Can realism save us from populism? Rousseau in the digital age

The Rousseau platform

In 2016, the 5SM launched the Rousseau platform, with which people can ‘participate in change’ and ‘make their voices heard’ (https://sostienirousseau.ilblogdellestelle.it/?o=27). Access to the platform is gained by registering as a member; however, one can also access as a ‘guest’ to explore the website and decide whether to take part.

The platform has both an informative and a participative task. The former consists in providing members with access to a series of documents: ‘Lex Europa’, regarding the laws to be discussed in the European Parliament; ‘Lex Parlamento’, regarding national politics; ‘Lex Regioni’, concerned with governance of the Italian regions; and ‘Lex Iscritti’, regarding the rules to be followed by the members of the Movement. Moreover, the platform offers an e-learning tool, the Rousseau Open Academy, through which both politicians already working in office and citizens can deepen their knowledge of political, economic and legal issues. Further, an application called Sharing allows offices to share documents among representatives of local institutions. Finally, a section called Activism discusses future initiatives of the 5SM and narrates the ‘stories, events and most significative battles’ of the movement (https://vote.rousseau.movimento5stelle.it/about).

The participative aspect of the platform mostly consists in allowing the members to discuss and vote on the proposals suggested by 5SM politicians on different issues (European Parliament, national politics, Italian regions and the movement’s rules). Only members who have been registered for more than six months are allowed to vote. Once a politician has presented a proposal on the platform, members have 60 days to suggest modifications; specifically, they can choose from the following options: ‘modification’, ‘objection’, ‘suggestion’ and even ‘technicality’. After 60 days, the website explains, the politician proposing the law evaluates ‘each and every suggestion’ from the members and, if the suggestions are compatible with the general lines of the proposal, incorporates those modifications into the final draft. However, they do not have any obligation to incorporate each and every suggestion into the final proposal. The platform is also used for fundraising and for delivering materials that supporters of the Movement can use to actively participate in the 5SM’s campaign. Last but not least, the platform is employed for referendums.

The broader promise of the platform is to enhance direct democracy through the tools offered by digitalisation: ‘Rousseau’s world is full of initiatives and projects, which promote digital citizenship, innovation and the role of the Internet as a tool to create new models of active participation, collective intelligence and direct democracy’ (MoVimento 5 Stelle, n.d.b).

Populism as a thin ideology

‘Ideologies’, Stanley claims, ‘are interpretative frameworks that emerge as a result of the practice of putting ideas to work in language as concepts’ (Stanley, 2008: 98). They are ‘logically and culturally elaborated frameworks of interpretations’ that ‘provide compelling, convincing and heuristically useful organisations of interpretative possibilities’ (Stanley, 2008: 99). As such, they are necessary for interpreting the political world in which we act. Stanley follows Colin Hay in claiming that actors need to make sense of the political world in which they find themselves, and having ideas coincides indeed with interpreting that world (Hay, 2002: 209). ⁵

Importantly, ideologies per se are morally neutral elements of the political realm – that is, they do not necessarily represent distortive or manipulative practices: ⁶

Ideologies may indeed be distorting and harmful, but they do not have to be so by definition. Rather, they are human and social products that bind together views of the world … and enable collective action in furthering or impeding the goals of a society. (Freeden, 2006: 14)

In brief, populism is immersed in the political domain, which, in turn, is permeated by ideology. Having clarified that ideology is not necessarily distorting or manipulative, we still need to clarify under which conditions morally neutral ideologies turn into distortive ones. Ricoeur points out that, on the one hand, ideologies are necessary to legitimise political authority, as they ‘bridge the tension … between the claim to legitimacy made by the authority and the belief in legitimacy offered by the citizenry’ (Ricoeur, 1986: 13). In this sense, they have an integrative role because they provide ‘the needed authoritative concepts that make it meaningful’ (Ricoeur, 1986: 12). On the other hand, they might turn into justifying mere domination: ‘Ideology moves beyond mere integration to distortion and pathology as it tries to bridge the tension between authority and domination’ (Ricoeur, 1986: 14). ⁷ Within the context of a broader analysis of political legitimacy, Geuss similarly differentiates between ideology in a positive and in a pejorative sense. A positive ideology ‘enables agents effectively to satisfy some of their needs and desires’ (Geuss, 1981: 23), yet not all the desires and needs qualify as grounding positive ideology: ‘First, there must be some restrictions on the kinds of wants, desires, and interests a positive ideology is to satisfy … . Then there must also be some restrictions on the way in which the needs and desires of the group are satisfied’ (Geuss, 1981). In contrast, ideology in a pejorative sense ‘is “(ideological) delusion” or “(ideologically) false consciousness”’ (Geuss, 1981: 12), which can be false in virtue of some ‘epistemic properties’, ‘functional properties’ or ‘genetic properties’ (Geuss, 1981: 13). In sum, distortive ideologies are ones that deliver distortive images of the political by leaning on mechanisms of delusion and false consciousness.

