Ad lapidem ► Dismissal
Ad litteram ► Letter
Ad orationem ►Matter; Strict meaning
Ad personam ► Personal Attack
AD POPULUM
Latin populus, “people”.
1. Populist speech
The label “populist speech” is both descriptive and evaluative. Such speech is stigmatized and is widely considered to be used to promote negative values, xenophobia and other irrational and brutal social phobias; to call for action based on uncontrolled emotion and poor analysis rather than cold rational conclusions; and to make indiscriminate promises, suggesting that the proposed solutions are the only possible ones, easy to implement, that they will work miracles, and will have no negative consequences.
The populist discourse appeals to immediate gratification, and is opposed to the hardship discourse of perseverance and slow improvement: “If you vote for me, you will have to accept sacrifices. But, later, maybe…”
“Populist” is the new label for ancient and modern demagogic speech, which develops a fraudulent discourse for the sake of purely short-term electoral gains.
1. Appeal to the beliefs of a group
The ad populum argument can be defined as an argument that starts from premises that are accepted by the audience, rather than from universal premises. Such an argument, therefore, would aim to achieve at obtaining adherence rather than truth (Hamblin 1970, p. 41, Woods and Walton 1992, p. 211).
According to the Socratic critique of assembly discourse as focusing on social persuasion when addressing the audience about their everyday affairs, to the detriment of transcendental truth, and moral rectitude, all political speech would be inherently populist, S. Probable. In this sense, all rhetorical or dialectical arguments would be ad populum. The ad populum argument is then no different from the argument based on the interests, beliefs and passions of the audience, i.e., the ex concessis, ex datis, or ad auditores argument.
2. Appeal to emotion
“We can define the paralogism known as argumentum ad populum as an attempt to win the popular assent to a conclusion by arousing the emotion and enthusiasm of the masses” (Copi 1972, p. 29; cited in Woods and Walton 1992, p. 213). The ad populum argument is negatively related to hatred and fanaticism, and not always positively related to enthusiasm: it gets caught in the general condemnation of passions, without taking into account the fact that on the one hand, emotions may or may not be justified, and that, on the other hand, good and bad arguments may be based on strong emotions, see Emotion.
This definition corresponds to the expression ad captandum vulgus “playing to the gallery”, i.e., to theatrical oratory, which is not an exclusive characteristic of politicians. The speaker becomes an actor. The criticism of ad populum joins the moral criticism of flattering discourse, and the criticism of enthusiasm, conformism and group effects in general, as “bandwagon fallacies” and alignment with the majority crowd (ad numerum), see Pathos; Emotions; Laughter; Consensus.
As in all cases of appeals to the passions, a substitution of the passions for the logos, and thus a lack of relevance may be suspected (Woods, Walton 1992, p. 215), see Vicious circle.
3. The argumentative orientation of the word people
The word people can have two opposing argumentative orientations. The individualist, who believes that all virtue resides in the individual, can use the scheme of the opposites to conclude that the crowd is inherently corrupt, and that any argument that appeals to popular sentiment is therefore fallacious. The people are always the populace, the madding crowd.
On the other hand, the adage vox populi vox dei, “the voice of the people, is the voice of God,” gives the people a kind of infallibility. The popular corruption argument mirrors the ad superbiam fallacy, that is the charge of pride (ad superbiam), a sin committed by those who consider themselves superior to an inherently corrupt people, see Dismissal; Collections (2).
Boldly relying on an effect of compositional effect, supported by two analogies, Aristotle supports the superiority of the many over the one:
According to our present practice assemblies meet, sit in judgment, deliberate, and decide, and their judgments all relate to individual cases. Now, each member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state is composed of many individuals. And just as a feast to which all the guests contribute is better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than any individual.
Again, the many are more incorruptible than the few; they are like the greater quantity of water, which is less easily corrupted than a little. The individual is liable to be overcome by anger or by some other passion, and then judgment is necessarily perverted; but it is hardly to be supposed that a great number of people would all be overcome by a passion and go wrong at the same moment. (Aristotle, Politics, III, 15. Jowett, p. 99)
— Perhaps “hardly to be supposed”, but historically well documented.
4. Populum and plebs: The people and the crowd
In Republican Rome, the appeal to the people, provocatio ad populum, was a right of appeal (jus provocationis) in criminal trials, a basic human right of the accused. As a last resort, an accused Roman citizen could take his case to the populus. The populus is the assembled people, constituted as a political-judicial body, in the comitia centuriata, the solemn assembly of the people, in which full citizens vote and make decisions. In these assemblies, the gods themselves speak through the voice of the people. The populus is thus very different from the vulgus or the plebs as random, unorganized whole.
This right is linked to Republican institutions: “Tradition claims that the provocatio ad populum was created by a law of the consul Publicola the same year the Republic was founded.” (Ellul [1961], p. 278). With the Empire, “the provocatio ad Cæsarem evicted the provocatio ad populum” (Foviaux 1986, p. 61), that is, that Caesar replaced the People.