Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2004)

9(3), 241–252

Populism for political theorists?

MARGARET CANOVAN

Emeritus Professor of Political Thought, Keele University

ABSTRACT Political theorists do not in general pay much attention to populism;

are there any good reasons why they should do so? This paper will consider a
number of positive answers to this question. Most attention has so far been paid
to issues of methodology—can we define ‘populism’? Recently there has also
been some interest in the relation between populism and democracy, but there
are two further topics that may be worth investigating, first the possibility of a
distinctive political ideology that might be called ‘populist’, and second the
meanings and significance of populism’s core concept, the elusive ‘people’.

Few political theorists believe that populism deserves their attention. Echoing
earlier fears of ‘the many-headed monster’,1 recent students of politics have
indeed tended to treat populist movements as pathological symptoms of some
social disease.2 The aim of this paper is to suggest some reasons why main-
stream political theorists might nevertheless find it worth their while to take an
interest in populism.
It may help to start with an analogy. Fifteen years ago, mainstream political
theorists were not in the habit of paying any attention to nationalism. If they
noticed it at all, they assumed that nationalist politics did not raise any
interesting theoretical questions. However, when the collapse of communism
prompted reflection by putting nationalism on the political agenda the issues it
raised turned out after all to be intellectually interesting, generating a large and
sophisticated theoretical literature. Now that populism in its turn is rising up the
political agenda, is there scope for a similar development? Populism has a bad
name among intellectuals, but there are some inducements for political theorists
to overcome their distaste and take a serious interest in it. I shall argue that at
least four aspects of the topic offer scope for theoretical investigation, though
this paper can offer only a preliminary survey of the territory.
In summary, the four are as follows:

I. Methodological issues involved in identifying ‘populism’.

II. Issues to do with the relation between populism and democracy.
III. The possibility of a distinctively populist ideological position.

ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/04/030241-12 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1356931042000263500
MARGARET CANOVAN

IV. Issues raised by the meanings and ambiguities of populism’s core concept,
‘the People’.

I. Methodological issues
What is ‘populism’? Do the various political phenomena labelled in this way add
up to a distinctive general something? What sort of thing are we talking about,
with what kinds of features?
The ‘populism’ that is most likely to be in the news today is the so-called
‘New Populism’ of the past decade or so: a collection of movements, broadly on
the right of the political spectrum, that have emerged in many established liberal
democracies, challenging existing parties and mainstream policies.3 As political
phenomena go, ‘New Populism’ may seem relatively easy to identify and
characterise (although, as we shall see later, it raises interesting issues about the
relationship between populist and democratic appeals to ‘the people’). Typically
confrontational in style, these movements claim to represent the rightful source
of legitimate power—the people, whose interests and wishes have been ignored
by self-interested politicians and politically correct intellectuals. These chal-
lengers do not in general call themselves ‘populists’, and despite some links they
have not so far seen themselves as branches of an international ideological
movement, but although there are many differences between their policy pre-
scriptions, they do share a distinctive style and message. Cases generally
recognised as falling into this category, despite many differences, include Ross
Perot’s 1992 Presidential campaign in the USA, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation
Party in Australia, and Preston Manning’s Reform Party in Canada. Of the many
European cases, the most long-lasting is Jean Marie Le Pen’s Front National in
France; other particularly conspicuous examples include Jörg Haider’s Freedom
Party in Austria; Umberto Bossi’s Northern League in Italy, and the brief
eruption in the Netherlands of the movement led by Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn’s
assassination just before the Dutch general election in 2002 dramatically illus-
trated one of the typical features of these New Populist movements, their
overwhelming dependence on personal leadership rather than institutional party
structures.
Claiming to speak for the forgotten mass of ordinary people, New Populists
take on the colour of their surroundings.4 The positions they campaign for and
the values they express depend on local concerns and the kind of political
establishment they are challenging. Invariably critical of professional politicians
and the media, they claim to say aloud what the people think, especially if it has
been deemed by the elite to be unmentionable. New Populists often call for
issues of popular concern to be decided by referendum, by-passing professional
politicians and leaving decisions to the people. By way of emphasising their
closeness to the grassroots and their distance from the political establishment,
they also tend to use colourful and undiplomatic language. They are most
comfortable in opposition, though some have had enough electoral success to
find themselves sharing power. The strength of the populist challenge to

