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Please cite as:
ECPS Staff. (2025). “ECPS Conference 2025 / Roundtable II — ‘The People’ in and against Liberal and Democratic Thought.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). July 10, 2025.  https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00112

Held at St Cross College, University of Oxford, as part of the ECPS Conference 2025 (“We, the People” and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches,” July 1–3), Roundtable II offered a wide-ranging philosophical and political interrogation of how “the people” is theorized, invoked, and contested in contemporary democratic thought. Chaired by Dr. Aviezer Tucker (University of Ostrava), the session featured presentations by Naomi Waltham-Smith (Oxford), Bruno Godefroy (Tours), Karen Horn (Erfurt), and Julian F. Müller (Graz). Together, the panel explored the rhetorical, constitutional, and epistemic instabilities surrounding the concept of “the people,” challenging static or essentialist understandings and calling for renewed attention to pluralism, temporality, and audibility within liberal democratic frameworks.

Reported by ECPS Staff

At the ECPS Conference 2025, held from July 1–3 at St Cross College, University of Oxford under the theme “‘We, the People’ and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches,” Roundtable II offered a particularly provocative and philosophically expansive exploration of the populist challenge to liberal democratic thought. Chaired by Dr. Aviezer Tucker (University of Ostrava), the session titled “‘The People’ in and against Liberal and Democratic Thought”assembled a diverse array of perspectives, traversing political theory, music philosophy, legal studies, and liberal political economy.

As chair, Dr. Tucker aptly remarked on the intellectual breadth of the panel—a “smorgasbord” (smörgåsbord) of approaches that might well result in an Eintopf, or philosophical stew. With four distinct yet interrelated presentations, the roundtable demonstrated both the urgency and conceptual richness of current debates surrounding democratic legitimacy, popular sovereignty, and the epistemic ruptures posed by populism.

The sequence began with Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith (University of Oxford), whose philosophical interrogation of “listening to the people” challenged political theorists to take seriously the ontological and rhetorical weight of listening in democratic discourse. She provocatively reclassified both “listening” and “the people” as “impossible concepts,” offering a compelling intervention that bridged musical aesthetics and democratic theory.

Next, Associate Professor Bruno Godefroy (University of Tours) advanced a bold normative framework that redefined “the people” in temporal rather than essentialist terms. Arguing for a “presentist” conception grounded in the authority of the living generation, Godefroy called for a democratic constitutionalism that embraces periodic renewal over historical entrenchment.

Finally, Professors Karen Horn (University of Erfurt) and Julian F. Müller (University of Graz) co-presented insights from their edited volume Liberal Responses to Populism. While Professor Horn charted the liberal tradition’s internal reckoning with populism, Professor Müller offered a theoretically rigorous diagnosis of populism’s epistemic incompatibility with liberal democracy—underscoring its rejection of pluralism, compromise, and fallibility.

In sum, Roundtable II embodied the interdisciplinary ethos of the ECPS Conference. Under Dr. Tucker’s guidance, the panel created a dynamic intellectual space in which normative theory, conceptual critique, and institutional reflection could intersect to reassess one of the most contested categories in contemporary politics: the people.

Naomi Waltham-Smith: Listening to ‘the People’: Impossible Concepts in Political Philosophy

In a rigorously reflective and conceptually adventurous presentation delivered during Roundtable 2 of the ECPS Conference 2025, Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith (Music Faculty, University of Oxford) interrogated the political and philosophical stakes of two deceptively ordinary yet persistently invoked terms in contemporary public life: listening and the people. Speaking with evident intellectual clarity, Professor Waltham-Smith situated her remarks within her ongoing project exploring the philosophy of listening—an inquiry that traverses music, political thought, and rhetorical analysis.

Her central argument unfolded around the notion that both “listening” and “the people” are impossible concepts: the former is conceptually vague yet rhetorically ubiquitous, while the latter is theoretically contested and politically volatile. Drawing on a wide-ranging archive of political speech—from Margaret Thatcher’s leadership bid to Mike Huckabee’s Trumpist populism— Professor Waltham-Smith demonstrated how politicians frequently promise to “listen to the people” as a performative gesture, often substituting this phrase for concrete political accountability. Citing examples from both sides of the Atlantic, she showed how this rhetorical move appears across ideological lines, from Thatcher and Tony Blair to contemporary figures like Zoran Mamdani and Lord Ashdown.

