The Political Theory of American Populism

‘Populism’ is the central concept of our political era. Winning majorities, ousting incumbents, attacking courts and even locking up opponents, parties speaking on behalf of “the people” have flourished in the past decade. Yet these ‘populist’ parties share little with the movement that invented the term – the American Populists of the late nineteenth-century. Few academic fields rival the recent output of work on populism, and yet political philosophy still suffers from a significant historical deficit and a consequent set of critical biases. This postdoctoral project returns to the late nineteenth-century American Populists, reconstructing their political thought to enrich our contemporary populism debate. With American Populism as its focal point, this project shows how the late nineteenth-century offers philosophical resources to today’s critical characterisations of populism. Comprising four major research journal publications and one monograph, the project centres on two questions: (1) What was the political philosophy of the original American Populist movement? and (2) How does this political philosophy affect and destabilize the underpinnings of contemporary work on populism in political philosophy?