Populism

The word populism, on some occasions with a lowercase “p” and on others with an uppercase one, has an extensive range of often quite different meanings and usages. Populist (again, with both lower-and uppercase variants concerning the initial “p”) is both a noun and an adjective derived from the “-ism” noun, although the “-ist” noun and adjective are often even more widely and loosely used than the parent “-ism” noun. This is equally true of the further adjective populistic. The “-ism,” “-ist” and “-istic” (in the former of the two following examples) words are applied to movements as the diverse as the U.S. agrarian political party of the 1890s and a French literary movement of the late 1920s and 1930s. Application of the “-ist” or “-istic” designations to individuals is, as will become clear, a practice confined largely to the second half of the twentieth century, although many individuals of an earlier era have by some later commentators or biographers been retrospectively thus designated. Those who have in recent times attracted such labeling include former U.S. president Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973), former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976), and English critic, novelist, and author G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936).

All three words derive from the Latin populus, variously meaning “a people” and “the people,” the latter in the Roman context being the Roman people, either embodying the whole Roman state or the people as distinct from the senate. Further Latin meanings of populus were more pejorative, covering less kindly notions such as “the populace” and “the multitude.” Some of this range of cognate meanings and usages survives in the ways in which successor words in Latin-derived languages are still used (for example, il popolo in Italian, le peuple in French, the people in English) and in concepts that are semantically similar if not linguistically related in numerous other languages (for example, das Volk in German, het volk in Dutch, narod in Russian). The word populism itself emerged in English only toward the end of the nineteenth century, apparently generalized from its initial application to the doctrines and membership of the U.S. political party, the People's Party (which is discussed below). However, there are numerous examples of individuals and movements existing before the end of the nineteenth century to whom some twentieth-century analysts have applied the word populist, even though the term was not contemporaneously used. Examples of such individuals are the English political radical William Cobbett (1762–1835) and the Russian writer Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910), the latter known for his hostility to science and his celebration of aspects of Russian peasant life. Similarly, movements such as the seventeenth-century Levellers and Diggers, which emerged as radical opponents of England's Commonwealth (established by Oliver Cromwell after the English Civil War), have also been labeled populist.