Populism is the defining political phenomenon of our age and yet it remains one of the most persistently misunderstood. Dismissed by some as the politics of ignorance, celebrated by others as the authentic voice of the dispossessed, it has generated more heat than light in the public discourse of the early twenty-first century. The Economic Roots of Populism cuts through this confusion with a rigorous, historically grounded, and morally serious argument: that populism is not a cultural pathology or a psychological aberration, but a structurally predictable response to economic systems that have failed visibly, measurably, and unjustly to deliver security, dignity, and broadly shared prosperity to the majority of those who live within them.Drawing upon the rich tradition of political economy from Adam Smith and Karl Polanyi through Thomas Piketty, Dani Rodrik, and Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and engaging critically with the major theoretical frameworks of Ernesto Laclau, Cas Mudde, and Jan-Werner Muller, this book traces the economic roots of populism across two millennia and six continents. It begins with the grain politics of ancient Rome and the peasant revolts of medieval Europe, establishing that the essential dynamic of populist politics the mobilization of the many against the economic and political privileges of the few is as old as organized economic life itself. It then moves through the major structural forces of the modern era: the rise of extreme inequality and the collapse of social mobility, the deindustrialization of once-thriving manufacturing communities, the broken promises of globalization, the political earthquakes triggered by financial crises, the deliberate cruelties of austerity politics, and the emergence of a vast new precarious workforce denied the security and representation that stable employment once provided.The books geographical scope is genuinely global. It examines the Rust Belt communities of the American Midwest and the post-industrial towns of Northern England, the Latin American Pink Tide and the resource nationalism of the developing world, the agrarian distress of rural India, and the territorial injustice of Frances gilets jaunes. In each context, the same structural logic is revealed: economic abandonment produces political alienation, and political alienation finds its most available expression in the populist demand for a reckoning with the elites perceived as responsible for it.Critically, the book does not stop at diagnosis. It examines what happens when populists actually govern the characteristic gap between the transformative promise and the frequently disappointing or actively destructive reality and it asks, with urgency and analytical honesty, what liberal democracy would need to do differently to defuse the economic time bomb before its political consequences become irreversible. The answers it offers rooted in the historical evidence of the post-war settlement, the Nordic model, and the institutional achievements of societies that have successfully managed the tensions of contemporary capitalism constitute a politics of economic dignity: redistribution, representation, and recognition as the only durable antidotes to the structural conditions that make populism democracys most persistent challenge.The Economic Roots of Populism is essential reading for economists, political scientists, policymakers...
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