Professor Waltham-Smith argued that listening, despite its popular currency, is notably absent from the lexicon of political philosophy. Unlike concepts such as democracy, equality, or sovereignty, listening rarely appears in political theory’s formal vocabulary. Yet, paradoxically, it functions as a universalizing metaphor in democratic discourse—an elastic term used to build consensus, gloss over division, and offer reassurance without structural change. It carries an emotional and ethical charge that often masks its conceptual vagueness, which she characterized as a kind of “polysemy without politics.” In this way, listening becomes an ideologically neutral placeholder, performatively invoked but seldom critically examined.

In contrast, the people is a thoroughly theorized but equally problematic concept—particularly in the tradition of Carl Schmitt, who identifies political concepts as “contested” in both subject and usage. Professor Waltham-Smith emphasized that “the people” is often wielded to draw friend/enemy distinctions, collapsing plural constituencies into singular identities for the sake of rhetorical force. Here, the concept becomes both powerful and exclusionary, prone to being mobilized against its own pluralistic potential.

To further illustrate the “impossibility” of listening as a political concept, Professor Waltham-Smith offered a theoretical taxonomy of current political analyses that presuppose a crisis of listening—even if they do not name it as such. She identified three dominant frameworks: first, the cultural backlash thesis, which views the rise of right-wing populism as a reaction to liberal, post-materialist value shifts that ignored traditionalist constituencies; second, a political-economic critique that sees party de-alignment and neoliberal technocracy as failures to respond to the socio-economic demands of core electorates; and third, a structural critique of neoliberal governance as inherently anti-democratic, intentionally limiting popular voice through selective responsiveness and institutional silencing.

Each of these frameworks, she argued, can be interpreted as responding to a deficit of listening—whether understood as empathy, responsiveness, or structural audibility. Yet, listening, in these contexts, remains undertheorized. Its presence is symptomatic of a deeper malaise in democratic representation, but it is rarely elevated to the level of philosophical scrutiny. Professor Waltham-Smith thus proposed that we must begin treating listening as a political concept in its own right, not merely as an affective or rhetorical gesture.

Her intervention was also historical. Tracing the problem of listening back to classical contract theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, she explored how each understood the sovereign’s relationship to popular voice. While Hobbes dismissed the need for further listening once authorization had been granted, Locke envisioned more reciprocal dynamics, and Rousseau—most intriguingly—was skeptical of deliberation as a means of producing the general will, fearing it would always be skewed by inequalities in property and voice. Professor Waltham-Smith extended Rousseau’s insight by proposing that listening might serve as a metaphor for justice—not in the abstract legal sense, but in the sense of redistributing audibility across social and political domains.

This concept of “audibility justice” emerges as a potential way to reimagine universalism not as the flattening of difference, but as a careful and contested project of equalizing the conditions for being heard. In this framing, listening is not about passive receptivity or liberal tolerance, but about transforming the structural conditions under which political voice can be articulated, recognized, and responded to.

By the close of her talk, Professor Waltham-Smith had not only traced the genealogies of listening and “the people” through theory and praxis but had also made a compelling case for why political philosophy must take the act—and impossibility—of listening seriously. Her remarks challenged participants to rethink foundational assumptions in democratic theory, opening up a rich terrain for interdisciplinary investigation. In doing so, she embodied the ECPS Conference 2025’s core ambition: to interrogate the boundaries of populism and democracy through fresh conceptual lenses that resist disciplinary silos and easy consensus.

Bruno Godefroy: The Living Generation – A Presentist Conception of the People

At Roundtable 2 of the ECPS Conference 2025, Bruno Godefroy, Associate Professor in Law and German at the University of Tours, delivered a thought-provoking presentation titled “The Living Generation – A Presentist Conception of the People.” His intervention advanced a bold normative argument and conceptual reorientation, challenging dominant paradigms in constitutional theory and democratic legitimacy by reframing “the people” as a temporally limited collective: the living generation.

