Common Sense, Fragmentation and Demagogic Populism: Conceptual Excavation and Rearticulation

The Gramscian tradition’s critical conception of common sense as fragmented and incoherent stands in stark contrast to the wholistic and normative understanding that dominates the Arendtian one. I contrast the Gramscian tradition, including Stuart Hall’s work on authoritarian populism and racism, with the work of Sophia Rosenfeld. She highlights the role of communications media in the relationship between common sense, populism and democracy, an emphasis too of the first-generation Frankfurt School’s work on the techniques and influence of antisemitic US radio demagogues. Such demagogues, I argue, rearticulate common sense fragments of even progressive populist traditions. Arendt’s enthusiasm for the US republic’s counter-demagogic institutionalisation of ‘opinion’ is contrasted with Habermas’s ‘contradictory institutionalisation’ of deliberative opinion, rather than common sense, in the bourgeois public
sphere. Habermas’s recent reworking of this framework to address social media’s fragmented ‘semi-publics’ underpins my concluding assessment of the conceptual status of common sense and contemporary demagogic populism.

Keywords: common sense – populism – demagogue – Begriffsgeschichte – public sphere