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Mosaic of the contemporary populist radical right: A review essay

Publication at Faculty of Social Sciences |
2021

Abstract

This review follows the structure of the book, exploring the key elements raised by the author, starting with the introduction and proceeding through each of the three sections. The introduction discusses the limits of the friend versus foe narrative in the absence of clarity by drawing upon the theoretical lit- erature on populism and its relationship to democracy (Canovan, 1999; Urbinati, 2014, 2019).

This review will focus the discussion around the main themes of each section, namely; the tensions between freedom and sovereignty in the first section, nationalism and antisemitism over time in the second section, and the rejection of the emancipatory promise of modernity by reactionary elements of the radical right in the third section. This review will conclude by assessing the limits and potential of the book, drawing on Popper's paradox of tolerance (Popper, 2020).