Inventing “Populism”: Notes for the Genealogy of a Paranoid Concept
Department of Political Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 20123 Milano, Italy
Genealogy 2022, 6(1), 2; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010002
Received: 25 October 2021
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Revised: 2 December 2021
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Accepted: 18 December 2021
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Published: 24 December 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Genealogy of Populism: Concepts, Ideas and Movements)
This article proposes a “genealogical” rereading of the concept of “populism”. Following the idea of “genealogical” analysis that was suggested by Michel Foucault, the aim is to show the “political” logic of the reinvention of the concept of “populism”, which was carried out between the 1950s and 1960s by the social sciences in the United States. First, this contribution reconstructs the history of the concept, identifying five different phases: (1) Russian populism of the late nineteenth century; (2) the Popular Party in the United States; (3) the Perón and Vargas regimes in Argentina and Brazil, respectively; (4) the reformulation carried out by the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s; and (5) the subsequent extension of the concept to Western Europe. It is argued that the decisive turning point took place in the 1950s when the social sciences “grouped” the traits of heterogeneous movements into a single theoretical category.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Palano, D. Inventing “Populism”: Notes for the Genealogy of a Paranoid Concept. Genealogy 2022, 6, 2. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010002
AMA Style
Palano D. Inventing “Populism”: Notes for the Genealogy of a Paranoid Concept. Genealogy. 2022; 6(1):2. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010002
Chicago/Turabian StylePalano, Damiano. 2022. "Inventing “Populism”: Notes for the Genealogy of a Paranoid Concept" Genealogy 6, no. 1: 2. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010002
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