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established liberal democratic politics was most dramatically symbolised by the

success of Jean Marie Le Pen in reaching the second, decisive round in the 2002
French Presidential election.
Methodological problems arise not so much in recognising similarities among
these movements as in trying to decide what is ‘populist’ about them and what,
if anything, they have in common with other past and present political phenom-
ena known by the same label.
Even within contemporary Western politics, the term ‘populism’ is used not
only for the confrontational politics that mobilizes ordinary people against the
establishment but also for a classic tactic available to political insiders: a kind
of ‘catch-all’ politics that sets out to appeal to the people as a whole. Like New
Populism, this kind of politics is often highly personalised. A professional
politician who is an effective communicator sets out to appeal across old
demarcations, playing down divisions along the lines of party, class or ideology
and stressing the unity of the whole people. This inclusive language of ‘the
people’ has been much used by Tony Blair, who successfully repackaged
Britain’s Labour Party as ‘New Labour’, shorn of its exclusively socialist and
working-class associations. Discussing ‘Blairism’, Peter Mair speaks of pop-
ulism as ‘a form of governing in which party is sidelined or disappears; where
the people are undifferentiated, and in which a more or less “neutral” govern-
ment attempts to serve the interests of all’.5
What does Blair-style ‘populism’ have in common with Le Pen’s, and what
links either of them with all the other so-called ‘populisms’? These range from
nineteenth-century English Chartism6 to Russian Narodniks7 and from the US
People’s Party of the 1890s8 to Latin American regimes such as those of Juan
Peron and Hugo Chavez.9 What justification, if any, is there for putting all these
into a single pigeonhole marked ‘populism’? The term’s form suggests affinities
with ideological movements like socialism, liberalism or nationalism, but al-
though all these other ‘isms’ encompass a wide range of variation, each gains a
degree of coherence from a continuous history, willingness on the part of most
adherents to identify themselves by the name, distinctive principles and policies
and so on. Populism does not fit this pattern. There is no acknowledged common
history, ideology, programme or social base, and the term is usually applied to
movements from outside, often as a term of abuse. Members of the US People’s
Party were unusual in calling themselves ‘Populists’, for most of those conven-
tionally given the label do not themselves embrace it. It is hard to imagine there
being any mutual acknowledgement of political kinship between (say) Tony
Blair, Hugo Chavez and Jean Marie Le Pen, nor the three of them joining in
common veneration of ancestors among the narodniki and the US People’s
Party.
All attempts at a general characterisation of populism have been contentious,
with some analysts offering definitions or lists of essential characteristics, others
finding only more tenuous connections and loose family resemblances between
the different candidates.10 Earlier analysts often assumed that the common
ground they were looking for must be a socio-economic base; more recent

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studies tend to focus on populist discourse, a rhetoric of appeals to ‘the

people’.11 More broadly, what is it that defines an ‘ism’, and is the answer the
same for populism as for other ‘isms’? Theorists with an interest in such
questions surely ought to add ‘populism’ to their list of problematic cases.
Meanwhile, the recent stress on populist rhetoric raises an issue that goes
beyond matters of definition. If populism is indeed characterised by appeals to
‘the people’; if, moreover, these appeals are finding an audience within mature
Western democracies, then how is populism related to democracy? Populist
movements are widely regarded, especially in Europe and Latin America, as
threats to democracy. Yet New Populists explicitly claim to be true democrats,
setting out to reclaim power for the people.