Professor Godefroy’s presentation began with a diagnosis of contemporary democratic malaise. Populism, he argued, does not arise ex nihilo but emerges in response to a persistent and structural crisis of representative democracy. This crisis is visible in phenomena such as the erosion of trust in political institutions, declining party memberships, the inability of democratic regimes to adapt to challenges like climate change, and the growing gap between citizens and elites. Central to this crisis is what Professor Godefroy termed “the paradox of constitutionalism”: while modern constitutional regimes claim legitimacy from the people’s sovereign will, they simultaneously entrench legal and institutional structures designed to resist further exercises of constituent power. In this view, the sovereign people are permitted to speak only once—during the founding moment—and are thereafter placed in constitutional “coma,” unable to reassert their will without triggering accusations of destabilization.

Professor Godefroy’s core concern was to evaluate the different responses to this paradox, particularly in relation to populist constitutionalism. Populists, he observed, often call for the reactivation of constituent power to amend constitutions in the name of reclaiming popular sovereignty. However, while these appeals can initially appear democratic, they frequently result in long-term democratic erosion. Citing the 2007 Venezuelan reforms and the 2012 Hungarian constitution, Professor Godefroy warned that populist-driven constitutional change often concentrates power and undermines institutional checks.

In the face of this dilemma, political theorists tend to fall into two camps. The first adopts a position of constitutional entrenchment, advocating resistance to constitutional change by invoking a transgenerational understanding of “the people”—one that transcends any given generation and anchors sovereignty in an abstract, collective identity. This conception protects institutions from volatile shifts but sidelines the living citizenry’s role in shaping their legal and political order.

The second approach, aligned with democratic constitutionalism, recognizes the partial validity of populist critiques and seeks to deepen democratic participation through controlled, incremental constitutional innovation. However, this perspective lacks a robust alternative conception of “the people.” Professor Godefroy’s intervention aims to fill this conceptual gap by articulating what he called a presentist or living generation conception of the people.

Drawing inspiration from Jefferson, Paine, and Condorcet, Professor Godefroy proposed that the people should be understood not as a transhistorical entity binding the dead, living, and unborn—as Edmund Burke famously claimed—but as the concrete collective of those currently alive. This reorientation reframes political legitimacy around the idea that constitutions and institutions derive authority from the ongoing, renewed consent of the living generation.

To clarify the stakes of this proposal, Professor Godefroy identified two central challenges to any theory of “the people”: the identity problem and the time problem. The identity problem asks how a coherent collective identity of “the people” can be grounded without appealing to fixed traits like ethnicity or culture. Traditional answers often rely on pre-political or essentialist notions, as found in Carl Schmitt’s existential homogeneity or in liberal theorist Alessandro Ferrara’s distinction between ethnos and demos. However, these models risk exclusionary consequences, as evidenced in the 1993 ruling by the German Constitutional Court on the Maastricht Treaty, which declared that democracy was only viable within the homogenous confines of the nation-state.

Professor Godefroy’s presentist alternative circumvents this by anchoring identity not in substance but in temporality and coexistence. The people, he argued, should be seen as a thin, temporally limited collective bound by shared existence rather than immutable characteristics. This view allows for the existence of collective identity without invoking dangerous essentialisms, while retaining the possibility of democratic self-constitution.

The second challenge—the time problem—asks whether the people’s identity and sovereignty are permanent or contingent. The transgenerational conception treats the people as an eternal subject, thereby curbing its capacity to act in time. In contrast, the presentist model insists on sovereignty as inherently temporal: the authority to constitute or reconstitute institutions belongs to the people insofar as they are alive and coexisting. Rather than viewing change as dangerous rupture, Professor Godefroy suggested that periodic constitutional renewal could be a safeguard of democracy, not its threat.

Critically, Professor Godefroy addressed common criticisms of this view. Detractors argue that a temporally limited conception of the people threatens stability and weakens institutional legitimacy. But Professor Godefroy contended that this critique overlooks the democratic necessity of periodic re-legitimation. Without such renewal, constitutions risk becoming vehicles of inert tradition rather than expressions of popular will.

