Before it was a political insult, 'populism' named a French literary prize
In 1929 Léon Lemonnier published a manifesto for the populist novel, fiction that portrayed working-class lives with sympathy, and in 1931 Antonine Coullet-Tessier founded a prize for the genre. That literary chapter is one of several detours in the history of a word that later became one of politics' most overused labels.
Populism first appeared in English in 1858, in a translation of Alphonse de Lamartine, simply as the opposite of aristocratic. In the Russian Empire of the 1860s and 1870s it was attached to the narodniki, a left-leaning agrarian movement that wanted to hand power to peasant communes through radical land reform. Until the 1950s, academic use was confined largely to historians of the American People's Party.
Everything changed in 1954, when two publications appeared almost at once. In the United States the sociologist Edward Shils, studying McCarthyism, proposed populism as a name for anti-elite currents across American society. In Brazil the political scientist Hélio Jaguaribe, reacting to populist hype in the press, produced what is regarded as the first academic text on Latin American populism, treating it as a form of class conciliation. In the 1960s Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell recast the old People's Party as an outbreak of status anxiety and irrationality, while Latin American scholars, often Marxist in outlook, tied populism to modernisation and mass mobilisation.
Latin America had absorbed the term after the Second World War for charismatic leaders who mobilised people newly arrived in cities from the countryside. Those voters, drawn into elections for the first time in large numbers, were seen as slipping free of older clientelist controls such as the practice called halter voting, and they began to reshape national politics.
The word has drifted ever since. It has no agreed programme, no coordinated international movement and a long history of mistranslation, so scholars often call it vague or overstretched, applied to contradictory movements across continents. Its tone grew steadily more negative as academics and political opponents used it critically. Researchers noticed it recurring in Western democracies by the early 1990s, and after the upheavals of 2016 interest soared so sharply that the Cambridge Dictionary chose populism as its Word of the Year for 2017.
Source: Populism
