This blog accompanies Anton Jäger’s Historical Journal article State and Corporation in American Populist Political Philosophy, 1877–1902

The study of the late nineteenth-century American Populist movement has long been one of the liveliest fields in American historiography. This stature definitely is fitting for one of the most formidable social movements in American history – and an uncomfortable outlier to today’s anti-populist consensus. From the 1870s to the 1900s, white and black Populists in the American South and Midwest built movements which knit workers and farmers together in a broad ‘producerist’ coalition, represented by organizations such as the Farmers’ Alliance, the Grange, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, and the 1891 People’s Party. This coalition radically remade their country’s republican tradition through the notion of a ‘co-operative commonwealth’, temporarily uniting black and white farmers in a common cause. They also broke with the individualism that characterised American agrarianism before, building a parallel co-operative economy in farmers’ clubs, agricultural brotherhoods, and labour unions.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most celebrated works of American history have been produced on this Populist ‘moment’ – from works by Vernon Parrington to Richard Hofstadter to C. Vann Woodward to Lawrence Goodwyn and Charles Postel. Despite this sustained attention, however, the intellectual roots of Populism have usually been neglected in favour of organisational, cultural, religious, or political narratives. What ideas and ideals animated these original populists? What political vision did they hope to achieve? And how did they confront challenges from political opponents? And what might these ideals mean for the ‘populism’ so familiar to us today?

My article in The Historical Journal (‘State and Corporation in American Populist Political Philosophy’) addresses these questions by providing a preliminary intellectual history of American Populism. In doing so, I take Populists seriously as political theorists who recast political ideas in their own time. I also seek to demonstrate their relevance for the contemporary populism debate. Recent scholarship on populism in this area has tended to present the phenomenon as a variant of direct democracy or ‘plebiscitarianism’, opposed to intermediary bodies, a feature consistently traced back to American Populism as well. In this account, American Populists opposed new discourses of corporate personhood in the late nineteenth century due to their tendency to distort natural bonds between peoples and leaders and disperse the popular will.

My article questions the tenability of this opposition through a close contextual engagement with original Populist texts. As the first self-declared ‘populist’ movement in modern history, Populists theorised about the usage of corporate personality for their own co-operatives. At the same time, they also put forward ambitious visions of American statecraft. Two genres of Populist writing are given particular attention to: their advocacy of the corporate form for their co-operative farm organising and, secondly a specifically statutory vision of state reform. None of these arguments should force scholars to regard Populism as an oracle or an exemplar. Rather, a historically grounded understanding of the original Populists might readjust the lens of current populism debates and historiographical conversations – thereby ‘returning populism to history’, as Federico Finchelstein so aptly put it.

Read the full article

Main image credit: People’s party candidates for President and Vice President 1892, Library of Congress