[lbo-talk] INSTANT POPULISM: A short history of populism old and new

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Wed Dec 1 20:16:21 PST 2010


nobody ever said it wasn't a social or political phenomena... and nobody said it wasn't an important element of American politics... and nobody said it wasn't worth studying. What we said was that populist politics is not rooted in any kind of social scientific analysis and that, as such, it can be and has stood for a wild diversity of things across eras and within movements many of which (both across and within) are completely incommensurable. It tends to be little guys we know and like = good and big guys we distrust and assume are corrupt = bad AND it tends to appeal, in romantic fashion, to earlier more edenic times before the big bad guys messed everything up. As I am sure you know, many populists have rooted their positions in the work of Adam Smith - as the agrarian populists of the 19th C did. This might seem to suggest that there's a social theory there but such a stance conflates moral and economic philosophy with social science.

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 10:49 PM, <c.berlet at publiceye.org> wrote:


>
>
> A response to the idea that populism is too vague to define and has no
> heuristic value?
>
> -Chip
>
>
> > On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 10:05 PM, <c.berlet at publiceye.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Quite a few scholars have actually produced a body of work analyzing
> >> populism, especially right-wing populism:
> >>
> >> Berlet, Chip and Matthew N. Lyons. 2000. Right-Wing Populism in America:
> >> Too Close for Comfort. New York: Guilford Press.
> >>
> >> [many more] ....snip
> >
> >
> > yes, a bunch of us have read a number of these, what is this list in
> > response to?
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319



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