The repugnance with which the words ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ are uttered these days is a familiar feature of the political scene. The former Italian prime minister Mario Monti appeals to people to avoid ‘a return to the past and populism’. The French president, François Hollande, warns against ‘dangerous populist excesses’ (‘as in Italy’), while his finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, in his turn, expresses the fear that one-sided austerity programmes may ‘nourish a social crisis that leads to populism’. Other epithets used to describe populism include ‘aggressive’, ‘virulent’, ‘uncivilized’. No one knows why this creature of the ‘saloon bar’, ‘incited by swaggering ham actors’, is always ‘ridden’—but even the impeccable German Free Democrats have ‘decided to ride the tiger of populism’. If the Austrian Social Democrats head ‘back to the roots’ it is in a principled way, not that of ‘a cheap, vote-getting populism’. Populism is always an ‘anti-systemic’ threat, not less so in its newest, ‘digital’ variant.footnote¹ And so on.

Amid this anxious unanimity, one thing stands out: the concept of populism is regarded as self-evident, as if we all know what is being referred to. The truth is that political scientists have been debating its meaning for at least fifty years. In a famous 1967 conference on the question at the London School of Economics, the keynote lecture by the us historian Richard Hofstadter was already entitled ‘Everyone Is Talking About Populism, but No One Can Define It’. The discussion was unintentionally comic at times. While Margaret Canovan listed seven forms of populism, Peter Wiles enumerated no fewer than twenty-four defining characteristics, but proceeded in the second half of his text to the exceptions—the populist movements that did not exhibit these features.footnote² In short, as the label comes to be applied to the most diverse movements, the phenomenon itself has become increasingly elusive. It would be easier to list what has not been defined as populist. At the same time, as we shall see, the social category from which it has been derived historically, ‘the people’, has all but vanished from political discourse. This essay will offer an explanatory hypothesis for the trajectories of both ‘populism’ and ‘the people’; but first we need to trace something of their history.

That history began, according to Wiles, as far back as the seventeenth century, with the Levellers and the Diggers. It includes the Chartists, the us Populist Party, the Narodniks and Socialist Revolutionaries in Russia, Gandhi in India, Sinn Féin in Ireland, the Iron Guard in Romania, Atatürk’s Kemalism in Turkey, the Alberta Social Credit Party, Tommy Douglas’s Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, the Institutional Revolutionary Party under Cárdenas in Mexico, the Acción Popular of Belaúnde Terry in Peru, Poujadism in France and Julius Nyerere’s socialism in Africa. Not to mention Nasserism in Egypt, Peronism in Argentina, the Social Democratic Party and the Brazilian Labour Party in Brazil, the Dominican Revolutionary Party (prd) in the Dominican Republic, the National Liberation Party in Costa Rica, Acción Democrática in Venezuela, Castroism in Cuba and military reformists over half the world as imitators of Nasserism. The list continues into the late twentieth century, taking in the Northern League in Italy, the ‘ethno-populisms’ that flourished in the ruins of Yugoslavia and Silvio Berlusconi, whose strategy has been defined as ‘tele-populist’.footnote³ Mussolini’s fascism, with all its variants and imitations, has naturally been included in this galaxy. Also de jure enrolled are Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement and the various versions of ‘anti-politics’, from Germany’s Pirates to Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party in Holland and the Occupy movement, for, ultimately, ‘99 per cent against the 1 per cent’ is as good a summary as any other. At the far end of the spectrum, however, the Tea Party too has been defined as populist.

As can be inferred from this catalogue à la Prévert, searching for a definition that would fit all these cases is a fool’s errand. As long ago as the 1980s Rafael Quintero and Ian Roxborough made the obvious suggestion of deleting the term from the social sciences.footnote⁴ But this is not a decision that can be taken on an individual basis: one may throw the term out the window, but others will continue to use and disseminate it. The alternative is precisely to regard its vagueness and self-contradictoriness as its defining characteristic. This was the route taken by Pierre-André Taguieff, for whom populism is a political style which ‘can shape diverse symbolic materials and be fixed in a multiplicity of ideological positions, assuming the political colour of its place of reception’. The same line is taken by Yves Surel who, in an essay on Berlusconi, argues that populism does not represent a coherent trend, but corresponds to ‘a dimension of the discursive and normative register adopted by political actors’. Populism, writes Ernesto Laclau, ‘is not a fixed constellation but a series of discursive resources which can be put to very different uses’, ‘floating signifiers’ that convey different meanings in different historical-political conjunctures.footnote⁵ The idea that populism works when regarded as a certain kind of rhetoric, applied in different ways in different situations, is appealing—but in truth, merely registers its polysemy and returns it to sender. However, there is a third possible line of attack. It is this: populism is not a self-definition. No one defines themselves as populist; it is an epithet pinned on you by your political enemies. In its most brutal form, ‘populist’ is simply an insult; in a more cultivated form, a term of disparagement. But if no one defines themselves as populist, then the term populism defines those who use it rather than those who are branded with it. As such, it is above all a useful hermeneutic tool for identifying and characterizing those political parties that accuse their opponents of populism.

This approach has the further, not insignificant advantage of making it possible to introduce a temporal dimension into the discussion. For populism has not always been deployed as it is today, and has not always been a definition of others. Until the end of the Second World War, many people and parties gladly defined themselves as populist, which for them was equivalent to being popular. Theirs was the ‘people’s party’: when it was founded in the usa, the People’s Party was also called the Populist Party. Its platform, adopted in Omaha in 1892, will have a familiar ring:

We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized . . . The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labour impoverished.footnote⁶

Through to the middle of the twentieth century, then, many would have been proud to be called populist. The battle-lines were clear: those who stood on the side of the people and those who were against them; those who wished to see the plebs become the people and those who believed that the people were nothing but plebs. This followed in the tracks of an age-old polarity, in which not only populists but the people themselves were an object of contempt and insults, a tradition dating at least to the sixth century bc when, according to Herodotus, the Persian Megabyzus opposed those who wished ‘to call the people to power’ thus: