ABSTRACT
The manifestation of various forms of populism across the globe has become an arresting and often disturbing phenomenon in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, although the term is notoriously difficult to define. While Marx and Engels determine to exorcise ‘nursery tale’ suspicions of a ghostly exercise of Communist power through the explicit formulation of their party manifesto, the contours of populism are left tentative, indistinct and contestable. Thirty-two academics gave presentations at the four-day colloquium, which took on the atmosphere of an intensely focused think-tank. The call for papers opened by asking whether ‘the emergence of what we might understand as a global populism demands a reconsideration of the limits of institutional forms of democracy and its cultures’. Benjamin Moffitt builds inventively on the discursive model to arrive at a carefully substantiated inductive theory of populism as political style.