That said, recall that populism is defined as a ‘thin’, as opposed to a ‘full’, ideology. A full ideology, Freeden argues, ‘will need to provide a reasonably broad, if not comprehensive, range of answers to the political questions that societies generate’ (Freeden, 1998: 750). In contrast, ‘a thin-centred ideology is one that arbitrarily severs itself from wider ideational contexts, by the deliberate removal and replacement of concepts … . A thin-centred ideology is hence limited in ideational ambitions and scope’ (Freeden, 1998: 750). Accordingly, populism is a thin ideology because, first, it lacks any ‘programmatic centre of gravity’ and rather emerges ‘empirically and contingently’ (Stanley, 2008: 99–100), and second, it is able to ‘cohabit with other, more comprehensive, ideologies’ (Stanley, 2008: 100). After all, populist movements are usually protest movements (Taggart, 2002: 74) and are ‘always much clearer about what they are against than what they are for’ (Taggart, 2002: 72). Consistent with this characterisation, the 5SM emerged as a movement of protest against the spread of corruption, waste of resources and clientelism that have characterised Italian politics for many years. After Mani pulite in 1992, a trial that resulted in the removal of many politicians from their offices, the spread of corruption became public knowledge. Moreover, the movement recently governed with a right-wing party, Lega, that has a strong ideological commitment to some political plans, especially with regard to immigration, that are far from the original ideological core of the 5SM.

Populist traits

I now focus on some characteristic traits of populism as a political practice. A first trait is the redefinition of the political and of the people. Note that such redefinition is possible because of the ideological nature of the ‘political’ (Stanley, 2008: 98). Stanley rightly points out that populists subscribe to the Schmittean category of friend and enemy (Stanley, 2008: 103). ⁸ Antagonism characterises the populist definition of politics as the battlefield on which two distinct groups – elites and people – face each other. However, populists do not subsume the Schmittean logic in a neutral way – that is, as a normatively neutral explanation of what politics is. Rather, they claim that politics is antagonistic because of elites’ and politicians’ corruption and self-interest, which trumps people’s needs and desires. As such, politics should be redeemed, and populists present themselves as the saviours apt to do so. Consistently, the 5SM, especially at the dawn of its political experience, politicised any differences between persons in terms of education, class, welfare and social and cultural background. For example, experts are viewed with suspicion because they are part of the so-called ‘elite’, as a group distinct from, and opposed to, ‘ordinary people’.

Relatedly, the redefinition of the idea of ‘the people’ usually results from the ‘contrast with the power-holders’ (Canovan, 2004: 249). ⁹ It can vary according to three lines – namely, the united people, our people and the ordinary people. The united people refers to the nation or the country, as opposed to ‘parties and factions that divide it’ (Canovan, 1999: 5). Our people refers to ‘ethnic kith and kin’, and, in contrast to the ‘integrative’ character of the previous notion, this one is ‘divisive, distinguishing our people from those who do not belong—alien immigrants, for example’ (Canovan, 1999: 5). Finally, the ordinary people refers to the common people, as opposed to ‘the privileged, highly educated, cosmopolitan elite’ (Canovan, 1999: 5). This last conception of the people often led the Movement to conceive of them ‘as the underdog’ (Stanley, 2008: 105), but also led to ‘celebrating them as the people’ (Stanley, 2008: 105). As a result, the people become exemplary of authenticity: they embody those moral qualities that are lost in the political practice.

Importantly, Müller suggests, ‘populism is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified … people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior’ (Müller, 2017: 19–20). For instance, the 5SM emphasised what we usually consider private moral qualities, such as honesty, sincerity, transparency and ordinariness, and turned them into politicised qualities, ¹⁰ which are presented as necessary for the functioning of the political order. In this regard, populists are like moralists because they apply the same moral standards both to private relationships and to political ones.

