The political meaning of “populism” (and “populist”) has become notoriously difficult to define. In the United States, it once had a fairly clear definition, referring to the People’s Party, which was founded in 1892 to represent the interests in particular of poor and middling farmers and to challenge the two major parties, Democrats and Republicans,…
Author: Howard Brick
Howard Brick (Louis Evans Professor of History, University of Michigan) studies the history of American social theory since the Civil War. He is author of Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism (1986); Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (1998); Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (2006); and with Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since 1945 (2015). Currently director of UM’s Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, he is working on a general history of American thought and culture, 1948-1963, and a study of the development, from the 1930s to the 1980s, of world-oriented social theory in the United States.