This book emerges out of our teaching and our dissatisfaction with the available books in film history. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's now classic volume, Film History: An Introduction, best represents the main tendency, and it provides students with an absolutely indispensable narrative history of film that focuses on the aesthetic development of the medium. However, while we recognise that students need to be familiar with this kind of history, if only so that they know the key points of reference in relation to which most existing scholarship is produced, we were also concerned that students should not be given the impression, from early in their studies, that film history is largely about the processes of aesthetic development. However, while Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery's equally classic volume, Film History: Theory and Practice, provides the main alternative, and focuses on the wide variety of objects, methods and practices involved in ‘doing’ film history, it presupposes a great deal of knowledge about the narrative of film history, the very knowledge provided by books such as Bordwell and Thompson's.

In one sense, then, we felt that a book was needed that combined both tendencies: that provided both a narrative history of the medium as it is usually presented, while also introducing students to a wide range of different objects and methods. We also felt that students could best understand what was involved in the practice of historical film research if, rather than simply describe objects and methods in the abstract, we presented them with specific exemplars of those types of research; if they saw examples of the actual practice of film history.

With the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941, the United States entered into the Second World War. In the process, the film industry and its personnel were recruited for the war effort. Directors such as Frank Capra and John Ford were conscripted into the armed forces where they made a series of documentaries that supported US involvement. Capra, for example, made a seven-part documentary series, Why We Fight (1943), that was shown to all recruits to the armed forces. The series used existing footage produced by both the Allies and the Axis powers to establish the case for US involvement. Ford, by contrast, made The Battle of Midway (1942), in which he used 16mm cameras to capture the action and received both a medal for injuries sustained during the conflict and an Oscar for best documentary.

Hollywood was also enlisted in other ways. The Office of War Information (OWI) worked with the film industry to mobilise support for the war and maintain morale during it. In the process, a whole host of films sought to illustrate the dangers of the menace posed by the Axis powers. For example, Basil Rathbone played Sherlock Holmes in a series of films during the war years, many of which featured diabolical Nazi plots that were foiled by the brilliant detective. The OWI was particularly concerned to create a sense of national unity in which internal tensions were downplayed and the United States was presented as a diverse but unified country.

Populism and Democracy

To the best of my understanding, Peter Worsley (1969) provides us with one of the first intelligent proposals of how to link populism and democracy. He takes his cue from the double heading of populism suggested by Edward Shils, the supremacy of the will of the people and the direct relationship between the people and the government (p. 244). Worsley makes two claims based on this. One is that these notions apply to a wide variety of situations, which is why he argues that we should regard populism as an emphasis, ‘a dimension of political culture in general, not simply as a particular kind of overall ideological system or type of organization’ (p. 245). This is Worsley's way of saying that populism cannot claim any conceptual purity for itself, or that the ‘as such’ of populism is not such as it is always already contaminated and cannot be determined outside a context. The other claim is that one can plot the contact between the people and the leadership on a continuum that goes from the total non-involvement of the masses at one end of the spectrum to the anarchist ideal self-regulating commune at the other (p. 245). He uses this scale to distinguish Right from Left, although it seems more apt as a criterion to differentiate elitist and participatory politics. Having said this, Worsley also identifies the limits of an argument that rests solely on the directness of the link between leaders and masses, for in complex societies this must necessarily be a symbolic or a mystifying directness.

The Verbal Smoke Surrounding Populism

Neopopulism and neocorporatism are regular entries in our political lexicon, yet the meaning assigned to the prefix ‘neo’ is not as clear in the former as it is in the latter. The rather unambiguous meaning of neocorporatism derives from the conceptual stability of its classical referent in the mainstream literature of political science. In the case of neopopulism, the prefix has not fared so well, partly due to the contested status of populism as such.

