Paper short abstract:

The gap between academic elites and the "common people" is one of the central motives in populism throughout history. The presentation provides some examples and develops a set of interpretations, discussing populism as a possible analytical focus for the cultural studies of class relations.

Paper long abstract:

At the beginning of all references to the "common people" there is a gap - an alleged gap between the educational elites and the people. Academics and intellectuals, it is claimed, have lost contact to the ordinary life of the masses. This argument is an integral part of the current "populist moment", as Chantal Mouffe puts it in her new book about left-wing populism. But it is also a central issue of social movements and cultural reform throughout history. Above all, the "gap discourse" is an instrument of re-regulating and re-positioning imaginations of social order. It pretends to measure the distance between "the elites" and "the people" in order to bridge the divide between the two. By means of this narrative, political and cultural players of all varieties claim to be close to the common people, the imagined "heartland" (Paul Taggart) of society - and they pathetically claim to be the ones who can heal the wounds of social division. My presentation outlines some critical aspects in the history of populism with special regard to the gap discourse. Examples are taken from the fields of Social Reform in Imperial Germany, the history of Volkskunde/Folklore Studies in the German-speaking countries and, finally, current diagnoses of social and cultural division between "the elites" and "the people". Furthermore I will discuss how populism as a mode of adressing the "people" can be understood as an analytical focus for the cultural studies of class relations in general.