Commissioned Book Review: Jorge Tamames, For the People: Left Populism in Spain and the US
| Author | Adrià Porta Caballé |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221130904 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(1) NP15 –NP16
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1130904PSW0010.1177/14789299221130904Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2022
Commissioned Book Review
For the People: Left Populism in Spain
and the US by Jorge Tamames. London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 2020 £17.00, ISBN
9781912064441.
Earthquakes mock the very idea of solid
ground, of trustworthy geology
(Manaugh, 2019)
There was a lot of fuss a few years ago about the
landing of left-wing populism in the global
North at the hands of Syriza, Podemos, La
France Insoumise, Corbyn and Sanders, but
there has not been as much critical evaluation
on their breakthroughs and limitations after
their electoral defeats. Jorge Tamames’ book
For the People attempts to do so by focusing on
two particular case studies: Spain and the
United States. It is well known that studies on
populism today stand at a crossroads between
two seemingly irreconcilable methodologies:
the ontic, on the one hand, based on the empiri-
cal content one can find in disciplines like his-
tory or sociology, and the ontological, on the
other hand, more interested in discovering the
formal logics of populism tout court (Biglieri
and Cadahia, 2021: 5). In this sense, perhaps the
greatest merit of Tamames’ book is its dual and
hybrid nature: not only he compares two differ-
ent case studies (Spain and the US; Podemos
and Sanders), but he also attempts to combine
two different theoretical frameworks (populist
theory and political economy; Laclau and
Polanyi). To the extent that discursive analyses of
populism usually lack context, and the economic
more than any other, Tamames’ overarching the-
sis – that left-populism can be best understood as
a Polanyian ‘countermovement that seeks to con-
tain market logics’ (p. 11) – will be of interest to
any studious of On Populist Reason.
Interestingly, Tamames’ starting point is not
so much building a robust theoretical edifice as
the search for the perfect metaphor to describe
the ‘populist moment’. Such a gesture could be
disregarded as nothing more than a literary patch
stitched in order to suture the intrinsic and inevi-
table ‘faults’ of social sciences, but I would like
to add that Donna Haraway’s (2004: 1–33) not
much well-known PhD thesis, for instance,
already demonstrated decades ago the immense
role that metaphors play in shifting Kuhnian
paradigms even in so-called ‘hard’ sciences
like biology. Metaphors matter and, drawing on
Paul Pierson’s work in Politics in Time (2011),
Tamames identifies the two key variables in
meteorological analogies: ‘an event’s “time
horizon of cause” (i.e. the time it takes to build
up) and its “time horizon of outcome” (how
long before its effects become noticeable)’ (p. 55).
In this sense, earthquakes are chosen to be the
perfect metaphor for populist irruptions because
their effects are short, fast and sudden even
though they are the result of the slow move-
ments of tectonic plates. In the end, Tamames
concludes that he has sought to ‘capture the bal-
ance of structure and agency in the image of the
earthquake’ (p. 239), but one is kept wondering
whether an earthquake is any better than a tor-
nado (or, in fact, any meteorological analogy) in
this respect, since contingency is not yet exactly
the same as agency.
In his road towards developing a ‘political
economy of populism’ (p. 11), Tamames sets
the task of organically combining the works of
Laclau and Polanyi, which is not an arbitrary
experiment because they are both thinkers of
‘social indeterminacy’ (p. 67) against any eco-
nomic ‘class reductionism’ (p. 68), which is
why they can be both aligned in a ‘sociological
Marxism’ à la Gramsci (in Michael Burawoy’s
terms, p. 69). Despite all these similarities, it is
at this point that I would like to express what is
perhaps my biggest criticism of the book, with-
out undermining its analytical value. It is my
understanding that the Polanyian analysis would
have to end where the populist construction
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