In the final portion of his presentation, Professor Godefroy outlined institutional implications of his theory. He proposed three mechanisms for operationalizing the presentist conception of the people. First, periodic constitutional conventions—as endorsed by Jefferson and Condorcet—could be institutionalized every 20 years, enabling living generations to reaffirm or revise foundational texts. Second, mandatory constitutional referendums, still found in several US states, could require electorates to decide periodically whether to initiate constitutional reform. Third, sunset clauses—or temporary constitutional provisions—could prevent the ossification of laws and allow for regular reconsideration of foundational norms. He pointed to the German Basic Law as a historical example that, while never formally sunsetted, was initially conceived as provisional.

By the end of his presentation, Professor Godefroy had not only challenged dominant constitutional paradigms but had articulated an ambitious, normatively rich, and practically oriented alternative. His conception of the people as the living generation foregrounds coexistence, consent, and temporal finitude as central to democratic legitimacy. In so doing, he offered a compelling framework that reclaims constituent power from both populist excess and technocratic inertia, offering a democratic vision rooted in temporal humility and political responsibility.

Professor Godefroy’s intervention resonated powerfully with the interdisciplinary goals of the ECPS Conference, drawing together legal theory, political philosophy, and democratic practice. His presentist lens invited scholars to rethink how we define “the people,” challenging them to take seriously the sovereignty of the living—not as an abstract slogan but as a constitutional imperative. 

Karen Horn: Liberal Responses to Populism

At Roundtable 2 of the ECPS Conference 2025 at the University of Oxford, Professor Karen Horn (University of Erfurt) delivered a reflective and analytically rich presentation titled “Liberal Responses to Populism.” Speaking from a third-eye vantage rooted in both historical scholarship and contemporary liberal thought, Professor Horn used the occasion to introduce an important recent anthology she co-edited, also titled Liberal Responses to Populism. The volume, a product of an academic workshop hosted by the interdisciplinary New Ideas in Economic Thought (NEWS) network, was both the backdrop and the scaffolding of her address.

Professor Horn began by situating the work within the broader intellectual infrastructure of NEWS—an international, interdisciplinary network of approximately 200 scholars from philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and history. Established in Germany in 2015 and increasingly global in scope, NEWS is explicitly non-partisan and non-sectarian, aiming not to advocate specific political agendas but to foster rigorous inquiry across ideological lines. It is in this space of pluralistic yet rigorous liberal inquiry that the anthology was conceived.

The volume, Professor Horn explained, emerges from a three-part framing of liberalism’s contemporary challenges. The first question: Does classical liberalism need to rethink its relationship with democracy? This question recognizes the historical ambivalence within liberal thought toward majority rule and popular sovereignty, sometimes prioritizing the rule of law and institutional constraint over participatory processes. The second question: Can liberalism be reformulated—conceptually or institutionally—in ways that withstand the populist challenge? And third: How do digital transformations impact liberal democratic governance, especially as technologies potentially empower both authoritarian control and radical democratization?

Professor Horn underscored that populism’s threat is not merely rhetorical but structural. Drawing from thinkers like Jan-Werner Müller, she affirmed that democracy requires pluralism, and that liberalism—rooted in freedom, equality, and diversity—cannot coexist comfortably with populist projects that seek homogeneity, personalization of power, and political antagonism. Populism, in its more pernicious forms, threatens to reconfigure society into clientelist regimes, eroding liberal democratic norms from within. Thus, the liberal challenge is to defend democratic institutions without falling into illiberal strategies in the process.

Central to Professor Horn’s argument was a nuanced critique of liberalism itself. While rejecting populist anti-liberalism, she emphasized the need for internal reform and self-critique. Classical liberalism, she argued, must confront its blind spots—especially its often reductive economic focus and historical indifference to the psychological and sociocultural dimensions of political life. This detachment, she suggested, has weakened liberalism’s capacity to offer compelling responses to the grievances that fuel populist support.

Professor Horn’s presentation moved beyond abstract critique to outline the structure and insights of the Liberal Responses to Populism volume. Divided into four thematic parts, the book begins with conceptual analyses of populism, followed by empirical discussions of political responses, normative proposals for liberal reform, and engagements with influential thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe, Michael Sandel, and Isaiah Berlin. Several essays within the volume stood out in Horn’s summary. Max Friebe’s piece, for instance, explores how populist appeals often express a yearning for representation and recognition—an insight echoed by Bruno Godefroy’s earlier remarks on constituent power. Another contribution by Aristotle Tziampiris explores how populism corrodes liberal democracy by morphing it into a clientelist system—a gateway to authoritarianism that is difficult to reverse.

