Public Sphere and World System: Theorizing Populism at the Margins

Building from Jürgen Habermas and Immanuel Wallerstein, we develop a scheme in application to authoritarian populism in general, and specifically to populisms in the history of peripheral and semi-peripheral countries of Latin America in their world-systems context. Our discussion is divided into three main components: (1) a conceptual delimitation of populism and its authoritarian variations; (2) an outline of some of Habermas’ and Wallerstein’s theories as they pertain to populism; and (3) an attempt at bringing Habermas’ and Wallerstein’s theoretical models into conversation via an operational scheme dealing with world-systems analysis and the problem of the public sphere and lifeworld. Our main effort consists in bringing the rise of the twentieth century industrial world (urban life, urban masses, the press and so on) and the challenges of the public sphere together to understand the problem of populism in (semi)peripheral countries. Accelerated capitalist change produces major impacts on communicative structures, so that, more than a political issue confined to contemporary Western democracies, populism deals with the transnational developments of the modern world-system. At the margins, thus, populism and its authoritarian slips have strong roots in the context of global capitalist transformations of local lifeworlds.