Remarkably, the populist redefinition of the people is inherently antipluralist, as it presents a fictionally homogeneous image of the people. In fact, any internal dissent is sanctioned with the exclusion of the dissenting individuals from the ‘friend’ category and their recategorisation as enemies. In general, populist politics denigrates disagreement as a by-product of the conflict of interests between elites and the people, and, therefore, populists deny the possibility of internal disagreement among the people. Rosanvallon (2008: 265–266) nicely links together these aspects:

Populism claims to resolve the problem of representation by conjuring up an image of a unified homogeneous people … . Populists denounce ‘otherness’ in moral terms (by vilifying the ‘corrupt’ and ‘rotten’), in social terms (by condemning ‘elites’) and in ethnic terms (by attacking ‘foreigners’, ‘immigrants’, ‘minorities’, etc.). By contrast, they celebrate ‘the people’ as unified and pure, undivided so long as outsiders are kept out.

This narrative is complemented by a third element: denigrating professional politicians’ (Canovan, 2004: 242) and elites’ values (Canovan, 1999: 3) as being unrepresentative of people’s needs and perspectives, while also vilifying the media and journalists (Canovan, 2004: 242), accused of lies and truth distortion. Exemplary in this sense is the attack by Alessandro Di Battista, one of the activists of the Movement, against journalists who wrote articles about the alleged crime committed by Virginia Raggi, mayor of Rome and activist of the Movement. In a post on Facebook, Di Battista defined those journalists as ‘prostitutes and mercenaries’. ¹¹

In contrast, populists claim ‘to speak for the forgotten mass of ordinary people’ and ‘to say aloud what the people think, especially if it has been deemed by the elite to be unmentionable’ (Canovan, 2004: 242). The 5SM has frequently insisted on the corruption of politicians and their high wages as examples of persistent inequality and lack of fairness concerning financial incomes. As a consequence, they asked the 5SM’s members of parliament to renounce part of their stipend. In a nutshell, the assumption is that while the ordinary people are able to restore morality in politics, professional politicians instead lead to immoral political practices.

Note that both the rejection of professional politicians and the appeal to the people contribute to spreading both the belief that politics as a profession is to be disparaged and the delusion that—thanks to the removal of professional politicians – a progressive change is possible, in terms of better serving people’s needs and interests and of rehabilitating politics from its immoral drifts.

Finally, populism is characterised by a new political style. Political discourses are often delivered via a ‘colourful and undiplomatic language’ (Canovan, 2004: 242). For the 5SM, it suffices to mention Vaffa Day, ¹² the name of the 5SM’s rallies. Politicians’ language must be simple and understandable for ordinary people, and so must political solutions: ‘Populists claim that all this complexity is a self-serving racket perpetuated by professional politicians, and that the solutions to the problems ordinary people care about are essentially simple’ (Canovan, 1999: 6). Relatedly, populists prefer models of direct democracy and they make great use of referenda (Canovan, 2002: 34, 36). Besides, populists normally refuse to form institutionalised political parties and prefer ordinary people to be in charge in the political arena (Canovan, 1999: 6; Taggart, 2002: 69): ‘Populist politics … has the revivalist flavour of a movement, powered by the enthusiasm that draws normally unpolitical people into the political arena’ (Canovan, 1999: 6). Furthermore, populist movements are best suited to be the government’s opposition and generally inspired by a charismatic leader (Canovan, 1999: 6; Taggart, 2002: 67).

Anti-moralism, anti-utopianism and sensitivity to the context

In this section, I argue that realists’ opposition to moralism – complemented by their anti-utopianism and sensitivity to the political context – helps unveil the distortions included in the populist redefinition of the political and of the people. Specifically, anti-moralism contrasts with the populists’ Manichaean picture of politics and with their rejection of the role of experts in politics.

Moralism is the idea that political philosophy is applied ethics (Williams, 2007: 1–17). Politics, realists argue, is a special field of human experience that is characterised by specific facts (e.g. coercion and conflict) and therefore should be regulated by a distinctive normativity. ¹³ Conflict, realists claim, cannot be eliminated because it is inherent to the very definition, and reality, of politics; as a result, ‘realists never lose sight of the possibility of regress as well as progress’ (Galston, 2010: 394).

