2. The Limits of Populism as Causal Explanation

There were of course predecessors. Aníbal Quijano (1998) traces the historical origins of the term populism to the nineteenth century Populist party in the United States, a predominantly agrarian organization and movement that fought fluctuations in crop prices, and the Russian narodniki of the nineteenth century. In the US, ‘populism’ was conceptually elaborated as early as 1894 by Thorstein Veblen (1894) to describe the politics of “an intellectually undisciplined populace” susceptible to demagogic manipulation (459). The narodniki, a peasant movement of the 1860s and 1870s that briefly drew the loyalties of a young Leon Trotsky, responded to Russia’s tortured transition from feudal society to more fully consolidated capitalist logics of ownership and production. Knowledgeable of and known to socialist and anarchist thought of the day, the narodniki conceived of the peasantry as a truly revolutionary class, capable of propelling Russia to socialism without passing through the ‘stages’ of economic and political development (Quijano 1998: 174–176). These nineteenth century populisms illustrate two important ways in which the term has always been loaded with normative meaning, long before its incorporation into conceptual and theoretical arsenals of contemporary social sciences. In Veblen’s case, populism betrays a fear of the unwashed masses, ‘the people’—a rather common preoccupation of his age. Just one year later (and first translated into English in 1896), Gustave Le Bon’s (2002) highly influential The Crowd was published in Paris, a study that articulated the growing anxieties and preoccupations of emerging ‘mass psychology.’ Le Bon’s basic thesis, that when combined in a mass, individuals (no matter how critical, learned, or dispassionate they may be in isolation) de-evolve from civilization to barbarism, is also seen in Veblen’s concern of the two-sided deterioration of the US polity expressed in his entry on populism. This aspect—fear or distrust of the (often newly enfranchised or mobilized) masses, without the mediating, mitigating, and disciplining power of established institutions—informs most subsequent and contemporary theorizations of populism in Latin American politics.

For more discussion of neopopulism in Latin America, see: Weyland (1996, 2003), Knight (1998), and Ellner (2002).

For more on Carlos Andrés Pérez and neoliberalization in Venezuela, see the following chapter.