Populism as Adaptation: Critical Notes on Ernesto Laclau’s Interpretation of the Northern League

In On Populist Reason (2005), Ernesto Laclau revisits in a profoundly original way the philosophical meaning of the notion of populism. The root of Laclau‘s formulation is the following: an idea of people as a contingent yet formally repetitive political construction. Against every temptation of sociological descriptivism, populism represents a performative act of nomination which is at the very same time necessary and yet unable to fully saturate the ontological split that marks the social field. Thus, in Laclau‘s view the notion of populism perfectly overlaps the political field: there is no politics other than populist politics. The present paper critically reviews Laclau’s discussion of Italian populist formations presented in Chapter 7 of his work, in particular his thesis about the deep continuity between the “national task” claimed by the Italian Communist Party under Italy’s First Republic and the creation of a fictitious country (“Padania”) by the Northern League in the 1990s. The main argument is the following: although such a philosophical continuity might help in analysing certain aspects of the Northern League, it is very problematic in historical terms and ultimately fails to assess the crucial link between processes of local governance in Northern Italy and transnational circuits of valorization as fostered by global neoliberal networks.