How do we explain the emergence of populism and how will it change democratic politics? Many commentators see populism as a degradation of liberal democratic political culture into a xenophobic rejection of pluralism, internationalism and multiculturalism. As such, it is often portrayed as a backlash against the political status quo by an increasingly economically marginalized and disenchanted electorate. Questioning this widely held belief, Brian Elliott argues that the populist sentiment actually contains the promise of a renewal of democratic political culture. Elliott sees underlying populism a desire to reaffirm popular sovereignty in the context of representative democracy. To make the case for a progressive populism, Elliott reappraises the historic struggles of various workers' movements which helped bring about political reform and broadened the franchise in the nineteenth. Following this, he identifies and examines the contemporary challenges of work and outlines a new working-class politics that would overturn the neoliberal logic that has come to dominate mainstream political thinking over the last forty years. This book will appeal to those wishing to gain a broader, historically informed and philosophically nuanced understanding of our political times. Brian Elliott has a background in modern European philosophy and has published five previous books.

The most recent, Natural Catastrophe (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), analyses the politics of climate change in the age of neoliberal governance. Elliott writes in direct, lucid prose, on social, politics, and cultural matters that appeal to a general readership as well as to those studying and researching within the humanities.