Abstract This chapter explores the relationship between populism and pluralism. Through a reconstruction of the term “pluralism,” and a consideration of populist and pluralist rhetoric, it argues that pluralism can help address the challenges of populism—but that it is misleading to construe the two as “opposites.” In support of this argument, it disaggregates various meanings of the term “pluralism” and shows why one iteration in particular, which associates pluralism with an anti-political version of liberalism, is harmful to attempts at countering populism. While populism (especially right-wing populism) presents a danger to individual liberty and the rule of law, the chapter contends that instead of placing too much emphasis on liberal values, we should look for a more political response. This response is found in the account of pluralism that emerged in the mid-twentieth-century United States: an account focused on preventing unhealthy concentrations of power and facilitating citizens’ control over government.

It is generally acknowledged that poststructuralism has impacted the study of politics in the UK and the United States over the past 30 years. However, it is also clear from a number of recent publications that there is renewed interest in the questions of how to define poststructuralism and to evaluate its overall significance.1 Indeed, some half-century after the publication of seminal texts such as Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy and Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, it would be fair to say that the legacy and impact of ‘poststructuralism’ remain hotly contested. Both supporters and critics remain divided on whether or not poststructuralism represents a distinct tradition, and the ways in which poststructuralist theory can enhance the study of politics. The essays collected in this symposium address these questions and aim to take stock of the politics of poststructuralism today. We do not claim to provide an exhaustive account of current debates, but the contributors hope that these essays nonetheless deliver a wide-ranging conceptual map of contemporary poststructuralist theory, as well as a critical appraisal of some of the issues that will shape the development of the field in the future. In part, the essays are designed to introduce colleagues working across the disciplines of political science and international relations to these debates, as well as to take the arguments forward and so, we hope, being of interest to more specialist readers in the field as well. In the current context of ‘post-truth politics’, this would seem to be a timely discussion. Indeed, several commentators have sought to blame poststructuralism for what feels like the sudden onset of the dizzying world in which we now find ourselves – of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ – which has characterised public debate in the context of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. The suggestion seems to be that several decades of poststructuralist talk about ‘anti-foundationalism’ and ‘anti-essentialism’ has prepared the ground for this moment, where the gloves come off, and populist politicians can now openly manipulate ‘the truth’ to suit their own cynical objectives. However, we could turn this image on its head and consider instead how contemporary political debate seems finally to have caught up with certain key observations that poststructuralists have made for many years, that is, the circumstances of epistemological groundlessness that are, in the end, deeply rooted

In this article, I defend Jacques Derrida's assumptions about language and discourse from three immanent critiques of poststructuralism. I refer to these as the ethical, metaphysical and political critiques. At the heart of Derrida's approach is an emphasis on the terrain of signification, understood as a precondition of our perception of/engagement with the world'. This is encapsulated in his statement that there is no(thing) outside of the text', and the ethical, metaphysical and political critiques turn on what can or cannot be said about this nothingness' that marks the limit of the discursive terrain. I examine the assertions that the extra-discursive nothingness' is (a) the source of an inscrutable ethical demand, (b) can be understood as a material realm of vital forces' and alternatively (c) that nothing positive can be said about this limit point of the discursive, but it' nonetheless becomes manifest within the terrain of signification in the form of a disruptive event. While I reject the ethical and metaphysical responses, I feel sympathy for the political critique of deconstruction. Indeed, I argue that politics unfolds in a tension between the manifestation of the event and the kinds of manoeuvres that are possible within the field of signification.

Over the past four decades we have lived through a set of technological changes that have had an immense and profound impact on all societies around the world. At the heart of these changes is the revolution in digital technology, microelectronics and computers, following the first commercial use of the microprocessor in 1971, which has heralded the age of global interconnectedness and networked communication. The new digital technologies – manifest for example in satellite communications, wireless technologies, and the Internet – have, for the first time in human history, made possible real time communication on a planetary scale. The impact of these developments has, of course, been palpably unequal, and the distribution of the infrastructures for the new technologies has mainly reinforced established fault lines of structural inequality. This is evident for example in the consolidation of new centre/periphery dynamics between the information rich and the information poor, both within the advanced industrialised societies and especially between the developed and the developing world. Nevertheless, the new modes of digital communication are being disseminated at an everincreasing rate, including to some of the poorest and most remote regions of the world. In 2011 there were 2 billion Internet users worldwide and this is projected to be 3 billion by 2015. In this context it is important not to slip into a form of technological determinism, but there can be no question that diverse localities all around the world are currently experiencing a set of uneven and combined developments, driven in large part by these technological innovations, and which are every bit as dramatic as the impact of the industrial revolutions on Western Europe from the late eighteenth century. In fact, some of the novelties that characterise the post-industrial digital revolution, in contrast to the industrial revolutions, are the enormous rate of (seemingly perpetual) technological innovation, and the speed with which the new technologies have been disseminated across vast geographical locations.

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Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsMark WenmanMark Wenman is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Nottingham, and currently a lead Editor of Political Studies and Editor in Chief of Political Studies Review. He has published numerous articles on pluralism, post-structuralism, and democratic theory, and has recently completed a monograph entitled Agonistic Democracy: Constituent power in the Era of Globalisation, which was published with Cambridge University Press in 2013. Email: mark.wenman@nottingham.ac.uk

William Connolly has made important interventions in political theory over a period of four decades, and the past few years have seen a surge in recognition of his contribution. Those who are familiar with Connolly’s ideas will know the role that continental theorists—especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze—have played in the development of his thought, and more recently the uses he has made of advances in the natural sciences, for example in complexity theory, in the work of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Ilya Prigogine. With reference to these innovations, a consensus has emerged in recent discussions, that there is a basic discontinuity between Connolly’s “postmodern” theory of pluralism and the “old” pluralism of the generation of post-war political scientists. By way of contrast, in this essay I outline the congruity between Connolly’s ideas and earlier iterations of pluralism. I trace the essential continuities between Connolly and the leading post-war writers, especially Robert Dahl, Charles Lindblom, David Truman, and David Easton, and also his proximity to a tradition of pluralism that flourished in the early part of the twentieth century and was exemplified in the work of Arthur Bentley. Indeed, I make the case that Connolly’s work is best understood as the resumption and enhancement of a distinct canon of pluralism in American political thought.