Rueda Garrido, Daniel: Laclau and Populism. Rhetorical Discourse as a Construction of ‘the People’ or as a Manifestation of a Shared Identity?

_Ethics and Politics_ 28 (1):1-13. 2026The aim of this article is to examine and discuss the hypothesis put forth by Ernesto Laclau in his On Populist Reason (2005) that the identity of a group or community is constructed rhetorically through the act of naming, whereby it universalises a particular demand. Conversely, it will be argued that this process serves to reaffirm a pre-existing identity. The aforementioned identity is constituted by the way in which individuals conceptualise what it mea