Imagining Populism Differently: Notes on the Proposal of a Feminist, Internationalist, Republican Populism

In the article I briefly discuss four important interventions from Biglieri and Cadahia’s Seven Essays on Populism: (a) against anti-institutionalist readings of populism, they make a plea for a ‘populist institutionality’; (b) they defend a plebeian version of republicanism; (c) they seek to rehabilitate the nation-form while, at the same time, arguing for a transnational populism, and (d) they argue in favour of the feminization of populism and an ‘antagonism of care’. However, while it is argued in the article that their main intervention, i.e., their ontological claim about the intrinsically emancipatory nature of all populism, remains ultimately unconvincing, it could be interpreted as a productive political incantation to make use of the human faculty of imagination and start imagining populism differently.