Reacting to the Politics and Economy Relation. The Reasons for Contemporary Populism

This paper attempts to interpret the contemporary forms of populism, in the light of the political and economic debate about the function of the state and the market as relevant modern institutions. Considering different economic perspectives and analysing them from an historical point of view, the paper describes the evolution of contemporary society, and the changing relevance of the political and the economic systems. Against the theoretical background of Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory (1984), a critical assessment of different economic approaches is proposed: it is argued that none of them has been able to tackle the generalized increase of social, economic, and individual problems, and the growing social exclusion. In contemporary modernity, social systems are becoming more and more intransparent to one another, and apparently unable to solve the problems for which they functionally evolved. The paper proposes that populism may be intended as a reactive adaptation of the political system to its inability to solve social and economic questions and suggests the necessity of a new paradigm to understand the growing complexity and mutual intransparency of social systems.