Here's some of Stuart Hall's essay, "Authoritarian Populism: A Reply
To Jessop Et Al," in NLR 151 (1985):
The actual term 'authoritarian populism', however, only emerged in
1978 after I read the concluding section to Nicos Poulantzas's
courageous and original book, State, Power, Socialism, which was also—
tragically—his last political statement. There, Poulantzas attempted
to characterize a new 'moment' in the conjuncture of the class
democracies, formed by 'intensive state control over every sphere of
socio-economic life, combined with radical decline of the
institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform
curtailment of so-called "formal" liberties, whose reality is being
discovered now that they are going overboard'. [3] (I especially
relished that final phrase, since it put me in mind of how often the
fundamentalist left is scornful of civil liberties until they find
themselves badly in need of some.) More seriously, I thought I
recognized in this account, and in my brief conversations with
Poulantzas at the time, many similarities between his
characterization and those I had been struggling to formulate in
Policing the Crisis, 'Drifting into a Law-and-Order Society', and so on.
Poulantzas called this the moment of 'authoritarian statism' (as). He
added, inter alia, that it was linked with 'the periodization of
capitalism into distinct stages and phases'; that it existed 'in the
form of regimes that vary according to the conjuncture of the country
concerned'; that it covered, specifically, both 'the political crisis
and the crisis of the state'; that it was intended to help us
periodize 'the relationship between the state and the political
crisis'. He insisted it was neither the birth pangs of fascism nor an
'exceptional form of the capitalist state' nor even 'the fulfilment
of the totalitarian buds inherent in every capitalist state'. Indeed,
the importance of as was that it represented a new combination of
coercion/consent, tilted towards the coercive end of the spectrum,
while maintaining the outer forms of democratic class rule intact. It
did, he argued, relate to 'considerable shifts in class
relations' (not, devotees of Class Politics please note, to the so-
called 'disappearance of class or the class struggle', whatever that
entirely fictional construction of theirs might mean). But also, that
it coincided with the generalization of class conflict and other
social struggles to 'new fronts'. It thus represented a fundamental
shift in the modalities through which ruling blocs attempt to
construct hegemony in capitalist class democracies. That was its
explicit field of reference. There is little need to elaborate on as
further, if only because Bob Jessop must be thoroughly familiar with
it since he is one of Poulantzas's most meticulous and accomplished
commentators and critics, as his forthcoming study will show.
Poulantzas's concept seemed to me extremely useful—but weak in two
major respects. It misread the emerging strategy, since one of the
fundamental things which seemed to me to be shifting was precisely
the abandonment of the 'corporatist' strategy central to Labourism,
and its replacement by an 'anti-statist' strategy of the 'New Right'.
(An 'anti-statist' strategy, incidentally, is not one which refuses
to operate through the state; it is one which conceives a more
limited state role, and which advances through the attempt,
ideologically, to represent itself as anti-statist, for the purposes
of populist mobilization.) I assumed that this highly contradictory
strategy—which we have in fact seen in operation under Thatcherism:
simultaneously, dismantling the welfare state, 'anti-statist' in its
ideological self-representation and highly state-centralist and
dirigiste in many of its strategic operations—would inflect politics
in new ways and have real political effects.
Secondly, I believed that Poulantzas had neglected the one dimension
which, above all others, has defeated the left, politically, and
Marxist analysis theoretically, in every advanced capitalist
democracy since the First World War: namely, the ways in which
popular consent can be so constructed, by a historical bloc seeking
hegemony, as to harness to its support some popular discontents,
neutralize the opposing forces, disaggregate the opposition and
really incorporate some strategic elements of popular opinion into
its own hegemonic project.
These two arguments led me to build on Poulantzas's insights, but to
shift the characterization of the conjuncture from 'authoritarian
statism' to 'authoritarian' populism'. I hoped by adopting this
deliberately contradictory term precisely to encapsulate the
contradictory features of the emerging conjuncture: a movement
towards a dominative and 'authoritarian' form of democratic class
politics—paradoxically, apparently rooted in the
'transformism' (Gramsci's term) of populist discontents. This was
further elaborated in my article 'Popular-Democratic versus
Authoritarian Populism', where I drew on the seminal work of Laclau,
and his notion of 'populist rupture'. But I distanced my more
delimited use of the term 'populism' from his more inclusive one,
attempting thereby to distinguish the genuine mobilization of popular
demands and discontents from a 'populist' mobilization which, at a
certain point in its trajectory, flips over or is recuperated into a
statist-led political leadership.
[...]
The Thatcherites know they must 'win' in civil society as well as in
the state. They understand, as the left generally does not, the
consequences of the generalization of the class struggle to new
arenas and the need to have a strategy for them too. They mean, if
possible, to reconstruct the terrain of what is 'taken for granted'
in social and political thought— and so to form a new common sense.
If one watches how, in the face of a teeth-gritting opposition, they
have steadily used the unpopularity of some aspects of trade union
practice with their own members to inflict massive wounds on the
whole labour movement, or how they have steadily not only pursued the
'privatization' of the public sector but installed 'value for money'
at the heart of the calculations of every Labour council and every
other social institution—health service, school meals, universities,
street cleaning, unemployment benefit offices, social services—one
will take this politico-ideological level of struggle somewhat more
seriously than the left currently does. That is the project of
Thatcherism—from which, I am sufficiently in apostasy to believe, the
left has something to learn as to the conduct of political struggle.
But I do not believe and have nowhere advanced the claim that the
project has been delivered.
[...]
I believe from what I have already said that it is also quite
difficult to sustain the charge that I treat Thatcherism as an
'uncontradictory monolith'. The entire thrust of my work on the
ideology of Thatcherism has been to try to show how Thatcherism has
managed to stitch up or 'unify' the contradictory strands in its
discourse—'the resonant themes of organic Toryism—nation, family,
duty, authority, standards, traditionalism, patriarchalism—with the
aggressive themes of a revived neo-liberalism—self-interest,
competitive individualism, anti-statism', as I put it in 'The Great
Moving Right Show'. [7] In the same piece, I pointed to the highly
contradictory subject-positions which Thatcherism was attempting to
condense. I deliberately adopted Gamble's brief but telling paradox
—'free market, strong state'. How all this could be described as
representing Thatcherism as an uncontradictory ideological monolith
beats me. Nor do Jessop et al score points by showing that many of
these elements in Thatcherism are not new. 'Some of these,' I said in
the very next sentence, 'had been secured in earlier times through
the grand themes of one-Nation popular Conservatism: the means by
which Toryism circumnavigated democracy.' I thought this of
particular importance in giving substance to Gramsci's argument that,
often, ideological shifts take place, not by substituting one, whole,
new conception of the world for another, but by presenting a novel
combination of old and new elements—'a process of distinction and of
change in the relative weight possessed by the elements of the old
ideology'. I don't see how all that could conceivably be construed as
endowing Thatcherism with an 'excessively unified image'.