There has been a cluster of meanings associated with the term populism. The account offered by the sociology of modernization prevailed throughout the 1960s, at least in the developing world. A classical exponent of this approach is Germani (1969), who sees populist mobilization as a deviation in the standard path from traditional to modern society. Di Tella proposes a modified yet equally functionalist interpretation. He conceives populism as the result of the convergence of two anti-status-quo forces, the dispossessed masses available for mobilization and an educated yet impoverished elite that resents its status incongruence – the gap between rising expectations and job satisfaction – and broods on ways of changing the current state of things (Di Tella 1965: 49–50). Other theoretical interpretations move away from this view of populism as an alternative road to modernize class-divided, traditional societies. Lasch (1995) sees it as a response to the crisis of modernity. In his initial neo-Gramscian approach, Laclau (1977) conceives populism as a dimension of the popular-democratic imaginary and argues that its class-nature varies in accordance with contending discursive articulations of the concept.

The first theme in our discussion of modes of politics that push liberalism to its edges is the debate on difference and identity. The frame for this debate was the culture wars of the 1980s and early 1990s around issues such as abortion, sexual preferences, race relations, curriculum content or the place of religion in public life. It was stronger in the USA than in other Western countries, but it nonetheless had an impact in all of them. An optimistic appraisal of this impact would point out that it made us more sensitive to cultural, gender and racial difference as well as non-economic forms of subordination. A more cautious assessment would counter that the culture wars displaced politics into morality and made progressive thought less concerned with economic exploitation and class inequalities. It ultimately blunted its radical edge, given that advocates of difference were critical of liberal democratic politics but felt quite comfortable advancing their agenda within that setting.

Semiotics and Some Programmatic Consequences of the Culture Wars

While both accounts of the consequences of the culture wars are correct, in order to ascertain this we must first position the debate on difference and identity. I want to introduce it by looking at an intellectual footnote that is now largely forgotten but had a surprising influence on this whole affair, namely, the inspiration that semiotics provided in the early stages of the war on words.

‘Agitprop’ used to be the bread-and-butter of radical movements aiming to change the order of things. It meant stirring the masses into action, mostly to follow a partisan roadmap pointing to socialism or to mobilize their latent energies for various anarchist initiatives, although later fascist and populist movements adopted it as standard practice too. Activists engaged in agitprop in a variety of ways, whether by extolling the virtues of the party line amongst trade unionists, selling partisan press in the streets, publishing pamphlets attacking the government as well as the rich and the powerful, or denouncing class-divided society as the source of the wretched condition of the people. This was its pedagogic role, educating the masses for action. They also confronted their adversaries, organized strikes and demonstrations, and occasionally embarked on ‘armed propaganda’ consisting of exemplary direct actions, like robbing banks to finance the organization's activities or setting bombs (often in government buildings) to frighten their enemies and elicit enthusiasm amongst their followers. This was the ideological and political role of agitation. Both the pedagogic and the ideological-political aspects were meant to justify the group's fitness to lead and to show that another world was both desirable and possible. This made agitprop an integral part of emancipatory politics.

Today the term ‘agitprop’ has lost its political lustre and groups outside the ideological fringe have all but abandoned it. It survives as a hip term amongst ‘hacktivists’ and culture bloggers and in the narratives of historians and erstwhile sympathizers of socialism and trade unionism. Talk about emancipation, central to radical politics from 1789 to 1968, has come to be seen as an anachronism in the context of liberal-democratic consensus.

The Mourning After

What is it that we mourn when we mourn revolution, especially since the term has fallen into disrepute in the age of liberal-democratic consensus? At first sight, we mourn very little. Ever since the fall of Communism and, perhaps just as significantly, starting with the polemic around the ‘end of history’ predicated as a consequence of that fall, its use in political discourse seems irremediably anachronistic, an enunciation closer to the language of historians than to the doings of serious activists and progressive thinkers.

So, who mourns? Certainly not the advocates of the free market, for they have every reason to celebrate. Those who once believed in revolution have now moved on. Having made their peace with the loss, they accept the closure of the idea of radical change and conceive politics along the path of pragmatism. If they still invoke revolution, or its manifold ghosts, they do so ironically in order not to sound risible or pathetic. Others, however, continue to mourn. They do so as one mourns a dead lover or a departed friend, with grief, at times with nostalgia, but always with the feeling of loss. This is a loss of direction ensuing from the collapse of a project or horizon for action, in this case the horizon of a more just society with a greater sense of solidarity, also called socialism for the sake of brevity.

