aH'taliana," in Problemi del Socialismo, No.
5 (Rome: Francoangeli, 1992), pp. 157-175.
38. Mannheimer, op. cit. pp. 20-21.
40 PAUL PIC CONE
the Italian political spectrum and simply came to duplicate other social-
democratic parties which by that time had themselves become purely
technocratic organizations with no particular ideological predilections.
At that point the Party found itself without whatever attraction it may
once have had bodi for that more idealistic part of its electorate still long-
ing for radical changes and for its more traditional working class sectors
for which sovietization remained irreversibly associated with moderniza-
tion, equality and social justice. Thus it is no accident mat widi die begin-
ning of die disintegration of die Soviet Union die Party has formally
changed its name and split into two slowly dwindling splinter groups
representing respectively diese two different traditional constituencies.
Coming at a time of increasing political corruption, criminality and
normlessness — and actually closely associated widi diese phenomena
— die collapse of die Cadiolic and Communist sub-cultures left a vac-
uum in die national consciousness which die Lombard League has
rushed to fill by appealing to a new collective identity39 predicated on
regional nomoi. It is its focus on territorial identity and, consequendy,
on die need to re-federalize a national structure diat is slowly losing
whatever original identity it may have once had diat sharply distin-
guishes the League from odier earlier traditional populist formations.
This is the result bodi of political choices as well as of practical
necessities. Since during die past five centuries Lombardy has been
under successive Spanish, French and Austrian domination, and more
recendy has experienced considerable immigration, even if it wanted
to die League could not possibly have been able to constitute itself
around edinic, linguistic or religious criteria.40 Consequently, aldiough
39. Ibid., p. 32.

40. Cf. Gianfranco Pasquino, "Una Lega Contro i Partiti," in Rivista dei Libri (May
1991), pp. 32-35. Although early on there were some attempts to focus on local dia-
lects and anti-Southern sentiments as the League's defining traits, they were readily
dropped in the League's first formal Congress in 1989 in favor of a broadening of the
criteria of who constitutes the people to include all of the region's residents. Cf.
Roberto Biorcio, "La Lega Come Attore Politico: Dal Federalismo al Populismo Re-
gionalista," in Mannheimer, op. cit., pp. 68 and 81. It is obvious why such multicultural
traits could not possibly work. Consider Milan, Lombardy's capital: diere, until very
recendy, the residual aristocracy could be found speaking primarily French, the local
working class conversing mostly in Milanese dialect, and only the middle class trans-
acting in a more or less standard Italian. As Biorcio points out, along with all other re-
gions today Lombardy cannot claim any distinct cultural particularity: "The existence
of an autonomous Lombard culture based on a specific language and on specific tradi-
tions . . . is presently hard to find. The survival of ancient local traditions is . . . restricted
to a very limited area." Ibid., p. 68. It is precisely this heterogeneity of traditions and cul-
tures that prevents the League from simply attempting to recycle some real or imagined
exhibiting all the typical characteristics of classical populist movements,41

the League differs from previous versions in its emphasis on federalism
and the reconstruction of viable communities locally and independently
of any central authority such as the welfare state. As such, this federal
populism avoids most of the pitfalls which historically prevented
earlier manifestations of this phenomenon from translating into any-
thing more than scattered and relatively impotent protest movements.
Within a genuine federation the weight of the whole can be brought to
bear on the constituting parts only under exceptional, well-defined con-
ditions, thus preventing the homogenizing center from obliterating
the particularity of the heterogeneous parts. To the extent that, in mak-
ing their case, nationalist versions of populism, whether the New Right
variety or the Azerbaijani, tend to universalize their particularity, they
are usually defeated either by a center presenting itself as the protector
of pluralism or by other hegemonic groups.
The Lombard League rejects outright the obsolete concept of the
nation-state in favor of an integral federalism predicated on the con-
stitution of new nomoi and the reconstitution of local communities as
the social space within which to practice participatory democracy.
Thus the main totalizing enemy is explicitly identified as the Roman
bureaucracy and die central government and, according to Paolo
Natale, voters' identification with the League is a function of "the lived
solidarity of the subjects as an instrument to reactivate group identity
and social recognition."42 This vindication of grass-roots social
communities as die constitutive units of a new federal populism con-
fronts die problem of alienation and encourages reintegration of ten-
dentially abstract individuals within organic communities conducive to
responsible citizenship and a healdiy social life. But in order to do so it
must sharply define territoriality as decisive for the new populist iden-
tity. Since all political formations are constituted not only by what diey
include but, even more importantly, by what they exclude, die
League's regional identity lends itself to standard misunderstandings.
From the viewpoint of the predominant liberal conventional wisdom
predicated on a society of abstract individuals externally aggregated
vision of the past and commits it to the creation and development of new nomoi able to
translate new needs and modes of interaction into new forms of social consciousness in a
context where the Italian welfare state, the last vestige of an obsolete, residual 19th
century nation-state, has shown itself clearly incapable of carrying out such a task.
41. Biorcio, op. cit., p. 71.
42. Paolo Natale, "Lega Lombarda e Insediamento Territoriale: Un'Analisi Ecolo-
gica," in Mannheimer, op. cit., pp. 118ff.
42 PAUL PIC CONE
by a technocratic state, it is all too easy to misinterpret the League's