Realists have labelled this cluster of ideas with expressions borrowed from the debate on practice dependence such as ‘priority of politics over morality’ (Sangiovanni, 2008), or they have described politics as an ‘autonomous sphere’ (Galston, 2010; Scheuerman, 2018; Williams, 2007). Softer versions of the autonomy of the political claim that disagreement is a persistent element of politics. Jeremy Waldron’s distinction between ‘circumstances of justice’ and ‘circumstances of politics’ is an example in this sense (Waldron, 1999).

The autonomy of the political motivates the realists’ rejection of what Williams labelled as ‘moralism’ – that is, the idea that political philosophy is the sphere of applied ethics. Specifically, realists are moved by a double concern. First, a moralistic attitude to politics, realists complain, is based on a descriptively inadequate account of what politics is. That is, it does not take into consideration the ineliminable facts of the political realm (Horton, 2010b: 433). Second, this moralistic attitude risks being normatively irrelevant – that is, unable to provide political orientation in the actual world (Horton, 2010b: 433) – because it is not anchored in the constitutive features of the political order at stake. In contrast to moralism, realists reject the claim that universal moral principles are the ultimate source of political normativity and rather insist that political theory should not be grounded on prepolitical moral commitments (Rossi and Sleat, 2014).

However, this attitude does not entail not providing a normative account of what politics should look like: ‘Rather, appropriate standards of evaluation arise from within politics rather than from an external moral standpoint’ (Galston, 2010: 388). ¹⁴ Political normativity should be anchored in ‘constitutive features’ of the political domain: ‘These features, by virtue of being essential elements of politics, ought also be taken as given or fixed points in any philosophy of politics’ (Sleat, 2016: 254–255). ¹⁵

Importantly, anti-moralism does not imply that moral values do not play any role in politics. This aspect is particularly prominent when realists engage with the notion of legitimacy. Demands for legitimation arise from within politics, realists argue, because ‘there is a crucial difference between political rule and successful domination’(Sleat, 2014: 322); ‘realist theory can draw upon moral considerations when making judgements regarding legitimacy without having to assume that morality has antecedent authority over politics’ (Sleat, 2014: 322). Opposing moralism therefore entails contesting that ‘the limits, nature and content of the political are determined … by whichever moral principles we take to have antecedent authority in this regard’ (Sleat, 2014: 322).

Consistent with that stance, standards of legitimacy must be compatible with the constitutive feature of politics and with the beliefs and attitudes of those subject to political power (Horton, 2012: 141). Some realists have therefore proposed what has been called an ‘internalist account of legitimacy’ (Sagar, 2018), one that decouples legitimacy from the satisfaction of standards that are determined from outside the political sphere. In this vein, Horton warns that ‘a philosophical account of political legitimacy should seek to explain how political legitimacy is possible—not in some world that never has been and probably never could be, but in our world’ (Horton, 2012: 139). ¹⁶

Relatedly, political realism frequently manifests an anti-utopian vocation (Galston, 2010: 387, 394). More precisely, it rejects those forms of political theory that are ‘utopian in the wrong way’ – that is, the way of thinking that conflict can be eliminated in politics (Galston, 2010: 386–387). Instead, elaborating nonutopian political standards requires one to ‘take into account the context’ in which we hope to formulate political prescriptions (Philp, 2010: 468; emphasis added). Such a context is made of ‘preconditions’ such as ‘cultural commitments’, ‘political costs’, ‘economic resources’, ‘aspirations, capabilities and dispositions of actors’ and ‘probability’ of success in bringing about a certain outcome (Philp, 2010: 468). ¹⁷ This approach starts ‘from an account of our existing motivations and our political and social institutions (not from a set of abstract ‘rights’ or from our intuitions)’ (Geuss, 2008: 95). Accordingly, normative standards are constructed by asking ‘whether the point and purpose of a particular set of institutions is genuinely political … and whether those institutions are suited to their purpose’ (Rossi, 2019: 642).