II. Populism and democracy

This area has already prompted some interesting work, particularly in connection
with European politics.12 The dominant approach relies on what might be called
the two-strand theory of democracy. According to that theory (current in many
versions) modern liberal democracy is an uneasy combination of two fundamen-
tally different sets of principles, liberal on the one hand and populist/democratic
on the other. ‘Liberalism’ is concerned with individual rights, universal princi-
ples and the rule of law, and is typically expressed in a written constitution;
whereas the ‘democratic’ strand is concerned with the sovereign will of the
people, understood as unqualified majority rule and typically expressed through
referendums.
According to the two strand theory, modern liberal democracies always have
tensions between these two strands, and populist movements threaten the fragile
compromise by insisting on undiluted democracy. ‘All populist movements
speak and behave as if democracy meant the power of the people and only the
power of the people.’13 The impression given by the two strand theory is,
however, that although populism raises practical problems for liberal democracy,
its theoretical significance is limited. But the two-strand theory, while persuasive
in some respects, is in other ways a misleading oversimplification, for reflections
on populism raise wider questions about democracy.
I have argued elsewhere that contemporary populist movements inadvertently
highlight democracy’s complexities, which go further than the two strand theory
allows. It is possible to analyse these complexities in different ways, taking
slices that cut sections at different angles. Cutting one kind of slice, it may be
illuminating to think of modern democracy in terms of Michael Oakeshott’s
distinction between the politics of scepticism and the politics of faith, or as
having pragmatic and redemptive faces. Populist mobilisations of the kind led by
Pim Fortuyn or Ross Perot seem clear cases of the politics of faith—but then so
do liberal mobilisations like the American Civil Rights movement; the faith/
scepticism axis is separate from the populist/liberal axis.14
Cutting a different section across the complexities of modern democracy can
lead one to what might be called the Bagehot Problem. In his book on The

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English Constitution, talking about the role of the monarchy in parliamentary

government, Walter Bagehot remarked that ‘The best reason why Monarchy is
a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of
mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any
other.’15 There are analogies with a difficulty that arises in contemporary
conditions, and that amounts to a democratic paradox. The democratic project is
to bring the mass of the people into politics; but making this possible requires
institutional arrangements that are too complex for most people to grasp in
imagination. The modern democratic mechanisms that can empower people—
fair electoral procedures such as proportional representation, processes of con-
sultation and discussion, channels through which issues can be raised and
policies shaped—add up to a tangled network that cannot make sense to most of
the people it aims to empower. Looking at the system from the grassroots, we
see no evidence that we as individual members of the population are exercising
power; neither can we see a collective people doing so on our behalf.
Ever since the advent of mass politics in the nineteenth century, the normal
device for making politics comprehensible to the population has been ideology
(in Michael Freeden’s sense)—a conceptual structure that provides a map of the
world of public affairs and links theory to action.16 But democratic ideology,
which is centred on the notion of the sovereign people, generates expectations
that are inevitably disappointed. Populists would say that the reason for those
disappointed expectations is that power has been stolen from the people. The
trouble is that if any power is to be effectively given to the people-as-population
of a large and complex modern society, this can be done only by means of
institutions and procedures that are intricate to the point of being baffling.17
I have argued in this section that reflection on the emergence of populist
movements within established democracies can shed light on modern democracy
itself, and do so more broadly than the ‘two strand’ theory allows. One of the
disadvantages of that theory is that its focus on liberal fears of populism diverts
attention from crucial issues to do with the nature and authority of the sovereign
people. In claiming power for the people and calling on those people to redeem
the polity, populists are after all highlighting fundamental assumptions of
contemporary politics. Their insistence inadvertently shows up the embarrassing
obscurity of those truisms of modern political culture. That is an argument to
which I shall return in the final section of this paper. First, however, let us look
briefly at a rather different reason why political theorists might take an interest
in populism.

III. Populism versus progress

There is a gap in the current ideological spectrum that could be filled by a
distinctively populist picture. The key issue here is belief in Progress and the
intellectual and political vanguardism that goes with it. Apart from religious
fundamentalisms (and the kind of old-fashioned Burkean conservatism that is
effectively extinct) all the influential modern ideologies promise some sort of