Professor Horn also highlighted contributions that explore more constructive liberal strategies. Essays examining the role of civic virtues, the revival of decentralized governance (especially in areas like migration), and institutional pluralism offer pathways for reform that remain faithful to liberal principles while addressing populism’s roots. One particularly timely intervention considers the risks and opportunities presented by blockchain technologies—an emblem of digital transformation that intersects with debates about decentralization, transparency, and institutional trust.

Throughout her presentation, Professor Horn stressed the breadth and openness of liberalism as a tradition. Rejecting narrow or doctrinaire definitions, she insisted that liberalism encompasses a wide spectrum—from ordoliberals to social liberals—and can draw from both center-right and center-left sensibilities. The task, then, is not to ossify liberal orthodoxy, but to renovate it, ensuring that it remains responsive to the challenges of the 21st century while preserving its core commitment to individual dignity, institutional pluralism, and democratic deliberation.

Professor Horn closed by inviting further engagement with the volume, emphasizing that it was conceived not as a definitive answer, but as a springboard for debate and reflection. Her presentation served as both an introduction to a collective scholarly effort and a call to action for liberals confronting a volatile political landscape: to reaffirm their principles, to rethink their frameworks, and to resist the temptation to sacrifice liberal values in the name of expediency.

In sum, Professor Horn’s intervention offered a deeply considered, self-reflective, and interdisciplinary approach to one of the central political questions of our time. Rather than retreating into dogma or despair, she advocated for an intellectually honest and reform-oriented liberalism—one that confronts populism not with authoritarian mimicry, but with renewed democratic conviction.

Julian F. Müller: Liberal Responses to Populism

At the ECPS Conference 2025, Professor Julian F. Müller (University of Graz) also delivered a compelling philosophical intervention during Roundtable 2. Speaking in continuity with Professor Karen Horn—his co-editor of the newly published volume Liberal Responses to Populism— Professor Müller shifted the discussion from liberal reform strategies to a more fundamental inquiry into the epistemic foundations of populism itself.

Professor Müller began by contextualizing his remarks within the broader editorial project. While the book includes their joint exploration of “crypto-democracy”—a technologically enabled model for liberal-democratic reform—his Oxford presentation focused instead on his individual theoretical work, published recently in Episteme. His goal was to offer a precise and conceptually robust account of populism, one capable of distinguishing it from adjacent but distinct political positions such as conservatism.

From the outset, Professor Müller insisted that “getting populism right” is not a mere academic exercise but an urgent political necessity. Misidentifying populism, he argued, leads to diagnostic errors, ineffective remedies, and a dangerous flattening of ideological distinctions. He illustrated this point through a stark comparison: the respectful political disagreements voiced by Senator John McCain in contrast to Donald Trump’s conspiratorial, delegitimizing rhetoric about Barack Obama. Without conceptual clarity, Professor Müller warned, we risk conflating principled conservatism with demagogic populism.

Turning to existing theories, Professor Müller systematically critiqued two influential models. The first is Ernesto Laclau’s discourse-based theory, which defines populism as a rhetorical strategy of constructing “the people” against “the elite,” unified around empty signifiers like “America First.” For Professor Müller, this theory’s flaw lies in its overreach: if all politics is populist in Laclau’s framework, the term loses discriminatory power. It becomes impossible to distinguish between democratic mobilization and illiberal manipulation.

The second model Professor Müller addressed was Cas Mudde’s “thin-centred ideology” approach, which posits that populism hinges on a moral dualism between a pure people and a corrupt elite. While more analytically discrete than Laclau, Mudde’s model, Professor Müller argued, fails to explain a critical aspect of populist behavior: hostility toward democratic institutions. Even if citizens share moral values, they still require institutional mediation to resolve instrumental disagreements—such as how best to achieve economic growth or safeguard national security. Mudde’s model, Professor Müller claimed, does not account for this institutional deficit in populist politics.