Importantly, the attention to the context is not motivated by feasibility constraints; in fact, ‘realists can make prescriptions that do not take feasibility into account, but other limitations apply: realists’ attention to the complexities of political dynamics cautions against two forms of theoretical hubris, which we may call technocratic and ideological moralism’ (Rossi, 2019: 644). While I return to the latter below, the former is pertinent here. Technocratic moralism carries on a wrong utopianism, as it:

is the attempt to provide a blueprint for the ideal polity … . The main problem with this tendency is that it treats politics as if it were similar to a seminar toom, and so unduly restricts the space for genuinely political contestation. (Rossi, 2019: 644)

In order to elaborate both contextualised political standards and a correct diagnosis of society, political theory needs to be empirically informed – that is, it requires the expertise of scientists who know political institutions enough to assess whether they are performing their tasks. This aspect becomes even more prominent when the analysis of subjects’ beliefs in legitimacy is at stake. I return to this later, but suffice it to say here that the connection between legitimacy and subjects’ beliefs does not imply that any belief in the regime’s legitimacy is per se a marker of the regime’s legitimacy. Establishing the standards for acceptable beliefs requires us to understand ‘how power relations shape beliefs’ and therefore must lean on ‘the best social-scientific accounts of those dynamics’ (Rossi, 2019: 643).

In the following, I argue that anti-moralism, complemented with its anti-utopian vocation and sensitivity to the context, strikes at the populist understanding of politics. First, anti-moralism questions the moralistic picture of politics offered by populists. The populist promise to transform politics into the field of applied ethics is not only misplaced, given the autonomy of the political, but also represents a plan that is irremediably destined to fail because of its descriptive inadequacy and normative irrelevance. Confronting the 5SM’s project to intervene in politics in order to restore authenticity, dignity and morality, political realism recalls that, although moral considerations play a role in the political realm, they are not the sole and ultimate grounds for political action. In addition, the realist warning against ‘spanning the personal and the political’ (Rossi, 2019: 640) – that is, thinking that the moral qualities we appreciate in our private relationships should also guide the assessment of politicians and political actions – reveals the inadequacy of applying standards of dignity in the relationship between rulers and ruled that stem from the notion of dignity we would apply in the personal relationships between individuals.

Second, realists’ insistence on the persistence of conflict and disagreement challenges the populist picture of a homogeneous people, one that does not accommodate the coexistence of radically different and conflicting worldviews. In fact, political realism restores an understanding of politics in which mediation of conflict between different worldviews is inherently part of what it means to be engaged with politics. At this point, moralists could object that, for example, the Rawlsian conception of legitimacy is equipped to do the same job, while also grounding the political order on principles of fairness and equal respect. However, realists warn, an empirically informed approach to political theory – that is, one that is based on a description of what politics is in the first place – tells us that conflict between different worldviews and interests is an ineliminable feature of politics. The establishment of a stable political order, realists recall, should be reached despite this permanent conflict, rather than being considered as a solution to the conflict. By presenting this image of politics, realists denounce the distortions included in the populist picture of the people in two ways: first, they warn against a form of politics that prefers to hide disagreement, rather than engaging with it responsibly at the level of the political practice; second, the persistence of conflict implies as its necessary premise that any picture of the people as homogeneous is necessarily fictional.

Third, the realist anti-utopian attitude, together with its insistence on the need for experts, radically contrasts with the populists’ wrong type of utopianism. Among the several tweets and messages sent by the 5SM’s members, one is particularly striking: ‘They taught us that we must start doing what is necessary, afterwards what is possible, and then we suddenly found ourselves doing the impossible’. ¹⁹ What should be contested is surely not the attempt to prefigure a revolutionary image of politics. The problem is rather that when populist politicians claim that the political realm should be completely subverted to mirror their image of the ideal polity, they instil the belief that such an ideal polity is somewhere within reach. In some sense, the Rousseau platform nurtures such a delusion by being presented as the place where real democracy flourishes. In contrast, the realist warning that ‘the society we should aspire to is, for the time being, a non-place’ (Rossi, 2019: 645; emphasis added) reveals that any proposal that presents itself as the realisation of the ideal polity should be viewed with suspicion. After all, the wrong kind of utopianism not only is often accompanied with delusion and disappointment, but also undermines the possibility of serious reflection about what can and ought to be done in politics. In this sense, while anti-moralism already provides a methodological blueprint for how this reflection should be conducted, Weber’s ethics of responsibility complements it by offering political standards for evaluating politicians and political actions.