exclusionary criteria predicated on territoriality as merely a recycling
of nationalism, with all the racist, xenophobic connotations historically
attached with such a notion — especially when all of Western Europe
is becoming inundated with Third World or East European immigrants.
It is not surprising, therefore, that from the very beginning the Lom-
bard League has been accused of racism and associated with Le Pen's
National Front in France,43 even though the Italian political situation is
dearly not comparable to the French and careful voter surveys have
shown diat the League's territorial rooting is by no means the flip side
of any hostility towards immigrants and other outsiders.44 In fact,
many of the League's members are themselves Southern Italian immi-
grants who have managed to establish solid roots in the region45 To the
extent that one of the League's main goals is die constitution of new
nomoi, which at this point exist only as what Ernst Bloch would have
called "the not yet," i.e., in vague communitarian longings, rough
43. Cf. Giorgio Bocca, La Disunita d'ltalia (Milan: Garzanti, 1990); and Luciano
Balbo and Ludovico Marconi, / Razzismi Impossibiii (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1990). For a par-
ticularly superficial and misinformed account, see Marco Martiniello and Paul Kazim,
"Italy: Two Perspectives. Racism in Paradise?" in Race & Class (January-March 1991), Vol.
32, No. 3, pp. 79-89. Kazim identifies the League as "an extreme right-wing group advo-
cating separatism for the rich Lombardy region . . . and fanning popular resentment
against immigrants." As evidence both Martiniello and Kazim provide a conspiratorial
account of one of several incidents of the police break-up of a make-shift encampment of
illegal jobless immigrants, allegedly to appease the extreme Right, i.e., the League. The
clear implication is that these immigrants are essential to the hidden economy, but the
racist local population is unwilling to treat them fairly and pay them a living wage. What
actually happens is that illegal immigrants from disintegrating, poor Third World
countries do make their way to industrial areas with occasional labor shortages in the
more manual occupations, and local, usually social-democratic, authorities not only al-
low immigrants to come in but also to set up make-shift encampments with inhuman liv-
ing conditions. The severe social problems and overload of already inadequate existing
services these encampments create are directly felt by the local people, but generally ig-
nored by die normally inept and unresponsive central government and local authorities.
Most of the time die only way local residents can attract die authorities' attention and
contain die various health and odier social problems by providing the people in die en-
campments widi minimal help is dirough acts of civil disobedience which are imme-
diately perceived as racist. While some of the people involved may, in fact, be racist, by
and large most League supporters want only a clear governmental policy regulating im-
migration so that those immigrants who do come are provided widi at least minimal sup-
port. For a much more balanced analysis of the League which discusses most of these is-
sues without distorting its program or its oudook, see Dwayne Woods, "Les Ligues
Regionales en Italie," forthcoming in Revue Fran/pise de Science Politique.
44. Biorcio, who has specifically studied diis question dirough extensive surveys of
die Lombard League's constituency, has concluded that "die correlation of localism
with anti-Southern feelings is statistically insignificant." Ibid., pp. 60-61.
45. Natale, op. tit., p. 119.
territorial contours and, negatively, in opposition to the central

