Images of the People. Populus, Plethos, Plebs and Ethnos

Numerous scholars have explored the genealogy of concepts such as “citizen”, “the people” and “sovereignty” from the perspective of the history of ideas and political sciences. In the last fifteen years, however, the academic interest in these analyses has been supplemented by lively debates that have occasionally reached the mainstream public arena in the Global North. In this context, social media platforms have played a major role, circulating innovative “images of the people” that tap in the history of political iconography. The essay focuses on the people as a performative entity whose contemporary visual instantiations deserve theoretical analysis. In particular, it combines the conceptual tools of political iconography with the framework delineated by a recent study about four meanings of the term “the people” (the people as “plebs”, as “populus”, as “ethnos” and as “plethos”) in order to analyse brief case studies, and to suggest the need to conduct more in-depth analysis of visual negotiations of “the people” on social media.