Populism. A Historiographic Category?

Populism is a category which is often abused in current public discourse. It is an issue that is usually looked at from the perspective of political science or cultural studies, while historians have rarely confronted it. Nonetheless, the study of historical cases of populism is a necessary preliminary task for an in-depth examination of the topic. This book opens up a channel of dialogue among political scientists, sociologists, philosophers and historians in order to launch a debate on the declination of the populist phenomenon. The essays here consist of the reflections of various scholars on several national cases through a survey conducted on a large temporal and spatial horizon, from the experiences developed in Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century to the more recent events of Ukraine’s revolution at the end of the twentieth; and from the first case of a populist party in the US to the examples of the Italian political scenario in the 1980s, in order to identify which historical perspective would be the most suitable for understanding populism and if populism can actually be considered a category that fits into the historical investigation of these phenomena.