bureaucratic apparatus, the League's identity is likely to remain associ-
ated with its immediately visible exclusionary criteria and dierefore
vulnerable to charges of racism and ethnocentrism — especially from
the traditional Left.
This adamant opposition from the traditional Left explains why die
League has been and will continue to be seen as part of the Right by
diose whose political myopia is rapidly approaching blindness. Recent
voter surveys show mat the League's latest successes have been mostly at
die expense of Center and Left-Center parties such as the Socialist,
Social Democrats and die Christian Democrats.46 Much less of an inroad
has been made widiin the more traditional Left associated widi die ruins
of die former Communist Party. The reasons for diis are not difficult to
locate. Still committed to the central plan as die only way to rationalize
and modernize die anarchy of capitalist production, and to a paternalis-
tic redistributive bureaucratic apparatus as die only way to ensure social
justice, die traditional Left can only shrink in horror on hearing about
die League's program of practically demolishing die central government
and decentralizing all social functions. Aldiough die League consciously
locates itself beyond any Left/Right division, its animating spirit is rooted
both in a much older but largely forgotten Left anarchist tradition, as
well as in die most advanced "post-Fordist" industrial practices which,
not by accident, are very congenial to older anarchist forms of economic
organization dating back to Proudhon. To a great extent, die unprece-
dented prosperity of Northern Italian regions today is largely a function
of die gradual post-Fordization of production diat has been underway
over the past two decades. In many respects, the project of political
federalization corresponds to a parallel project of industrial federaliza-
tion which has already been implemented in some advanced sectors of
Central Europe for some time.47 Widiin such a context of industrial ra-
tionalization and decentralization, die old Left vision of huge factories
widi diousands of workers producing standardized products is definitely
an anachronism.
The "transversal" character of die League can best be seen in the
kind of people who vote for it. Aldiough diey come from practically
46. Ibid., p. 107. Cf. also Umberto Brindani's interview with Umberto Bossi, the
League's leader, "Macche Piccone. Bulldozer!" in Panorama (December 8, 1991), p. 45.
47. This is roughly what is happening within large multinational corporations
such as IBM, which are slowly coming to realize how the myth of centralization and
bureaucratization threatens to drive them into bankruptcy.
44 PAUL PICCONE
every strata of society, they are generally younger than the average voter,
middle-class, well-educated, and entrepreneurial in orientation.48 Far
from being on the margins of society or the victims of social disloca-
tions, the League membership has been described as an integral part
(lo zoccolo duro) of the system.49 When the League electorate is broken
down according to classes, the only significant difference that could be
found was that while the working class tended to emphasize regiona-
lism as the League's most important feature, the better educated mid-
dle class focused instead on anti-bureaucratic opposition.50 In a study
of the large number of fringe sympadiizers likely to vote for the League
in future elections, Ilvio Diamanti came up with roughly the same re-
sults, with an "efficientist" wing of young people, middle class, "post-
materialist," anti-party and anti-bureaucratic, and a "particularist"
wing composed of older, working class, Catholic voters coming usually
from right-wing parties.51
Since the Leagues are a political response to structural dysfunctions
typical of all Italian regions and, more broadly but to a lesser extent, of
all Western European regions, what all this means is die likelihood of the
growth of similar regional Leagues throughout Italy and Europe in the
immediate future. As comparable problems of bureaucratic inefficiency,
unresponsiveness, waste, corruption and, most importantly, axiological
deficits resulting from die vacuity of liberal democracy's Enlightenment
universalism intensify, die kind of federal populism being developed by
die Lombard League may well become die model for similar new politi-
cal formations.
The paradox today is that while the disintegration of liberalism and
die welfare state is triggering grass-roots phenomena such as the Lom-
bard League in Northern Italy and corresponding populist responses
elsewhere, Western Europe is attempting to unify along precisely the
kind of standard welfare state parameters which are proving to be in-
creasingly bankrupt, as they are predicated on die primacy of member
nations and central bureaucratic authority. The question today is
whedier a new federal populism will proliferate fast enough to redirea
die project of West European unification along decentralized federal
lines and prevent Europe from reinventing Washington.
48. Renato Mannheimer, "Chi Vota per la Lega?" in Mannheimer, op. cit., pp.
130-134.
49. Biorcio, op. cit., p. 34.
50. Mannheimer, op. cit., pp. 1476-147.
51. Ilvio Diamanti, "Una Tipologia dei Simpatizzanti della Lega," in Mannheimer
ed., op. cit., pp. 178-182.

The Crisis of Liberalism and The Emergence of Federal Populism

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The Crisis of Liberalism and The Emergence of Federal Populism

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The Crisis of Liberalism

and the Emergence of Federal Populism

The bankruptcy of liberalism has been forecast so often that a sense

of liberalism is so confused and subject to such a variety of contradic-

populist political formations such as the Lombard League in Northern

The Unraveling of the liberal Consensus

cost of the post-WWII global confrontation with an expansionist "tota-

stability, no such promise would be minimally credible today, after the

As Christopher Lasch has shown, the corollary of this process of

This opposition is not simply the expression of a shifting and generally

Sociology to the Rescue

theory of infinite progress (predicated on the inevitability of the growth

5. The crisis of liberal democracy presupposes, as part of its ideological self-mis-

strategies of colonization but also provides no guarantees that the end

scientistic mystifications these traditional remnants neither need nor

rules out sociological intervention, he readily substitutes "society" —

13. Ibid., p. 38.

of "society" before it became souped up by the qualifier "civil": an

15. Habermas, op. at., p. 66.

maintained only by increasing legislation to substitute for disintegrat-

The Rise of the New Populism

To the extent that this project of Americanization was primarily a

elite's mobilization of "workers and poor peasants" to annihilate the

and begun to re-examine the relevant documents and events to draw

power relations: rendering government more "responsive" and "ac-

Multiculturalism as Bureaucratic Populism

as determining all others. Such a reading was encouraged by Marx

forgetting the ineradicable cultural constitution of his social individual,

to create a market of homogeneous consumers for a state-regulated

social reorganization.34 The advanced disintegration of residual nomoi

bureaucratic phenomenon extending and intensifying radier dian con-

35. Cf. "Special Section on Affirmative Action in Academia" in Telos 86 (Winter

Rather than reviving or inventing devisive idyllic visions of ethnic, gen-

more solid theoretical ground than standard liberal ideology predi-

The Lombard League's New Federal Populism

around 186 B.C. by the Romans, who eventually proceeded to integ-

39. Ibid., p. 32.

exhibiting all the typical characteristics of classical populist movements,41

by a technocratic state, it is all too easy to misinterpret the League's

territorial contours and, negatively, in opposition to the central

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