Recently, my colleague David Payne and I met up with SITE Zones and professor Sven-Olov Wallenstein to discuss an upcoming anthology on populism that David and I are editing together with Gustav Strandberg. We were speaking about some of the issues concerning the concept of populism and what we can say about the people as a political subject, both today and in relation to its past.
In connection to this discussion, we have also presented eight theses on the people as a category. Here, we have tried to relate the category of the people both to its role within the history of critical thought and its function in what many have termed the contemporary ‘populist moment’ in politics. We are thus trying to tease out some of the historical background to which any idea of a ‘people’ is necessarily tied. The text can be found here.