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Catherine Fieschi is Founder and Executive Director of Counterpoint, a London-based consultancy on social and cultural dynamics. She was previously Director of Research at The British Council and Director of the leading think tank, Demos. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London and a Senior Fellow of the London School of Economics. Her books include Fascism, Populism and the French Fifth Republic.
A succinct, comprehensively researched and intelligible account of the definitional contours, history, multiple origins, and multifaceted nature of ‘populism’. Fieschi disentangles populism from fascism and the ‘extreme right’ and identifies the core memes of ‘populocratic’ sentiment and ressentiment. In doing so she highlights the seductiveness of its myth of 'the people’, and the growing dangers it poses to democratic pluralism. These dangers can only grow in a digital age in which individuals can narcissistically confuse their voice with vox populi. -- Roger Griffin, Oxford Brookes University Catherine Fieschi does what many claim to do but few achieve: write an original book on populism. Far-reaching and thought-provoking, Populocracy is a must read for practitioners and scholars alike. -- Cas Mudde, Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor of International Affairs, University of Georgia Catherine Fieschi’s brilliant analysis of populism draws on her decades of deep research to bring the colour, the people, the real-life experiences that explain the 'jiu-jitsu' politics beyond the survey data and theoretical models. This book gives the vital missing links between the history of populism and its contemporary forms, puncturing the simplistic explanations with analytical rigour and first-hand evidence from her personal encounters with populists like Jean-Marie Le Pen long before others took them seriously. -- Heather Grabbe, Director, Open Society European Institute, Brussels Essential reading -- Danny Dorling, University of Oxford Hardly anyone knows populism better than Catherine Fieschi. In this excellent book, she has something new to say about why the confusion and discontent of our age has taken the specific form of populism. -- Simon Kuper, columnist, Financial Times Vivid and illuminating ... combines conceptual analysis with real examples to chart the historic evolution of populism. -- Ben Hall, Financial Times This is an absorbing volume and we are in the hands of an absorbing writer – a juggler of paradoxes, an assailer of conventional wisdom and a challenger of foolish optimisms. For students of politics, their teachers, politicians and commentators it provides a fascinating meditation on a key problem of twenty-first-century existence. -- Derek Hawes, Journal of Contemporary European Studies Accessible, thought-provoking and innovative. Fieschi’s concept of authenticity provides an intriguing way of describing the populist imaginary. -- Ben Margulies, LSE Review of Books