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progressive liberation. They are all universalistic, promising that in the long run
everyone is going to be liberated and made better off; but because they are
progressive, someone or other has to be in the vanguard, showing the way to the
rest.
This vanguardist way of thinking is so familiar that we rarely notice it: not
only is it built into liberalism, socialism and feminism, it is present even in
modern conservatism, as in the ‘trickle-down’ theory of economic growth. And
yet belief in progress is very hard to reconcile with equal respect for all human
beings. It has the inescapable effect of giving a privileged status to the advanced,
thereby devaluing the opinions, beliefs and way of life of the mass of mankind.
This is true even of the most egalitarian forms of liberalism and socialism; there
is always a vanguard further up the escalator of progress, whereas most people
are to be simply the recipients of liberation, education, welfare, Westernisation
and so on. The version of liberal imperialism favoured by our present leaders is
a striking example, but even the anti-growth, anti-globalisation agitators are not
exempt.
We are so used to thinking in these terms that it is quite hard to imagine
questioning them, and yet we need only recall the history of the twentieth
century to see that it is not absurd to have doubts about vanguardism. We could
all draw up a list of projects that seemed obviously ‘progressive’ at the time, and
that were imposed by vanguards on the population. There was Soviet collectivi-
sation, for instance—recall Sidney and Beatrice Webb coming back from Russia
in the 1930s and saying, ‘We have seen the future, and it works’. Eugenics was
supported by all ‘progressive’ opinion in the 1920s and 1930s; nuclear power
was the wave of the future and the answer to all our energy problems; rehousing
people in tower blocks seemed a good idea at the time. So it might be worth
considering alternative ways of thinking, including a populist mind-set.
An anti-vanguardist populism can be conceived in a number of different ways.
One of them might provide a rationale for direct democracy, in Ian Budge’s
sense of continual electronic referendums,18 but there are other directions in
which one might go. There is for example the version of anti-vanguardist
populism explored in the 1990s in the American journal Telos, which denounces
top–down rule by a supposedly enlightened ‘New Class’ of intellectuals and
bureaucrats, and proposes devolution of power to local communities, whether or
not they choose to run themselves in ways that are politically correct.19
A more far-reaching version was suggested in the early twentieth century by
G. K. Chesterton.20 The intriguing thing about it is that in attacking belief in
progress and vanguardism it also questions the assumption that the latest
generation are the most ‘advanced’ and that we can ignore older arrangements
and convictions. It casts doubt therefore on the sovereignty of those people who
are in power now, even if they happen to have majority support at present. For
Chesterton, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind means that we cannot
write off previous experience, as modernists habitually do: we have to pay
serious attention to tradition. ‘Tradition’ may sound like the slogan of Burkean

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conservatives, but Chesterton makes it into a principle of populist democracy.

This is what he says:
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the
democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of
those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being
disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the
accident of death.21

The implication of this populist way of thinking is that instead of assuming that
the latest way of doing things must be the best, long-standing popular customs
and traditions need to be taken seriously.
The occupational hazard of intellectuals who do pay attention to populist ideas
is that they are inclined to make fools of themselves idealising ‘the People’, like
the Russian Narodniks in the 1870s who ‘went to the people’, expecting to find
ideal community and revolutionary fervour. Despite this danger, the nexus of
populism with scepticism about progress and vanguardism may be worth
thinking about. For one thing, it has affinities with the issues that arise in trying
to spread liberal democracy to non-Western countries, especially those with
deep-rooted popular religion, above all Islam. Perhaps we need to consider what
it would actually mean to pay decent respect to the opinions of mankind.
What the outcome of such reflections might be is hard to say; for the present,
I simply raise the issue and leave it hanging in the air as I go on to a fourth and
last aspect of populism that should interest political theorists: populism’s central
concept, ‘the people’.

IV. ‘The People’

It seems astonishing that so little attention has been paid by political theorists to
this term and its meanings. It is after all a key term not only within populist
politics but in modern politics more generally. Unlike ‘freedom’, ‘justice’, or
even ‘nation’, ‘people’ has attracted hardly any analysis, even by theorists of
democracy. But is conceptual analysis actually the right way to approach it?
‘People’—‘the people’, ‘a people’—is extraordinarily open and variable in its
significance. What the term signifies is perhaps not so much a concept as a series
of discourses about political identity, discourses used by partisans of many
different causes to fight many different political struggles. I have no quarrel with
that view: the various forms of discourse-based approach to ‘people’ are highly
illuminating,22 but there is room also for a different kind of approach, one more
akin to the literatures on concepts such as ‘freedom’.
One long-overdue task is simply clarification. ‘People’ has many different
political senses, and very few of those who use it notice when they slip from one
sense to another.23 It is worthwhile to map those ambiguities, and doing so
brings interesting things to light. In the first place it highlights the peculiarities
of the English term ‘people’. Like its equivalents in many languages, it is
derived from the Latin populus and has three basic senses: the people as

