Populism as a logic of political action

This article offers a new understanding of populism. The argument unfolds as follows: first, the populist literature is reviewed and two main approaches are identified: ontic and logic-oriented, the more important of which is the Schmitt-Laclau logic of enmity. While the authors broadly agree with Laclau’s criticism of ontic approaches, they endorse neither his ontological understanding of enmity, nor his claim that populism is politics, and enmity is the logic of populism. Next, the origins of populism are located in a paradox at the heart of democracy. Democracy defines itself as a community of inclusion, yet exclusion is constitutive of inclusion, including therefore democratic inclusion. Then is discussed what the authors believe to be the true logic of populism: resentment. Unlike enmity, which functions in Laclau’s populist theory as an ontology of non-identity, resentment operates within a rivalrous framework, which presupposes identification between the parts and refers to a set of normative commitments. Finally, the article concludes by presenting an understanding of populism as a specific logic of political action.

The Concept of Progress

This chapter explains that the concept of progress which has shaped the Western tradition is a highly specific one and a result of a series of developments. It argues that the true logic of progress is not a historical, a social-technical, scientific, or technological logic; rather, it is a social logic in the sense that it must be supported and defined by a society itself. There are no predetermined blueprints for this, though there is a reflexive principle which states that only those who are affected may define the steps that constitute “progress.” This principle refers to a normative structure of social self-determination according to which no one may be subjected to specific rules or institutions which cannot be adequately justified to him or her as a free and equal subject. This is the core meaning of self-determination central to social progress.

ILP Applications to Software Engineering

Though inductive logic programming (ILP for short) should mean the “induction of logic programs”, most research and applications of this area are only loosely related to logic programming. In fact, the automatic synthesis of “true” logic programs is a difficult task, since it cannot be done without a lot of information on the sought programs, and without the ability to describe in a simple way well-restricted searching spaces. In this chapter, we argue that, if such knowledge is available, inductive logic programming can be used as a valid tool for software engineering, and we propose an integrated framework for the development, maintenance, reuse, testing, and debugging of logic programs.