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The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, January 14, 2019

Populist – and proud of it

Since 2011, I’ve blogged about populism four or five times – mainly in a neutral definitional way. But a combination last week of a couple of articles in The Guardian and Open Democracy with my reading of R Eatwell and M Goodwin’s recent little Pelican book National Populism – the revolt against liberal democracy; (2017) got me into surfing mode on the subject and to some disturbing thoughts……

Let me start with how I saw things at the end of a couple of days
- Talk of “populism” surfaces whenever things seem to be slipping from the control of “ruling elites”
Such talk has occurred every 30 years or so in the past 150 years – the 1880s in the US and Russia; the 1930s in Europe and Latin America; the late 1960s globally; the late 1990s in Europe 
- as a professional and intellectual discipline, Political Science has adopted a rather disdainful view of democracy and a “scientist” approach to its methodology - marginalising those few academics with serious interests in notions of the “public good” being embedded in government programmes
The US tradition of populism has never died - whereas the European tradition is sceptical at best (with the exception of the French whose celebration of revolt seems part of their DNA)
But the younger contemporary American academics seem to have lost their sense of history and have produced rather aggressive celebrations of liberalism (Y Mounk)

The reader should now be warned that the next few paras represent a rather jaundiced take on academia…. As a social “scientist”, I have long had a healthy skepticism about the overconfident claims of particularly economists – and have even been known (as long ago as 2010) to challenge the political scientists for hiding their heads in the sand. Not for nothing is Social Sciences as Sorcery; Stanislaw Andreski (1972) one of my favourite books – and I was delighted to be able to download it in full yesterday……

2008, of course, should have been the death knell for economics since it had succumbed some decades earlier to a highly-simplified and unrealistic model of the economy which was then starkly revealed in all its nakedness…..Steve Keen was one of the first economists to break ranks very publicly way back in 2001 and to set out an alternative - Debunking Economics – the naked emperor dethroned.
This coincided with economics students in Paris objecting to the homogeneity of syllabi and reaching out to others – creating in the next 15 years a movement which has become global
This is a good presentation on the issues (from 2012) and I am now reading an excellent little Penguin book The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins (2017) from their experience of stirring things up on the Manchester University economics programme. The book’s sub-title says it all!
Dani Rodrik is one of the few economists with a global reputation to support them (Ha-Yoon Chang is another) and indeed published an important book recently reviewing the state of economics - Economics Rules – the rights and the wrongs of the dismal science; (2016) which was nicely reviewed here

The Financial Times recently reviewed several other such books - so the situation is not beyond repair but we have to be realistic. Academic economists have invested a lifetime’s reputation and energy in offering the courses they do - and neither can nor will easily offer programmes to satisfy future student demands for relevance and pluralism….. chances are that the next cohort will be more pliable... 

Academic Political Science  may not have quite the same level of pressure to change as in Economics but increasing questions are nonetheless being asked of it about the implications of the populist zeitgeist for the celebration of liberal democracy which masquerades as political science departments of US universities.

So what does all this mean for the present anguishing over populism?
I graduated in the 1960s as a “Labour” populist – although I never expressed it quite like that! I was schooled in the writings of RH Tawney, Ivan Illich, Paolo Freire, Saul Alinsky, Peter Marris and Martin Ryan; and inspired at various times by such distinctive and competing Labourites as Nye Bevan, John Strachey, GDH Cole, Hugh Gaitskell; RHS Crossman, Tony Crosland and John Mackintosh. The result of such a mish-mash was a pragmatic centralist with an anarchist streak…..I was one of the contributors to the famous 1975 Red Paper on Scotland and had sympathies with the alternative economic strategy and the Lucas Plan
And, despite the senior position I had reached in the 80s, I remained committed to ensuring that that the ordinary, decent citizen’s voice and collective efforts were respected and encouraged. I may not have been a Bennite but I respected the man.

I left the UK in late 1990 and therefore never knew New Labour and its insidious contribution to the current cynicism about politics – Neil Kinnock may have been the Labour Leader but John Smith was the solid leader-in-waiting…From 1978-1990 the articles of the maverick Marxism Today journal plotted the various ideas absorbing the British Left during that critical period. Gordon Brown even contributed a piece (in late 1989) which indicated if not populism a strong ideological flavor..

And Jeremy Corbyn is, of course, and always has been an ideologue – not a populist. But the fascinating 2017 British Labour Party Manifesto also has a strong populist streak…It’s a pity that so few of the chattering political and economic classes in Britain have yet been able to produce books which pick up the analysis from the point we had reached 30 years ago before New Labour seduced and traduced the Labour tradition….

Populism Resource


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