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sovereign; peoples as nations, and the ‘common people’ as opposed to the ruling
elite. Uniquely, however (as far as I know) ‘people’ in English also means
human beings as such, individuals in general. Although this use of the term is
grammatically distinct, its meaning seeps into and colours the other uses, and
that introduces two extra elements of political ambiguity. It makes the sovereign
people look like a collection of individuals as well as a collective body, and it
implies that ‘people’ and their rights are universal, crossing the boundaries that
confine particular ‘peoples’.
That extra dimension of Anglophone ambiguity is connected with a second
feature that comes to light once one maps the meanings of ‘people’. Those
ambiguities turn out to be the key to important and neglected issues for
democratic politics in particular. For the various political struggles that have
stretched and shaped ‘people’ to accommodate different political identities have
also made it the repository of a series of unresolved political problems that are
half-articulated and half-concealed by the term’s contradictions. The central
problem (to which all the others are connected) has to do with the collective
authorisation by the sovereign people from which governments derive their
legitimacy.
This is a notion that is boringly familiar but at the same time problematic in
all sorts of ways. For convenience’s sake one can divide up the problems it poses
into two pairs of issues, the first two concerned with boundary issues and the
others with issues of authority.24

Identifying the people

Who are the ‘people’ who form the ultimate source of political authority? The
adult population of each state in the United Nations? That is much too simple.
Externally, we cannot take for granted that a state’s borders correspond to the
boundaries of a people; internally, at the same time as referring to the polity as
a whole, ‘the people’ as a category has often been narrower than the population,
sometimes because it referred to an exclusive group of privileged citizens, and
sometimes (conversely and confusingly) because it meant precisely those ex-
cluded from that elite, the ‘common people’. Externally and internally, the
blurred boundaries of the people reflect conflicts and dilemmas that continue to
bedevil democratic politics.

Ourselves and others: external boundaries

The ‘peoples’ credited with the right to self-determination may at times be
defined by existing state boundaries; much of the notion’s force, however, is the
plausibility with which it can be used to challenge such boundaries. The most
bitterly contested claims to self-determination are often those where (it is
claimed) frontiers and people do not coincide. In some cases a ‘people’ is held
to extend across an existing border. ‘We are the people’, the chant of the Leipzig
demonstrators in 1989, changed rapidly into ‘We are one people’—one people

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with the population of West Germany. In contrast to that unifying conception of

the true boundaries of the people, the collapse of communism in Yugoslavia led
rapidly to secessionist movements by minorities claiming to be separate peoples,
and thence to civil war and to the horrors of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against those
thought to belong to a different ‘people’.
In the cases both of Germany and Yugoslavia, ‘people’ was understood
in ethno-national terms, and there are powerful reasons why this should
be so, but republicans and internationalists claim that a self-governing
‘people’ does not have to fit that pattern. It was in city-states, not nations,
that the conception of popular sovereignty was first articulated; more recently,
the example of the USA has seemed to some to show that a single people
with powerful political solidarity is possible in conditions of ethnic diversity.
Can the EU bind its component peoples into a single people, as European
visionaries hope, and how can it, or any other polity claiming authority from the
people, justify closing its borders against migrants who are themselves people?
Should not popular sovereignty and self-determination include all people every-
where? Defining ‘the people’ raises important issues, in theory as well as
practice.

Whole and part: internal boundaries

By immemorial tradition, ‘people’ (like populus and demos before it) has meant
both the whole political community and some smaller group within it. Odder
still, it has often happened that one group identified as ‘the people’ was a
political elite from which most were excluded, while the term ‘people’ was at the
same time used to denote those same excluded lower orders. From the point of
view of radicals challenging the existing political order, these ambiguities have
been a godsend. The long struggle for the vote in Britain hinged on claims by
the ‘common people’ that they were by rights the largest part of the true
sovereign people—the whole polity—and therefore entitled to join and outvote
the privileged political ‘people’.
Although universal suffrage has put paid both to the notion of the common
people and to the old notion of a privileged ‘people’, the elastic inner boundaries
of ‘people’ still have great political significance. The populist call to
‘give politics back to the people’ exploits the ambiguity according to which
‘the people’ is first understood by contrast with the power-holders (and therefore
as something less than the population at large) and then expanded to wield
the authority of the sovereign people as a whole. Populists seem to suppose
that nothing could be clearer or more straightforward than the project of
‘giving power to the people’. Instead of curling our lips at such simplicity, we
might be wise to look more closely at the complexities of the sovereign people.
All I shall try to do here is to indicate something of the range of that
investigation.