The ethic of responsibility

In the following, I argue that the idea of political responsibility as articulated by Max Weber sheds light on the standards by which to discriminate between good and bad politicians, thereby denying that any professional politician is necessarily corrupted and rehabilitating the image of politics as (among other things) the struggle for political power backed up by coercive means. Importantly, Weber’s notion regards political responsibility rather than moral responsibility: indeed, he elaborates the ethic of responsibility, which provides normative orientation to the politician, as opposed to the ethic of conviction, which instead normatively guides the action of the prophet. The two ethics are presented in ‘Politics as a Vocation’, which is devoted to asking which is the threshold between the political and the moral spheres. The context of investigation is the state, intended as ‘the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory’ (Weber, 2004: 33). Relatedly, ‘what “politics” means for us is to strive for a share of power or to influence the distribution of power, whether between states or between the groups of people contained within a state’ (Weber, 2004: 33). So, roughly speaking, politics is about power and coercion: ²⁰ ‘For Weber, the idea of a world free from ‘the rule of man over man’ is utopian. So too is any escape from the struggle for power through a unity of interests within classes, political parties, states or nations’ (Lassman, 2000: 84). ²¹ This aspect also emerges through Weber’s concept of political education, which consists in recognising and accepting the reality of politics (Owen, 2004: xlvi). This is the framework in which Weber asks ‘what is the true relationship between ethics and politics’ (Weber, 2004: 80) ²² and suggests the qualities a politician should possess.

Yet Weber does not aim at a purely descriptive account of what politics looks like: ‘Weber’s purpose is not to legitimate what has come to be called Realpolitik—politics as the pursuit of power for its own sake’ (Owen, 2004: xxxix). ²³ Rather, the distinctiveness of politics requires a specific normativity that rejects ‘the relevance to politics of any deontological ethic’ (Owen, 2004: xli). The normativity regulating politics is rather a contextualist one, as contemporary realists would define it. Indeed, for Weber ‘the standard of evaluation for political conduct cannot be wholly external to the agent’s commitments, purposes and achievements (and their context)’ (Philp, 2007: 83). He introduces this point via a rhetorical question: ‘Can the ethical demands made on politics really be quite indifferent to the fact that politics operates with a highly specific means, namely, power, behind which violence lies concealed?’ (Weber, 2004: 80–81).

Surely, the answer is no, and indeed Weber differentiates between an ethic of conviction and an ethic of responsibility. The former requires one to act in order to realise an ideal through ‘pure’ means – that is, to resist violence in any form. It is, in sum, the ‘unworldly ethic of love’ (Weber, 2004: 82): all that matters is the goodness of the objective and the moral strictness of the means. ²⁴ In contrast, the ethic of responsibility prescribes how to act in situations in which the use of violence is unavoidable – namely, politics. It prescribes being willing to ‘answer for the (foreseeable) consequences of your actions’ (Weber, 2004: 83) and being available to use force in order to achieve your objectives:

No ethic in the world can ignore the fact that in many cases the achievement of ‘good’ ends is inseparable from the use of morally dubious or at least dangerous means and that we cannot escape the possibility or even probability of evil side effects. (Weber, 2004: 84)

However, responsibility is only one of the three qualities the politician must possess. The others are passion and sense of proportion (Weber, 2004: 76). Weber intends passion as ‘commitment to the matter in hand, that is, the passionate dedication to a “cause”’ (Weber, 2004: 76). This quality is consistent with Weber’s openness to a combination of the two ethics at the end of the lecture. He claims:

In truth, politics is an activity of the head but by no means only of the head. In this respect the adherents of an ethics of conviction are right … an ethic of conviction and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute antitheses but are mutually complementary, and only when taken together do they constitute the authentic human being who is capable of having a ‘vocation for politics’. (Weber, 2004: 91–92)

Interestingly, Weber introduces a further distinction: ‘There are two ways of engaging in politics as a vocation. You can either live “for” politics or “from” politics’ (Weber, 2004: 40). The distinction is rooted in the economic dimension: ‘The people who live “from” politics as a profession are those who seek to make it their permanent source of income; those who live “for” politics are those for whom this is not the case’ (Weber, 2004: 40). However, Weber warns, when a state is governed by people who live for politics, it usually means that ‘the leading political strata must be recruited on the basis of a “plutocratic” policy’ (Weber, 2004: 41). Therefore, this type of government would be elitist at least with regard to its source. At the same time, though, Weber suggests that being in need of an economic income might result in a politician that is not fully committed to the cause, although this is not necessarily the case. In other words, the fact of living from politics does not necessarily say something about the quality of the politician (Weber, 2004: 42). Rather, what matters is the reason why a politician searches for power. For Weber, political power cannot be wanted for the sake of power itself, but only as a means: ‘The nature of the cause in whose service the politician strives for power is a matter of belief … . But some belief or other must always be present’ (Weber, 2004: 78). Weber indeed defines the ‘lack of commitment to a cause’ as one of the ‘two kinds of mortal sin in the field of politics’ (Weber, 2004: 77). Importantly, it is clear how Weber’s distinction between good and bad politicians does not overlap with the distinction between professional and nonprofessional politicians. What makes the difference is the vocation of the politician, and not her living either ‘for’ or ‘from’ politics.

