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Political theory tends to react to upsurges in populist politics in the real world, explaining them in turn as largely reactions to contemporary political crises, and in terms of regional styles, American or European most commonly. But for students of political theory, populism in theory and in practice has only been contingently, rather than structurally, related to the history of democratic politics and the growth of popular sovereignty. This chapter argues by contrast that populism is part of the mainstream structural history of popular sovereignty, and moreover, that such a history connects European and American democratic politics from the period of the 1848 revolutions through to the present. Taking populist politics as one component part of this transnational history, it also claims that the derivative reliance upon different national styles of populism misses something deeper about the relationship between populism and modern political theory.

Reviewing so much more than Professor Wegele’s Deutsche Historiographie in the first edition of the English Historical Review of 1886, in what has since become a justly famous essay, Lord Acton critically evaluated various German ‘schools’ of history in the nineteenth century. Of course, although Acton was the most cosmopolitan of scholars, the fact that the first edition of what would quickly become the premier English historical periodical should be so concerned with the state of German scholarship suggests something more than passing historiographical interest. For at root, Acton’s discussions of these schools of history were underpinned by an account of the political implications of different versions of historical enquiry. Indeed, he even suggested — in what had by 1886 already become a standard trope of political discourse — that although German ‘historical writing was old’, strictly ‘historical thinking was new in Germany when it sprang from the shock of the French Revolution’.1 In conclusion, as well as fulfilling his aim to outline the ways in which these schools ‘break new ground and add to the notion and the work of history’, the general tenor of the essay offered nothing less than a full-blown evocation of the historical spirit of the age: The tendency of the nineteenth century German to subject all things to the government of intelligible law, and to prefer the simplicity of resistless cause to the confused conflict of free wills, the tendency which Savigny defined and the comparative linguists encouraged, was completed in his own way by Hegel.2