ABSTRACT
Margaret Canovan, the English political theorist who helped to expand the breadth and depth of research on populist movements, noted in The People that “relations between populists and the academy have seldom been comfortable.” This fact, she says further, “can make it hard for analysts to view such movements objectively” (2005, p. 81). Such an uncomfortable relationship between populists and their observers is hardly exclusive to academia. In fact, in other areas – such as in many mainstream media outlets and in the circles of political establishment – it has openly evolved into outright hostility to populist movements and actors. Moreover, populism is widely used as a term of abuse, often as no more than as a byword for simplicity, primitivism, and impending threat to the world as it is. Populist politics, on this view, is, in short, an out-of-bounds way of doing politics.