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The sovereign people in action and in myth

How—if at all—could the people who are the source of legitimate authority
actually exercise that ultimate sanction, and what, in any case, is the nature of
this supposed authority? Is it (in the strictest sense) mythical? What prompts
these questions is that ‘the people’ as sovereign refers to two apparently quite
different things. On the one hand it refers to something collective, abstract,
dignified and mysterious: an entity—‘the British people’ or ‘We, the people of
the United States’—that has a continuous existence and history, transcending
and outliving its individual members. On the other hand it refers to those
individual members themselves, a collection of ordinary, ever-changing people
with their separate lives, interests and views. The English language matches this
ambiguity with grammatical uncertainty. In English, any collective noun can
take either a singular or a plural verb—‘the team has won the trophy’ and ‘the
team have lost the match’, but the issues involved here are not merely linguistic.
Although in French and German ‘peuple’ and ‘Volk’ may be unambiguously
singular, the problem of relating this collective entity to its collection of
individual members remains.
This problem has two aspects. In the first place, can the notion of the people
as source of political authority have any clear or practical meaning? Are there
any circumstances in which we can say that actions by some individual people
really do carry the authority of the people as a whole? Second, what is it about
this people (composed, after all, of ordinary individual people) that makes it
authoritative? How large a role in sustaining the notion is played by myths, and
do those myths have any more solid basis?

The sovereign people in action

If ‘the sovereign people’ refers both to a collection of transitory individuals and
to a collective entity that continues over the generations, how are we to
understand the relation between collection and collectivity? Crucially, what does
it mean to say that the people have/has exercised their/its authority? Can we
make sense in theoretical terms of the notion that individual people form an
authoritative collective people? There are plenty of other collective bodies—
from firms to football clubs—that seem to be able to possess and exercise
powers in a comprehensible and effective way; why is it so much harder to give
a clear account of ‘the people’ as a collectivity?
Supposing that we can form a clear idea of an authoritative ‘people’ that is
both a continuing whole and a collection of individuals, can we point to actions
in which its authority has been exercised? Do general elections transfer that
authority to politicians? Do referendums reveal the will of the sovereign people?
Might popular consent be more authentically revealed by the outcome of a
public debate on some issue—or perhaps in the mass demonstrations dubbed
‘people power’? Should we perhaps conclude that popular authorisation can
never be given adequate institutional form because it belongs to a more fluid

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aspect of politics, in which brief episodes of popular mobilisation are encapsu-

lated in myths?

Myths of popular authority

What is there about the people to make them the ultimate political authority? If
we think of ‘the people’ simply as the population—a collection of ordinary
ignorant human beings—then their claim to be regarded as the fount of political
legitimacy is not obvious, as anti-democrats since Plato have pointed out. It is
of course possible to make a negative case for the involvement of the general
population in decision-making, on the grounds that this can limit rulers’ abuse
of power by making them take notice of as many interests as possible, but the
political discourse of popular sovereignty has always had a more positive tone,
asserting or implying that the attribution of sovereign authority to the people is
much more than a prudential device. Thinking about the enthusiasm that greeted
the outbreak of people power in Eastern Europe in 1989, or about the pathos of
the first post-Apartheid election in South Africa, we must recognise that the
notion of the sovereign people is credited with a quality that lifts it far above
people as ordinary human beings. It is that numinous quality that encourages so
many to claim that they are the true voice of the people, and this special quality
also finds expression in myths.
We can examine myths of past foundation and future redemption in which the
people figures, and the way in which such myths colour our view of popular
movements happening before our eyes, but how we should regard that mythic
sovereign people? We could take a robustly cynical view, treating the notion
simply as a manipulative device. A less dismissive response might perhaps
suggest that our familiar myths of the people as founder and redeemer of polities
have rather more substance than that. If there is a kernel of truth hidden in the
myths, it might be a truth about the basis of political power and political
community. On that view, the hidden truth of the myth is that ordinary
individual people do have the potential (however rarely exercised) to mobilise
for common action. On occasion, such grass roots mobilisations generate
formidable power, bringing down a regime; more rarely, they sometimes manage
to make a fresh start and to lay the foundations of a lasting political com-
munity.25 Seen in that light, it might be the rarity, contingency and brevity of
such momentous events that makes popular authority so hard to pin down, and
‘the sovereign people’ so mysterious and vague a notion, but these speculations
cannot be developed here.
What I have tried to do in this paper is merely to sketch some topics
connected with populism that political theorists might do well to explore. The
topics I have mentioned are those that happen to interest me, and do not by any
means exhaust the possibilities. Let me therefore conclude with an invitation to
political theorists. Instead of adding to the literature on the few fashionable
topics, why not have a look at populism?

