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Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 24:5 (2025) ► pp.783–801

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Populism and contingency

Assessing the ideological flexibility of populism through Sorel’s Theory of Myth

ORCiD logo with link | Universidad de Salamanca | Vrije Universiteit Brussel
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Published online: 12 November 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.23193.ram
Abstract
Populism has been examined in depth in the last decades both from theoretical and empirical approaches. Among the topics that scholars have studied, the ideological flexibility of populist discourses is one of the most controversial and difficult to analyse. Although a large body of research has explored this peculiar characteristic of populist political discourses, this paper provides an original interpretation of populism by assessing this flexibility drawing on the importance of George Sorel’s theory in discourse theory, which could contribute to a better understanding of populist theory. Understanding populism from a discursive framework could explain the intrinsic contingency of populism and the emergence of both radical right and radical left populisms. This study aims to trace the theoretical path from the influence of Sorel’s Theory of Myth on populist discourse theory to its current implications for populist discourses, resulting in the multifaceted nature of populism.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1The ideological flexibility of populism in populist theory
    • 2.2When myth theory meets populism
  • 3.The myth(s) of ‘the people’ in populist discourses
    • 3.1The different notions of the myth of ‘the people’ in contemporary politics: The cases of Podemos and Rassemblement National
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (42)
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