Il populismo: un'ideologia esile dalle forti radici culturali

The article deals with the mainstream approaches to populism, namely the strategic, the cultural, and the ideological ones, and aims to show their merits and shortcomings. In particular, the article stresses the relevance of the ideological approach that, according to Mudde, considers populism as a thin-centred ideology. Populism, in other words, represents an ideology with a restricted core of values or a narrow set of political concepts. Indeed, it is essentially centered on the idea of “people” as an omogeneous unity characterized by a collective identity and on the idea of popular sovereignty as the ultimate source of legitimacy. Despite its thinness, the ideology of populism has strong cultural roots. Indeed, the two aforementioned core ideas are strictly bounded to two different cultural traditions that affected the Western world for a long time: organicism, on the one hand, and the Rousseau’s thinking, on the other. The attention is finally focused on these different traditions and on the way they have been transmitted to the populist ideology.