Populismo e nacional-popular

The article aims to investigate what was the effective use of the term “populism” by Antonio Gramsci, as a way to contribute to the contemporary debate, mainly because of the reactivation of the discussion by Ernesto Laclau. The author distances himself from Asor Rosa’s first interpretation of the subject, to show that Gramsci’s use of the term is much more complex: he states that in the Quaderni Gramsci directs attention to populist sensibility also in areas other than those of leftists political movements, sometimes without taking a denouncing attitude, but in general to extract the core that should be developed into a genuinely “popular” politic. In this sense, the authentic lesson of the Gramsian texts seems to help to immunize against the contemporary use of the term “populism”, understood as a stigma imprinted on the critical positions of inequalities and, on the other hand, on the tendency of progressive or liberal sociocultural environments. to settle as merely “pathological” phenomena the popular consensus given to populist leaderships, including reactionary ones.