In the following, I argue that Weber’s conceptual tools can be used to criticise populists’ vision of politicians. Professional politicians, the 5SM claims, are corrupted and only interested in power rather than in people’s needs. This conviction led the 5SM’s leaders to ask their politicians to return part of their salaries. Weber’s reflection on the two types of engagement with politics sheds light on populists’ insistence on nonprofessional politicians. First, Weber claims, political power is necessary for realising any type of cause in politics, even the noblest one. Viewing negatively politicians’ search for power is inconsistent with the nature of politics, and therefore it is politically dangerous, as it does not allow one to appreciate the difference between the search for power in order to realise a cause and the search for power for its own sake. Eliding this difference precludes the possibility of discriminating between good and bad politicians.

Second, restitution of politicians’ salary, in the 5SM’s intent, aims at discouraging people who see only personal interests in engaging in politics while occupying a political office. It also partly results from the idea that politics is not a profession. After all, most of the 5SM’s representatives and politicians are chosen from among members of civil society. Paradoxically, the 5SM’s representatives distrust the politicians who live for politics, as their involvement would result in elitist politics. However, they are also suspicious of politicians who live from politics, as the reduction of the salary demonstrates. The 5SM’s image of the politician is a person whose job is to collect people’s preferences and needs and to find a solution by employing the government’s resources. However, even this vision is contradictory because, as Weber highlights, access to the government’s resources is gained through the struggle for power – that is, through participating in a campaign in order to win an election. In a slogan, populists search for political power while denigrating political power in the first place. In the elections in March 2018, the 5SM became the dominant party in Italy, but the movement did not receive enough votes to govern without allying with another party. The agreement to form a government with Lega was a response to the dynamics of power and contradicts the 5SM’s narrative that the search for power is to be denigrated in the first place.

Finally, Weber’s reflection on the inevitable use of coercion in politics in order to realise moral and political ends sheds light on the unpolitical nature of the 5SM. Recall that for Weber, coercion is the ultimate means of politics and, as such, its use cannot be eliminated from the set of political options. While this implies neither that coercion needs to be used in each and every political situation nor that the use of coercion is always justified, it does imply that the use of coercion is required in order to realise political goods that cannot be reached in alternative ways. In this sense, the 5SM’s refusal to coercively implement rules demonstrates its unpolitical conception of politics.

An example is the antivaccination movement in Italy. The previous minister of health promulgated a law according to which children who lack mandatory vaccinations cannot attend school. The 5SM first made the rule laxer and, ultimately, fully withdrew it. This is an interesting case because the 5SM’s members have not (officially at least) denied the benefits of nation-wide vaccination and have instead repeatedly proclaimed the necessity of it for the sake of children’s security. However, despite considering vaccination a political ‘good’, they refuse to coercively regulate the issue. Ridiculously enough, they declared that they aim at informed consensus on vaccinations, because vaccinations are more useful if parents understand their necessity. This stance highlights their refusal to compromise between the political good of security (and responsibility towards immunosuppressed children) and the use of coercion. They claim that children must be protected through voluntary consensus among people in favour of and against vaccination. This attitude is not anchored in the very facts of politics, as it denies that given the persistence of disagreement and conflict between people, sometimes the only way to reach political goods is to coerce those who are not compliant with the envisaged political project. In this sense, Weber denies that power and coercion are per se derogatory means, while still offering standards for assessing when and how they should be exercised.

Realism as ideology critique

We previously saw that populism represents a form of ‘thin ideology’ that manifests in some typical political practices – for example, the dissemination of a moralistic vision of politics and the vilification of professional politicians. The aim of this section is to introduce ideology critique as a tool to unveil the distortive ideologies underlying populism. This reflection is broader in scope because it includes the distortions mentioned above, although from a different perspective. It asks whether people’s acceptance of power – and, in this specific case, their support for populist movements – results from ideological distortions delivered by populist politicians.

