The Impossibility of Populism.

• Author: Lemieux, Pierre

Populism can be defined and is generally viewed as a regime where the people rule. What distinguishes populism from democracy is a matter of degree: under populism, the people rule more effectively, with fewer blockages from representative assemblies, judges, experts, and elite. The purpose of this paper is to examine if such a regime is feasible.

I will try to keep as far from ethics and as close to economics as possible, although any policy proposal with distributive implications (which favors some individuals at the detriment of others) ultimately relies on value judgments--that is, on moral values (Lemieux 2006). When I do touch on value judgments (mainly when envisioning libertarian populism at the end of the paper), I try to rely on a minimal "live and let live" ethics in order not to strain my reader's moral credulity, as Anthony de Jasay suggests (1997, 152).

The People and Its Will

The immediate problem in the definition of populism is, What is "the people"? Just like "society," "the people" certainly does not exist as a biological organism. Contrary to cells and organs, individuals in society don't occupy fixed places or fill predetermined functions. An individual has personal preferences and goals and acts accordingly. (I take preferences as including both tastes and values, values being simply preferences regarding the state of the social world.) One cannot apprehend society or "the people" as a whole in the same way one can see or touch a biological organism--say, a porcupine. To conceive "the people" in this way is to fall victim of an organicist or anthropomorphic illusion (Hayek 1973, 52-53). The people does not exist except as a group of individuals who in a certain geographical location share some common preferences, which are fewer and more abstract the larger the number of individuals. Individual diversity is an unavoidable feature of any human society, the more so in a society past a primitive stage--that is, in an open society (Popper 1966, 173-74).

If "the people" is not some kind of superindividual, then it cannot have an intelligence or a will of its own. "The will of the people" or "the general will," as imagined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or (most of) his disciples, does not exist (Rousseau [1913] 1923, [1762] 1966; Hayek [1952] 1979a, 99-103,145). How, then, could the people rule? It would seem that governing or ruling necessarily means that a section of the people rules the rest.

One may object that the organicist vision or the personification of society is just an analogy. But it is a misleading analogy that can have dangerous consequences. The analogy enters history in 493 B.C. when the Roman consul Menenius Agrippa stopped a Plebeian revolt by telling the fable of the belly and the members of the body. Once upon a time, he told the rebel Plebeians, the members of the body revolted against the belly for being forced to provide it with food enjoyment. They stopped feeding it, only to realize that they were thereby weakening themselves to the utmost. Hence, the Plebeians should not revolt against the ruling Patricians (Livius 1919, book 2, chap. 32). Karl Popper reports that the Austrian scholar, writer, and inventor Josef Popper-Lynkeus (who was Popper's uncle) thought that the Plebeians should have replied: "Right, Agrippa! If there must be a belly, then we, the plebs, want to be the belly from now on" (1966, 294).

Since then, the organicist conception or intuition of society or "the people" has been regularly used to justify the domination of one social group over another. Charles Beudant, a nineteenth-century professor of law, wrote that the organicist figure of speech was now "taken literally and becoming a reality," notably in Germany at the end of the century. He explained that Johan Kaspar Bluntschli, a Swiss German jurist, saw the state as "an organic person ... a human person," "the organized person of the nation." Bluntschli even thought that this social organism was male and had come of age in 1740 (Beudant [1891] 1920, 206-7). For Adolf Hitler a few decades later, the state was a folkish or national organism. Vienna was the brain and will of the organism. The "body of the people" was affected by diseases that included the Jews, the Marxists, and the press (Rash 2005).

In America during the first half of the twentieth century, the organicist metaphor was used to justify eugenics, including forced sterilization. The "degenerates" were "an insidious disease affecting the body politic," "the wild cells of a malignant growth" (O'Brien 1999, 194, 191). For the good of the social organism, the defectives should not be prevented from dying: a well-known eugenicist, Leon J. Cole, declared in 1914 that "[d]eath is the normal process of elimination in the social organism.... [I]n prolonging the lives of defectives we are tampering with the function of the social kidneys" (qtd. in Lombardo 2019,3-4). A cell must not endanger the whole organism.

The People's Choices

The formalization of how "the people" makes choices confirms that it is not a rational superindividual. A first step of this formalization lies in the "paradox of voting," known since the Marquis de Condorcet in the eighteenth century, rediscovered by the mathematician Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) in the nineteenth century, and then found again by the economist Duncan Black in the mid-twentieth century (Arrow 1963,92-96; Lemieux 2020-21). The gist of the paradox is that as "the people" tries to govern through elections or referenda, incoherent results often follow. Even if each and every individual is rational, the people can be irrational.

Consider three voters, [V.sub.1], [V.sub.2], and [V.sub.3], and three alternatives presented to them: X, Y, and Z. Table 1 gives the preferences of each voter. [V.sub.1] prefers X to Y and Y to Z, which we can summarize by the expression "X Y Z". [V.sub.2] and [V.sub.3] have different preferences, but, by hypothesis, every individual's preferences are transitive. [V.sub.1], who prefers X to Y and Y to Z, naturally prefers X to Z. [V.sub.2], who prefers Y to Z and Z to X, prefers Y to X. And [V.sub.3], who prefers Z to X and X to Y, prefers Z to Y. We define rationality as transitivity or coherence in that sense.

It can easily be checked that if the voters are asked to choose between X and Y, two out of three, [V.sub.1] and [V.sub.3], will vote for X because it is higher in their respective preferences; the result of the vote (or, we may say, the "social choice") is thus X. If our three voters are asked instead (or later) to choose between Y and Z, the result of the vote would be Y because [V.sub.1] and [V.sub.2] vote for Y; the social choice is Y. Now, if the same three voters are asked to choose between Z and...