I am grateful to the Institute of Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen; IWM) in Vienna for the invitation to deliver the IWM Lectures in November 2013, on which this book is based. Klaus Nellen and his colleagues proved wonderful hosts, and I benefited greatly from discussions with them and the audience during those rainy fall evenings. Another stay at the IWM in the summer of 2014 helped me develop my ideas further.
Thanks also to the members of the Department of Politics in Princeton as well as the staff at the Center for Human Values (its director Chuck Beitz in particular), who enabled me to host a workshop on populism in 2012.
I am grateful to all those who, during that workshop and after lectures and seminars, talked with me about a topic that is of increasing concern to many people in Europe, the United States, and Latin America at the beginning of the twenty-first century—even if one cannot always be sure whether one is even talking about the same thing. (Richard Hofstadter once gave a talk with the telling title “Everyone Is Talking about Populism, but No One Can Define It”—a statement that seems not implausible today.)
My thinking about democracy and populism, for better or for worse, took shape in conversations with the following friends and colleagues (which is not to say that I could convince them of my theory): Andrew Arato, David Ciepley, Paula Diehl, Zsolt Enyedi, Gábor Halmai, Dick Howard, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Turkuler Isiksel, Dan Kelemen, Seongcheol Kim, Alex Kirshner, Mattias Kumm, Cas Mudde, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Ivan Krastev, Ralf Michaels, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Nadia Urbinati. Special thanks to Cristóbal for an invitation to Santiago and discussions with him and his colleagues at Diego Portales, and also to Balázs Trencsényi for very helpful conversations when completing the book in April 2016. I am also grateful to Koen Vossen and René Cuperus for information about Dutch politics.
This book draws on the following publications: “Populismus: Theorie und Praxis” (Merkur, vol. 69, 2015), “Parsing Populism: Who Is and Who Is Not a Populist These Days?” (Juncture, vol. 22, 2015), “‘The People Must Be Extracted from within the People’: Reflections on Populism” (Constellations, vol. 21, 2014), “Anläufe zu einer politischen Theorie des Populismus” (Transit, no. 44, 2013), “Towards a Political Theory of Populism” (Notizie di Politeia, no. 107, 2012), as well as a number of articles in Dissent, The New York Review of Books Daily, The Guardian, Le Monde, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
I am grateful to two editors, both for being patient and for being fast when it mattered: Heinrich Geiselberger, who helped with the German edition of this book, and Damon Linker, who proved an enthusiastic supporter of the American one.
Finally, I am indebted to my family. Special thanks to Heidrun Müller, who helped in various ways when I was completing the book.
This essay is dedicated to my children, who are experiencing their first presidential election campaign consciously and for whom various democratic vistas are wide open. I cannot aspire to be like Whitman, but I can perhaps pay homage by humbly copying the dedication to “him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between Democracy’s convictions, aspirations, and the People’s crudeness, vice, caprices.”