The recently developed literature on realism as ideology critique grew out of Bernard Williams’ and Raymond Geuss’ works. Its point is to develop a normative approach that avoids moralist interpretations of political concepts yet still enhances self-reflection (Prinz and Rossi, 2017).

Williams’ critical theory principle is meant to verify the authenticity of people’s acceptance of power, thereby preventing legitimation from being based on manipulation. Williams argues that ‘the state has to offer a justification of its power to each subject’ (Williams, 2007: 4); however, ‘the acceptance of a justification does not count if the acceptance itself is produced by the coercive power which is supposedly being justified’ (Williams, 2007: 6). In Truth and Truthfulness, he better specifies what it means for a justification to be produced by power: ‘We can introduce the following test of a belief held by a group: If they were to understand properly how they came to hold this belief, would they give it up?’ (Williams, 2002: 227). To Williams’ insights the radical realist approach adds Geuss’ insight that social theory should reflect on its own foundations as well as on the society it aims to understand (Geuss, 1981: 56). Besides, it employs Geuss’ previously mentioned distinction between positive ideologies and negative ideologies (Geuss, 1981: 23 and 12–13).

Accordingly, realists interested in ideology critique focus on elaborating a critical approach to legitimation stories – that is, to those narratives that are accepted by subjects as justifications for the exercise of political power. In doing so, they suggest applying epistemic standards to detect legitimation stories that should be ‘debunked’ while enhancing those that have ‘vindicatory’ power (Rossi, 2019: 645). The touchstone is consistency with the political practices that the narratives claim to enhance, instead of an appeal to moral principles (Rossi, 2019). In sum, the genealogical work proposed by radical realists aims at clearing away layers of distortive legitimation stories from the set of beliefs that justify political power, ones that create distortions in order to support the interests of those advantaged by the status quo (Prinz and Rossi, forthcoming).

To do so, ideology critique must satisfy a ‘realist desideratum’ (i.e. it must reveal the uncritical assumption of pre-political moral commitments) and a ‘debunking desideratum’ (i.e. it must detect the problematic causal story of a belief, namely one that is unjustifiably excluded from rational scrutiny) [Rossi and Argenton, forthcoming].

Take now the populist claim that professional politicians per se are corrupted. This idea has a long-ago origin in Italian politics and had its first public expression in Mani pulite. To be sure, that investigation revealed massive corruption in public offices. However, the populist ideology used this fact to denigrate politics and professional politicians in general, thereby conveying the message that being a politician is per se an activity to be denigrated. Yet such generalisation is suspicious as long as we can identify professional politicians who are committed transparently and honestly to their political offices. Genealogical critique provides a reconstruction of why politics is a denigrated activity, and it therefore encourages us to challenge the populist tale about politicians vis-a-vis the motivation that populists might have for offering such a narrative.

Recall that I consider ideology critique as working on a different level from anti-moralism and the ethics of responsibility. In fact, it addresses those legitimation stories that are accepted by subjects of political power. However, in performing the task of disclosing and signalling those narratives that are epistemically suspicious, it can interplay with anti-moralism and the ethics of responsibility. In the example of professional politicians, ideology critique does the preliminary job of signalling inconsistency between the narratives and the facts about politicians; then the standards included in the ethics of responsibility can help reset the perspective from which to address the issue.

Yet anti-moralism and the ethics of responsibility, in this account, can also provide inputs for engaging in ideology critique. For example, information about what politics actually is can raise doubts about the moralising legitimation story provided by populists. ²⁵ By signalling the distortions included, for example, in the redefinition of the people and of the political proposed by populists as well as in the promise to fully realise the democratic ideal through the implementation of the Rousseau platform, it reveals that the moralist picture of politics offered by populists functions to justify their political power while being inconsistent with the political outcomes that the 5SM claims to advance.

In sum, the combination of ideology critique with anti-moralism and the ethics of responsibility has emancipatory potential because it unveils ideological distortions and provides new grounds of evaluation that are hopefully freer from suspicious narratives than the debunked ones. Besides, it allows us to appreciate the difference between positive ideologies and negative ideologies, or, in the language of radical realists, between ‘outopias’ and ‘eutopias’.