Reading Populism with Bourdieu and Elias

This chapter explores the potential of relational sociology, specifically the work of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, for the study of populism. It argues that populism can be deciphered as political struggles over status. More precisely, populist status struggles take place in a sociocultural sphere in which politics becomes culturalized, and culture becomes politicized. While Bourdieu is particularly helpful for understanding the synchronous dimension of the ways in which populism politicizes cultural styles, Elias emphasizes the diachronic dimension of the status struggles between what he calls “the established and the outsiders.” Accordingly, the chapter suggests that social groups resort to authoritarian populism when they perceive their superior status position to wane and that populism is not so much an expression of social domination as of declining dominance. In this context, the aesthetics of populism performatively creates the “true” or “real” people: a fiction to shore up one’s sense of status.