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Notes and references

1. C. Hill, ‘The many-headed monster’, in C. Hill (Ed.), Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century
England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), pp. 181–204.
2. H.-G. Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe (London: Macmillan, 1994); H.-G. Betz,
‘Conditions favouring the success and failure of radical right-wing populist parties in contemporary
democracies’, in Y. Mény and Y. Surel (Eds), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Houndmills:
Palgrave, 2002); S. Immerfall, ‘Conclusion: the neo-populist agenda’, in H.-G. Betz and S. Immerfall
(Eds), The New Politics of the Right—Neo-Populist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies
(London: Macmillan, 1998).
3. P. Taggart, ‘New populist parties in Western Europe’, West European Politics, 18, 1 (1995), pp. 34–51;
P. Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000).
4. Taggart, ibid.
5. P. Mair, ‘Populist democracy vs party democracy’, in Y. Mény and Y. Surel (Eds), Democracies and the
Populist Challenge (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), p. 96
6. C. Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle—Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the
Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class—Studies in
English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); P. Joyce,
Visions of the People—Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991).
7. F. Venturi, The Roots of Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1960); R. Wortman, The Crisis
of Russian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).
8. L. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1976); J. D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961).
9. Di Tella, ‘Populism into the twenty-first century’, Government and Opposition, 32 (1997), pp. 187–200.
10. G. Ionescu and E. Gellner (Eds), Populism: its Meanings and National Characteristics (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969); E. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory—Capitalism—Fas-
cism—Populism (London: Verso, 1979); M. Canovan, Populism (London: Junction Books, 1981); M.
Canovan, ‘Two strategies for the study of populism’, Political Studies, 30, 4 (1982), pp. 544–552; D.
Westlind, The Politics of Popular Identity—Understanding Recent Populist Movements in Sweden and the
United States (Lund: Lund University Press, 1996).
11. M. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Y. Mény and
Y. Surel, Par le peuple, pour le peuple—le populisme et les démocraties (Paris: Fayard, 2000); M.
Canovan, ‘“People”, politicians and populism’, Government and Opposition, 19, 3 (1984), pp. 312–327;
Westlind, ibid.
12. Y. Mény and Y. Surel (Eds), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002).
13. Mény and Surel, ibid., p. 9.
14. M. Canovan, ‘Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy’, Political Studies, 47, 1 (1999),
pp. 2–16.
15. W. Bagehot, The English Constitution (London: Henry S. King, 1872).
16. M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
17. M. Canovan, ‘Taking politics to the people: populism as the ideology of democracy’, in Mény and Surel,
op. cit., Ref. 12.
18. I. Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
19. K. Anderson, R.A. Berman, T. Luke, P. Piccone and M. Taves, ‘The empire strikes out: a roundtable on
populist politics’, Telos, No. 87, 1991, pp. 3–37; Telos staff: ‘Populism vs the new class’, No. 88, 1991,
pp. 2–36.
20. M. Canovan, G. K. Chesterton—Radical Populist (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).
21. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Fontana, 1961).
22. Laclau, op. cit., Ref. 10; Kazin, op. cit., Ref. 11; Westlind, op. cit., Ref. 10; Mény and Surel, op. cit., Ref.
12.
23. Canovan, op. cit., Ref. 11.
24. These arguments are further explored in my forthcoming book on The People (Cambridge: Polity Press,
to be published).
25. H. Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1963).

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