General Will and the People in Cas Mudde's Work: Populist Ideology as a Democratic Form of Representation

Cas Mudde has established himself as one of the most important theorists of populism in the last two decades. His conceptual approach centered on the idea of populism as a thin-centered ideology, which has its essence in the antagonism between ‘pure people’ and ‘corrupt elite’. Still according to this ideological definition, politics in the populist logic would be responsible for faithfully representing the volonté Générale of the people and its functioning would depend fundamentally on the construction of a notion of a homogeneous people. The aim of this paper is to explore this antagonistic dichotomy and carry out a theoretical deepening of the idea of volonté Générale proposed by Cas Mudde. Our initial hypothesis is that both antagonism and the general will, as characterized by Mudde, are constituent parts not only of populist regimes or actors, but of contemporary democracy itself. We believe that this simplification of some of the structural aporias of representative democracy is more of a rule than an exception in today's political scenario. In this scenario, it seems increasingly clear that the idea of a ‘pure people’ is, in fact, a political construct, skillfully managed by experienced actors who look to the symbolic representation of the general will as their way of acting and winning elections. Confirmation of this hypothesis will be pursued on two fronts: On the first, we will analyze the texts written by Cas Mudde between 1995 and 2017, in particular In the Name of the Peasantry, the Proletariat, and the People (2001), The Populist Zeitgeist (2004) and Voices of the Peoples: Populism in Europe and Latin America Compared (2011 - co-authored with Kaltwasser). In the second, we will carry out a broader analysis of case studies (USA, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, among others), seeking to confirm the hypothesis that both the construction of the idea of a ‘pure people’ and the mobilization of politics as volonté Générale are more of a rule than an exception in the contemporary political scene. The case studies will be analyzed based on pre-selected academic articles that focus on the countries mentioned above and that propose to think about specific issues related to the general will and the discursive construction of the people.