What does it mean to speak of politics on the edges of liberalism, and why should this matter for political thought? Let me begin to answer this by saying something about what these essays are not. Their aim is not to identify and criticize the underside of liberalism, if by this one understands the negative side effects it has had on, say, equality or solidarity. There is plenty of literature on this already. Nor are they another entry in the list of interventions that take issue with the claim that we live in a post-historical world where liberalism rules. There is a lot on this too, and keeping a scorecard on the ins and outs of the polemic about the end of history has become otiose. What these essays try to do instead is to look at a grey zone of phenomena where one is tempted to suspend the qualifier ‘liberal’ when describing politics, or at least where it is difficult to assert unambiguously that what happens within it is governed by a liberal code alone. It is also a zone where experimentation with political innovation questions the liberal consensus. The ‘edges’ of the title thus refer to phenomena that either push the envelope of liberalism or seek to go against and beyond it.

Do these edges authorize us to infer by implication that there is something like a normal region of liberal politics? The quick and incomplete answer is that there is one, but mainly at the level of the liberal imaginary. Its regulative idea is that political performances entail sovereign individuals casting their votes, political parties representing the people and competing for the right to shape the will of the state, and elected representatives deliberating on their behalf in legislative bodies in between elections.

Whether in libraries or in front of a computer screen, intellectual labour tends to be a solitary enterprise accompanied by bouts of creative anxiety. Yet it also has a collective dimension, as we sometimes outline our preliminary ideas and intuitions in classes, circulate our drafts amongst friends and colleagues to hear their reactions, or submit them to the criticism of our peers at workshops and conferences. I have been fortunate enough to have had readers like Marta Lamas and the group of friends that met monthly in her house in Mexico City to discuss our work for over five years – Roger Bartra, Roberto Castro, Bolívar Echeverría, Fernando Escalante, Benjamin Mayer, Nora Rabotnikof and Ilán Semo. I also benefited from other readers, more scattered around the world, like Willem Assies, Margaret Canovan, Juan Martin and the anonymous referees of the journals that published earlier versions of these chapters. I thank them all for their generosity, although Nora deserves a special acknowledgement, as she was patient enough to read the drafts of several chapters, sometimes more than once, and to point out in her ever so subtle way some of the weaknesses in my arguments.

José Carlos Rodríguez, my friend, colleague and fellow traveller in Paraguayan political activism in the 1980s, is in many ways my intellectual alter ego. He revised virtually all the chapters, and while at times we had major disagreements, especially with regard to the interpretation of populism, his critical gaze helped me identify and work out many half-baked arguments and inconsistencies that otherwise would have made this book weaker than what it is.

Whose Agenda for the Twenty-first Century?

We live in an age when the tired paradigms of public perception reign supreme. Stereotype is all. In this respect, the new millennium is no different from the old. Samuel P. Huntington famously talked of the potential clash of two civilisations, a Western Christian and an Eastern Islamic. The Kosovan crisis of 1999 provided an interesting example of that within the former communist Yugoslavia, with Serbian forces of the Christian Orthodox faith conducting a policy of ethnic cleansing against Kosovan Albanians. The profound irony of this particular conflict, in the light of Huntington's prognostication, was that ‘the West’ in the form of the NATO Alliance, allied with, rather than fought against, Kosovan Albanian Islam.

Much more omnipresent is that paradigm of public perception whose essence is the clash of two seemingly immovable and invincible stereotypes, rather than civilisations: that beloved in Europe and the USA, especially since 11 September 2001, of a fanatically terrorist Islam, and that beloved by some ‘fundamentalist’ Muslims of an utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt West. Both stereotypes are fostered and fed by a press hungry for scandal and saleable copy, but the Western stereotype, at least, is part of an ancient tradition.

While rejecting such stereotypes, this volume will explore other paradigms and vocabularies, more firmly based in reality, often with particular reference to the concepts of tradition and authority in Islam. As it does so, frequent comparisons will be made with Christian concepts of tradition and authority by way of illuminating the Islamic dimension.