In response to these theoretical shortcomings, Professor Müller presented the core of his own contribution: a deductive theory of populism grounded in four axioms. While he did not enumerate each axiom in full during the brief presentation, he emphasized that these foundational premises allow us to derive a wide range of empirical patterns characteristic of populist behavior. Among these patterns are the populists’ rejection of compromise and pluralism, their deep distrust of institutions and intellectual elites, their preference for direct democracy and charismatic leadership, and their habitual invocation of conspiracy theories and “fake news.”

The distinctive contribution of Professor Müller’s theory lies in its epistemic framing. Populism, he contended, is not merely a political style or strategy—it is an epistemological stance fundamentally incompatible with the norms of liberal democracy. Liberal democratic theory, from John Stuart Mill to Karl Popper and contemporary deliberative democrats, rests on the assumption that human judgment is fallible, that truth is contestable, and that disagreement is a normal outcome of free public reasoning. In contrast, populists believe truth is self-evident and univocal—already known by “the people”—and only obstructed by corrupt elites, bureaucrats, or intellectuals. This epistemic certainty, Professor Müller warned, dissolves the very foundation of democratic legitimacy, which is predicated on negotiation, compromise, and the open-ended search for shared understanding.

Professor Müller’s ultimate diagnosis is stark but illuminating: populism is not just a threat to liberal democracy because of its procedural violations or authoritarian impulses; it is a threat because it rejects the epistemic humility upon which democratic discourse depends. By treating disagreement as betrayal and dissent as treason, populism delegitimizes pluralism at its root.

In conclusion, Professor Müller’s remarks provided an incisive complement to the themes raised by Professor Horn. While Professor Horn explored institutional and ideological reforms within the liberal tradition, Professor Müller pushed the conversation deeper—toward the cognitive and epistemic conditions that sustain democratic life. His presentation underscored the importance of epistemology in political theory and positioned the fight against populism not only as a battle over institutions or rhetoric, but as a defense of intellectual openness, fallibilism, and deliberative engagement. In this respect, Liberal Responses to Populism emerges not just as an edited volume, but as a timely philosophical intervention in the democratic crises of our time.

Conclusion

Roundtable II of the ECPS Conference 2025—“‘The People’ in and against Liberal and Democratic Thought”—offered a powerful testament to the intellectual and normative complexities involved in defining “the people” within democratic theory, especially in an era marked by populist turbulence. With interventions traversing political epistemology, constitutional theory, liberal reform, and philosophical inquiry into affect and rhetoric, the session advanced the conference’s overarching ambition to unsettle and reconceptualize foundational democratic categories.

Each speaker brought distinct disciplinary perspectives to bear, yet converged on a shared insight: that “the people” is not a static referent but a contested and often dangerous construct, simultaneously invoked to legitimize political authority and obscure pluralism. Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith’s notion of listening as an “impossible concept” foregrounded the performative and often depoliticizing invocation of the people in democratic discourse—unmasking the rhetorical mechanisms through which representation is claimed but not enacted. Her call for an “audibility justice” expands the terrain of democratic theory to include sensory and affective registers, reminding us that political voice is not only about speech but about being heard in structurally just ways.

Professor Bruno Godefroy’s proposal for a presentist conception of the people advanced this interrogation into constitutional temporality, arguing that democratic legitimacy must stem from the authority of the living generation. His emphasis on periodic constitutional renewal as a democratic safeguard challenges both populist nostalgia and liberal entrenchment, offering a framework that is as normatively robust as it is institutionally concrete.

Meanwhile, Professor Karen Horn and Professor Julian F. Müller turned the lens inward on liberalism itself. While Professor Horn called for an adaptive, self-critical liberalism that resists both dogmatism and despair, Professor Müller’s epistemological critique of populism underscored how liberal democracy depends not just on institutions, but on the shared acceptance of fallibility and contestation as democratic virtues. Populism’s threat, they argued, is not merely institutional but epistemic.

Together, these contributions demonstrated that the concept of “the people” is not merely a tool of populist mobilization but a central site of philosophical and political contestation. Roundtable II thus reaffirmed the value of interdisciplinary dialogue in the struggle to preserve—and reimagine—democracy in the face of populist encroachment.

Note: To experience the panel’s dynamic and thought-provoking Q&A session, we encourage you to watch the full video recording above.