POPULISM AND THE HISTORIANS: RICHARD HOFSTADTER AND THE BIRTH OF A GLOBAL POPULISM DEBATE

This article revisits the debate on 'populism' set off by Richard Hofstadter's 1955 classic of American historiography The Age of Reform. Hofstadter's revisionist reading of the late nineteenth-century 'big p' Populist movement as an anomic status revolt fed a powerful strand of social science and political commentary in the 1950s and 1960s, popularized by pluralist intellectuals such as Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, Peter Viereck and Seymour Martin Lipset. Although Hofstadter's claims saw fierce contestation in the 1960s and 1970s - notably in work by Lawrence Goodwyn, Robert McMath and Comer Vann Woodward - his vision continued to condition the language of the global social sciences for subsequent decades. Adopting a cross-disciplinary view, this article reads the Hofstadter-controversy as a crucible of the Cold War academe, both methodologically and politically. It ends on the Hofstadter controversy as key to a paradox in today's global populism debate: an inability to include and account for the original, self-declared populist movement in world history.