Nadia Urbinati on populism, representation, and rhetoric: some critical remarks

This paper examines Urbinati’s theory of populism with the aim of bringing to the fore a lacuna in such theory. The lacuna concerns her appreciation of the role of rhetoric in populism and more in general in democracy. If Urbinati’s general understanding of politics recognizes an important role to rhetoric, such recognition is not accompanied by a systematic analysis of what rhetoric is and how it operates. The effects of such deficiency can be appreciated in her theory of populism. On the one hand, her critical account of populism seems to hinge significantly on the kind of rhetoric and more generally of style it adopts, on the other the question of what precisely characterizes such rhetoric and style is left mostly unaddressed. The result is that Urbinati’s account of populism loses some explanatory power, with regards both to the nature of populism and the responses to it